Groundings with Walter Rodney

On the 50th anniversary of Walter Rodney's The Groundings With My Brothers, a small group of scholars on the impacts of Rodney on their intellectual development and political commitments.

Walter Rodney. Credit: Walter Rodney Papers, Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library Archives.

Pick up a paper, or turn on the news today and you will likely come across discussions about reparations, the re-ordering of the global financial system, disconnect of the people from a political process that claims to represent them, etc. It is always a good time to read Walter Rodney. So voracious was his appetite for thinking, writing, questioning, educating that it can feel like there is a Walter Rodney book, essay, argument for every question, dilemma, paradox. Almost forty years after his assassination, the world has changed tremendously. And as the experts in this roundtable maintain, more useful than looking at Rodney as a man ahead of his time, is looking at how the questions and concerns have morphed and taken different manifestations—and how we have failed or succeeded in tackling them. His lesson of the importance of looking at the many worlds we live in and meeting them with courage and clarity remains. From then to now, Guyana to the world.

About the Interviewee

Dr. Monique Bedasse is an award-winning historian based in the departments of history, and African and African American studies at Washington University in St. Louis.

Erin MacLeod is author of Visions of Zion: Ethiopians and Rastafari in the Search for the Promised Land (NYU Press) and Editor at Large for UWI Press. (NYU Press).

Nijah Cunningham is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Hunter College, CUNY, and a collaborator in the Small Axe Project.

Matthew J Smith is Professor of History and Director Centre for the study of the Legacies of British Slavery, University College London.

Jesse Benjamin, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice at Kennesaw State University.

About the Interviewer

Anakwa Dwamena is Books Editor at Africa is a Country and editorial staff member at The New Yorker.

Further Reading