A Wide Net of Solidarity: Antiracism and Anti-Imperialism from the Americas to the Globe – Anne Garland Mahler

Description

In A Wide Net of Solidarity, Anne Garland Mahler traces the impact of the Anti-Imperialist League of the Americas (LADLA, Liga Antimperialista de las Américas) on racial justice and anti-extractive struggles from the early twentieth century to the present. Founded in 1925 in Mexico City by a group of multinational activists, LADLA brought together trade unions, agrarian organizations, and artist groups across fourteen chapters in the Americas, with highest activity in the Greater Caribbean and United States. Within two years, LADLA activists joined the League Against Imperialism, formed at the 1927 Brussels Congress, where they met with US Black activists and anticolonial leaders from Africa and Asia. Drawing on extensive archival research, Mahler uncovers LADLA’s role in fostering Black, Indigenous, and immigrant-led resistance movements while positioning these struggles within a broader hemispheric and global struggle against the racialized accumulation of capital. By unearthing LADLA’s multiracial analysis of capitalist exploitation as well as its emphasis on mutual solidarity across difference, Mahler shows us how the organization provides vital insight for social movements fighting racial and economic injustice today.

Praise

“Anne Garland Mahler’s incisive analysis brings to life a history of revolutionary internationalism with profound lessons for today.” – Michael Hardt, author of The Subversive Seventies

“A Wide Net is a powerhouse intellectual history, astonishing in its breadth and brilliant in its critical arguments. Anne Garland Mahler provides in this book the foundations for a necessary history of solidarity and thinking in the Left through careful archival work and bold analytical intervention, unmatched in its ability to tell the history of world culture and world social movements.” – Ignacio M. Sanchez Prado, author of Strategic Occidentalism: On Mexican Fiction, the Neoliberal Book Market, and the Question of World Literature

“A Wide Net of Solidarity offers a rich history of transnational organizing in Latin America, clearly showing the extensive reach of this work. . . . This is an important book for scholars of internationalism, Latin American Studies, race, class, and cultural politics.” – Anima Adjepong, Ethnic and Racial Studies

“A Wide Net of Solidarity’s emphasis on internationalism and the potentially revolutionary nature of culture injects an important piece of history into the struggle for a hopeful and socialist future, while simultaneously addressing issues of identity and class in a manner that prioritizes neither at the expense of the other.” – Ron Jacobs, CounterPunch

“[A Wide Net of Solidarity] seeks to recover a largely forgotten experiment in transnational anti-imperialist organizing in the interwar period, is much more than an institutional history. The book intervenes in broader debates about how anti-imperialist politics have been imagined, organized, and sustained across national, racial, and ideological divides.” – Abigail Kret, NACLA