Walter Rodney was a scholar, working class militant, and revolutionary from Guyana. Strongly influenced by Marxist ideas, he remains central to radical Pan-Africanist thought for large numbers of activists’ today. Rodney lived through the failed –though immensely hopeful -socialist experiments in the 1960s and 1970s, in Tanzania and elsewhere.

The book critically considers Rodney's contribution to Marxist theory and history, his relationship to dependency theory and the contemporary significance of his work in the context of movements and politics today. The first full-length study of Rodney’s life, this book is an essential introduction to Rodney's work.

A striking book on the international operations of racism and the global meaning of Black Power

In his short life, the Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney emerged as one of the leading thinkers and activists of the anticolonial revolution, leading movements in North America, South America, the African continent, and the Caribbean. In each locale, Rodney found himself a lightning rod for working class Black Power. His deportation catalyzed 20th century Jamaica's most significant rebellion, the 1968 Rodney riots, and his scholarship trained a generation how to think politics at an international scale. In 1980, shortly after founding of the Working People's Alliance in Guyana, the 38-year-old Rodney would be assassinated.
In this classic work published in the heady days of anti-colonial revolution, Groundings with My Brothers follows the global circulation of emancipatory ideas, from the black students of North America to the Rasta counter-culture of Jamaica and beyond. The book is striking in its simultaneous ability to survey the wide and heterogenous international context while remaining anchored in grassroots politics, as Rodney offers us first-hand accounts of mass movement organizing. Having inspired a generation of revolutionaries, this new edition will re-introduce the book to a new political landscape that it helped shape, with reflections from leading scholar-activists such as Carole Boyce Davies

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa is an ambitious masterwork of political economy, detailing the impact of slavery and colonialism on the history of international capitalism. In this classic book, Rodney makes the unflinching case that African maldevelopment is not a natural feature of geography, but a direct product of imperial extraction from the continent, a practice that continues up into the present. Meticulously researched, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa remains an unshakably relevant study of the so-called "great divergence" between Africa and Europe, just as it remains a prescient resource for grasping the the multiplication of global inequality today.

In this new edition, Angela Davis offers a striking foreword to the book, exploring its lasting contributions to a revolutionary and feminist practice of anti-imperialism.

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Red Africa makes the case for a revolutionary Black politics inspired by Marxist anti-colonial struggles in Africa. Kevin Ochieng Okoth revisits historical moments when Black radicalism was defined by international solidarity in the struggle against capitalist-imperialism, that together help us to navigate the complex histories of the Black radical tradition.

He challenges common misconceptions about national liberation, showing that the horizon of national liberation was not limited to the nation-building projects of post-independence governments.

While African socialists sought to distance themselves from Marxism and argued for a ‘third way’ socialism rooted in ‘traditional African culture’ the intellectual and political tradition Okoth calls ‘Red Africa’ showed that Marxism and Black radicalism were never incompatible.

The revolutionary Black politics of Eduardo Mondlane, Amílcar Cabral, Walter Rodney and Andrée Blouin gesture toward a decolonised future that never materialised. We might yet build something new from the ruins of national liberation, something which clings onto the utopian promise of freedom and refuses to let go. 

Red Africa is not simply an exercise in nostalgia, it is a political project that hopes to salvage what remains of this tradition—which has been betrayed, violently suppressed, or erased—and to build from it a Black revolutionary politics capable of imagining new futures out of the uncertain present.

The story of the fight against fascism across the African diaspora, revealing that Black antifascism has always been vital to global freedom struggles.

At once a history for understanding fascism and a handbook for organizing against, The Black Antifascist Tradition is an essential book for understanding our present moment and the challenges ahead.

From London to the Caribbean, from Ethiopia to Harlem, from Black Lives Matter to abolition, Black radicals and writers have long understood fascism as a threat to the survival of Black people around the world―and to everyone.

In The Black Antifascist Tradition, scholar-activists Jeanelle K. Hope and Bill Mullen show how generations of Black activists and intellectuals―from Ida B. Wells in the fight against lynching, to Angela Y. Davis in the fight against the prison-industrial complex―have stood within a tradition of Black Antifascism. 

As Davis once observed, pointing to the importance of anti-Black racism in the development of facism as an ideology, Black people have been “the first and most deeply injured victims of fascism.” Indeed, the experience of living under and resisting racial capitalism has often made Black radicals aware of the potential for fascism to take hold long before others understood this danger.

The book explores the powerful ideas and activism of Paul Robeson, Mary McLeod Bethune, Claudia Jones, W. E. B. Du Bois, Walter Rodney, Frantz Fanon, Aime Cesaire, and Walter Rodney, as well as that of the Civil Rights Congress, the Black Liberation Army, and the We Charge Genocide movement, among others.

In shining a light on fascism and anti-Blackness, Hope and Mullen argue, the writers and organizers featured in this book have also developed urgent tools and strategies for overcoming it.

Celebrate the release of If This World We're Mine with Arriel Vinson!

EVENT DEETS

When: Thursday, January 28 @ 7 PM CST

Where: Kindred Stories (2310 Elgin St. Houston, TX 77004)

How: 

• RSVP ONLY to reserve your seat.

• RSVP WITH BOOK to reserve your seat and purchase a copy If This World We're Mine, supporting both the author and our store programming. The book will be available for pickup at the event.

Please Note: Books purchased from other retailers are not permitted in the bookstore and are not eligible for the signing or photo line. To participate in the signing and photo opportunity, you must purchase a copy from Kindred Stories.If you already have a copy from Kindred Stories feel free to choose the RSVP only option. 

If you purchase a ticket and are unable to attend the event, your ticket is non-refundable. If your ticket includes a book, an email will be sent to all attendees before and after the event with instructions on how to receive your book. Books must be claimed within 14 days following the event. If your book is not retrieved it will be returned to the publisher and will not be available for pick up in the future.

ABOUT THE BOOK

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Arriel Vinson is a Midwesterner who writes about being young, Black, and in search of freedom. Her debut YA novel-in-verse, Under the Neon Lights, is a 2026 Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe New Talent Award winner, a Reese’s Book Club LitUp selection, and a Junior Library Guild Gold Selection. Arriel earned her MFA in Fiction from Sarah Lawrence College and is a Tin House YA Scholar, Highlights Foundation scholarship recipient, and Walter Grant recipient. Her sophomore novel, If This World Were Mine, is forthcoming in spring 2027. You can connect with her on social media at @arriwrites and find her work at arriwrites.com

ABOUT THE CONVERSATION PARTNER

LIARA TAMANI grew up in Houston, Texas, where every spring meant one thing: rodeo season. She loved getting decked out in her best cowgirl gear and soaking up the music, food, and electric energy of the rodeo, a joy she now shares with her daughter and husband. Her deep Texas roots shine through her storytelling, capturing the spirit and rhythms of the state in all her acclaimed novels: Calling My Name, All the Things We Never Knew, and What She Missed. Before becoming a writer, she attended Harvard Law School and worked as a marketing coordinator for the Houston Rockets and Comets, television production assistant, home accessories designer, floral designer, and yoga and dance teacher. She holds an MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and a BA from Duke University.

There is a current revival of Black Consciousness, as political and student movements around the world – as well as academics and campaigners working in decolonization – reconfigure the continued struggle for socio-economic revolution. Yet the roots of Black Consciousness and its relation to other movements such as Black Lives Matter have only begun to be explored.

Black Consciousness has deep connections to the struggle against apartheid. The Black Consciousness Reader is an essential collection of history, culture, philosophy and meaning of Black Consciousness by some of the thinkers, artists and activists who developed it in order to finally bring revolution to South Africa. A contribution to the world’s Black cultural archive, it examines how the proper acknowledgement of Blackness brings a greater love, a broader sweep of heroes and a wider understanding of intellectual and political influences.

Although the legendary murdered activist Steve Biko is a strong figure within this history, the book documents many other significant international Black Consciousness personalities and focuses a predominantly African eye on Black Consciousness in politics, land, women, power, art, music and religion. Onkgopotse Tiro, Vuyelwa Mashalaba, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, Assata Shakur, Marcus Garvey, Neville Alexander, Thomas Sankara, Malcolm X, Don Mattera, Keorapetse Kgositsile, W.E.B. DuBois, Walter Rodney, Mongane Wally Serote, Ready D and Zola are among the many bold minds included in this amalgam of facts, ideas and images.