Interview with Anne Garland Mahler, author of “A Wide Net of Solidarity: Antiracism and Anti-imperialism from the Americas to the Globe”
Anne Garland Mahler is an associate professor at the University of Virginia. Her new book is A Wide Net of Solidarity: Antiracism and Anti-imperialism from the Americas to the Globe (Duke University Press, 2025). She was kind enough to share a bit about the book and some related topics.
Your new book is titled A Wide Net of Solidarity: Antiracism and Anti-imperialism from the Americas to the Globe. The title is pretty explanatory, but how do you explain to people what the book is about?
First of all, thank you for your interest in the book! It’s about a network of politically radical activists and artists in the American hemisphere and around the world in the 1920s-30s. It addresses a range of organizations and individuals, but its primary focus is the Anti-Imperialist League of the Americas (Liga Antimperialista de las Américas, LADLA), one of the most significant solidarity movements in the history of the American continent. LADLA, founded in 1925 in Mexico City by a group of multinational activists, grew to include fourteen chapters throughout the Americas and was especially active in the Greater Caribbean and the United States. Within two years, LADLA activists joined with organizations from forty nations at the 1927 Brussels Congress to form the League against Imperialism (LAI). There, they met U.S. Black activists and anticolonial leaders from Africa and Asia. Through the study of archival sources, rare newspapers, and literary and artistic works, A Wide Net of Solidarity provides the first account of how these exchanges impacted debates in radical circles in the Americas, specifically on the subjects of Black and Indigenous political leadership, immigrant rights, racial policing, and links between foreign intervention and internal forms of fascist governance. LADLA theorized the relation (but not conflation) between differentiated experiences of capitalist exploitation suffered by Indigenous, Black, and immigrant communities within extractive economies. In so doing, it advanced a multiracial and hemispheric analysis of racialized capital accumulation that is still useful to social movements today.
How do you define solidarity?
Solidarity, as a term, originated in France in the nineteenth century as a legal concept based in the Roman in solidum—a contract with multiple signatories where each signatory was liable for the debts of the other. Within social movements, it’s generally used to describe either active support for a particular cause/group or mutual support and mutual indebtedness within a group. Solidarity is a slippery term that’s used in a proliferation of different ways, and there are many helpful scholarly examinations of the concept. I particularly recommend the work of Andrea Sangiovanni, Jessica Stites-Mor, and David Featherstone.
Solidarity movements that bring together diverse groups can be powerful agents of change, moving beyond empathy and creating complicity and collaboration. But they are also characterized by a core problematic wherein bridging the struggles of diverse groups can risk flattening differences between them, leading to misinterpretations, over-identification, and enmeshment. Such a problem is central to LADLA’s history and is at the heart of the analyses developed over the course of the chapters. In seeking to understand how capitalism differentially impacted Indigenous, Black, and immigrant communities, LADLA modeled a form of solidarity politics based on the relations (but not equivalences) between differing forms of capitalist exploitation. Terms like relational solidarity (which is what I use in the book), “coalitional solidarity,” or “thick solidarity” attempt to capture — as Roseann Liu and Savanna Shange have written — “a kind of solidarity” that recognizes a diversity of goals and that does not “gloss over difference, but rather pushes into the specificity, irreducibility, and incommensurability of racialized experiences.”
The subtitle says "from the Americas to the Globe"--why in that order? Do you see Antiracism and Anti-imperialism as exports from the West or is it simply a matter of your analysis starting in one place and then spreading out from there?
Existing scholarship on LADLA has mostly framed it as a regional, Latin American organization with connections to the League Against Imperialism (LAI) and Communist International. This includes the only prior book-length study of LADLA, an outstanding book by Daniel Kersffeld called Contra el imperio: Historia de la Liga Antimperialista de las Américas (2013). Despite the regionalist framework through which LADLA has been understood, it was not a regional, Latin American organization. Instead, it had an explicitly hemispheric vision from the outset, maintaining an active section (and several sub-sections) in the United States and collaborating with U.S. citizens, especially Jewish and Black activists. Through joining the LAI, LADLA’s initially hemispheric vision would become more global in scope. So, the move that LADLA made from an initial focus on the American hemisphere to a more global imagination is what “the Americas to the Globe” part of the book’s title is referencing.
On a closely related note, scholarship on twentieth-century Latin American radicalism has tended to have a regional focus that does not frequently situate activists within the global, anticolonial milieus they often inhabited. This tendency to apply a regionalist lens to Latin American radical politics is especially the case for the interwar period, which was characterized by the emergence of Latin America’s regionalist ideologies. In response to post-WWI disillusionment with Western Europe and increasing U.S. dominance, interwar Latin American writers and political figures defined the region through ideologies like hispanoamericanismo, indoamericanismo, mestizaje, and indigenismo. A closer look at LADLA shifts our understanding of interwar Latin American intellectual history. Contrary to the regionalist lens through which interwar Latin American political thought has been understood, LADLA members rejected interwar regionalisms for what I call a hemispheric globalism, wherein LADLA expanded on its initially hemispheric connections with worker and minority struggles in the United States to embrace an interdependency and solidarity with anticolonial, anti-imperialist, and antiracist movements around the world. While LADLA did not employ this term, I use hemispheric globalism to describe: first, an ideological tenet that self-determination for “oppressed, colonial, and semi-colonial peoples” (to use their words) in Latin America could be achieved only through transnational alliances with similar struggles in the American continent and beyond; and second, a practical strategy to foment systems of mutual support by facilitating communication between resistant movements across the American hemisphere and expanding those connections, through the LAI, to global horizons.
Is this a book project you've been thinking about for a long time and you just got to it or is there something that made you want to do this book right now? Is it especially tied to our moment?
This project originated in research for my first book, From the Tricontinental to the Global South: Race, Radicalism, and Transnational Solidarity (2018). Although not the focus of that book, I found myself at one point tracing the movements of Sandalio Junco, an Afro-Cuban baker turned trade union organizer, through archival and periodical sources –– from Havana to Mexico City and later to Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Berlin, Moscow, and eventually back to Havana. Junco became LADLA’s General Secretary in 1929 while he was living in exile in Mexico City, and it was his work that inspired me to start looking more closely into LADLA’s history. I started working on some of the material in response to an invitation to a 2017 workshop on communist internationalism at the University of Bologna as well as through my participation in The Red and the Black Conference at the Institute for Black Atlantic Research. The research for this book eventually took me to special collections in Havana, Los Angeles, Mexico City, New York, and Palo Alto and to digital archives held in Amsterdam and Moscow. So, the book has been a long time in the making.
In general, whatever I’m writing, there are questions about the here and now that I’m always holding in the back of mind. And the book ultimately argues that LADLA made three lasting contributions that are useful to social movements today. First, LADLA provides an early twentieth-century example of transnational political organizing across extractive economies, which it used to theorize the relationship between differing oppressions and to imagine a new global political community. Second, LADLA analyzed the relation between differentiated experiences of capitalist exploitation suffered by Indigenous, Black, and immigrant communities and advanced a multiracial and hemispheric analysis of racialized capital accumulation. And third, LADLA serves as an important case study for thinking through the promises and limitations of transnational and multiracial solidarity movements. We do not yet have a collective discursive and aesthetic memory of LADLA with which current social movements can productively engage; this book hopes to correct for that gap.
Who is this book for? What is the audience you want it to have?
In this and other projects, I aim to shed light on social movement histories –– and provide a set of concepts based on those histories –– that are useful not only to a broad range of scholars but also to activists and artists. So, in that sense, there are two general audiences for this book: one, scholars and students of twentieth and twenty-first century anticolonial and anti-racist movements as well as in fields like Latin American, African American, Afro-Latin American, Caribbean, and hemispheric American history and cultural studies; and two, a broader public interested in social movements, anticolonialism, antiracism, histories of communism, and the history of Latin America.
A topic like this involves "justice" and "injustice" quite a bit--how do you define those terms? Why do you personally think justice has value and why do you think justice is valued across so many different cultures (and, arguably, species)?
These are important questions that may be beyond the book’s scope. However, all my work to date has been interested in thinking about the complexities of coalition-building—where different groups may have somewhat different notions of what justice means or how to get there—and the symbols, language, and strategies chosen to attempt to bridge those differing interests. The book focuses quite a bit on contemporary Indigenous and environmental justice movements in the Americas, and particularly the debates on extractivism within those movements. That is, it considers debates on whether the extraction of high volumes of natural resources should be used by governments to correct for social inequalities or whether the accompanying environmental pollution, dependence on foreign capital, and destructive impacts on rural, Black, and Indigenous communities means that the so-called “extractive model” should be rejected entirely. Ultimately, the debate about extractivism is a debate about justice, what it means and to whom. LADLA anticipated many of these debates in its own critiques of extractive industries, and the book explores how recent social movements against extractivism in the Americas rely heavily, if subconsciously, on LADLA’s political vision for the hemisphere.
What drew you to this type of scholarship? Why is this a subject that matters to you?
I grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, and have always been interested in the history of racial justice struggles, which is so central to that city’s history. In college, I got interested in thinking about those movements more hemispherically across post-plantation economies in the Americas, and I went on to get a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in Latin American cultural studies. When I went to graduate school, I wanted to do scholarship that was essentially hemispheric and comparatist in nature, but since so much of that work comes from a U.S. focus that then looks southward, I wanted to have the training in Latin American studies that would allow me to frame things a bit differently. LADLA modeled this kind of hemispheric thinking from below. It was founded in Mexico City and then expanded both northward and southward. Although LADLA has not yet been a reference point for scholarship produced within the framework of hemispheric studies or transnational American studies, it modeled a hemispheric analysis and vision of political community that took Latin America and the Caribbean as its point of departure. LADLA activists would eventually expand their initially hemispheric connections with worker and minority struggles in the United States to embrace an interdependency and solidarity with anticolonial, anti-imperialist, and antiracist movements around the world. And that’s another core interest of mine that originates in my upbringing in Birmingham—the building of coalitions across different struggles and different groups of people and the productive tensions that result from that work. Just take one look at the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the work it did in the U.S. South, and you’ll know exactly what I mean.
What is your next project?
I’m currently finishing a co-edited project, The Oxford Handbook of the History of the Global South, which gathers thirty-nine contributors working in institutions in Asia, Africa, Latin America, Europe, and North America. I’m also working on an intellectual biography of activist Elizabeth “Betita” Martínez. Beyond these projects, I’ve been actively working on learning to write fiction, which has been a challenge. There are things that can be said through fiction that can’t be said through nonfiction and vice versa, and moving forward, I’d like to write in a wider range of genres. Learning to write in a different genre has been an exercise in humility and also something that has expanded my world and imagination, and I feel like I’m growing as a writer and thinker.
Do you have any books, academic or not, that you regularly recommend to people? If so, what do you recommend? (On a topic related to your book or any topic.)
Oh, so many, but I’ll try to limit it to a few very recent books. I just finished Greg Grandin’s new book, America, América: A New History of the New World (2025) which covers five centuries of intellectual history of inter-American relations and inter-American international law and political thought. I learned so much from that book. In the realm of fiction, I recently read Yuri Herrera’s Season of the Swamp (2024), which is about Benito Juárez’s brief stint living in New Orleans in the mid-1850s. Even though it’s a novel, Herrera draws on significant research done in rare newspapers that give us insight into the larger historical and cultural context, both in New Orleans and Mexico at that moment. The book helps us understand how Juárez’s experiences in New Orleans, where slavery and slave-trading were still legal, shaped his ideas about human rights and the legal system moving forward. It’s a great read! Finally, I’m currently reading Deborah Baker’s Charlottesville (2025), which is about the 2017 white supremacist Unite the Right rally and the months leading up to it. I’m finding it very well-researched and thoughtful. Although I work at the University of Virginia, I’m learning a lot from the longer history she tells about Charlottesville, and even though I was involved in activism at that time, I’m learning certain details that I didn’t know before about all that happened from 2016-2017. It’s an odd experience to have meetings that I attended narrated back to me as history — hearing again the words of speeches that I listened to in real time –– and to learn things from a book about people/activists with whom I regularly socialize and organize. It’s a really enlightening read, and I recommend it.
