History, Method, and Myth: Walter Rodney and the Geographies of Black Radicalism

Abstract

This essay reconsiders Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972) via a discussion of Rodney’s pedagogy and his methodology. The essay inquires into the relevance of Rodney’s pedagogy and what it means to teach the book in the contemporary moment. To that end, the author first discusses Rodney’s engagements with the University of California, Los Angeles, as part of a longer history of Black intellectual and political activism and the geographies of Black radicalism on campus. The author then explores the question of methodology in Rodney’s book, especially as that methodology draws on the intellectual and political traditions of Pan-Africanism and Marxism.