Abstract
Amzat Boukari-Yabara's portrait of Guyanese scholar and activist Walter Rodney (Walter Rodney: Un historien engagé, 1942-1980, Paris: Présence Africaine, 2018) is not a traditional biography, but rather a narrative of the context in which he deployed his work as an historian and a politically engaged contributor to African and Caribbean studies in the 1960s and 1970s. The author, like Rodney himself, believes that the history of African and Afro-diasporic peoples should be written from the Africas and the Americas themselves. Whether writing about the history of the slave trade, the African past, decolonization or black power, the biographer expertly conveys Rodney's erudition while directing students of these issues toward a broader retrospective, contextualization and actualization of his thought. More than any existing biography or chronicle of Rodney's life, it is a book that redefines and actualizes what it means to be an “historien engagé,” a politically and socially committed student of the past and its lessons for the present.
Highlights
Amzat Boukari-Yabara’s portrait of Guyanese scholar and activist Walter Rodney (Walter Rodney: Un historien engagé, 1942-1980, Paris: Présence Africaine, 2018) is not a traditional biography, but rather a narrative of the context in which he deployed his work as an historian and a politically engaged contributor to African and Caribbean studies in the 1960s and 1970s
The author, like Rodney himself, believes that the history of African and Afro-diasporic peoples should be written from the Africas and the Americas themselves; the book is described as an “invitation to an intellectual and geographic journey” of the black experience and of Rodney’s engagement with the stakes and controversies of his time
Rodney first traveled to Cuba in 1961 and 1962, meeting during his first trip with Fidel Castro, and studied Cuban independence and antiracist movement in Groundings: Development, Pan-Africanism and Critical Theory the 1890s
Summary
Abstract: Amzat Boukari-Yabara’s portrait of Guyanese scholar and activist Walter Rodney (Walter Rodney: Un historien engagé, 1942-1980, Paris: Présence Africaine, 2018) is not a traditional biography, but rather a narrative of the context in which he deployed his work as an historian and a politically engaged contributor to African and Caribbean studies in the 1960s and 1970s.
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