The School of History at Queen Mary hosts the inaugural George Padmore Institute annual lecture
Professor David Scott, Ruth and William Lubic Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University joined us at Mile End for the inaugural George Padmore Institute annual lecture.
The inaugural George Padmore Institute Annual Lecture, hosted by the School of History at Queen Mary University of London at the end of January, is part of a new series designed to promote path-breaking scholarship on anti-imperialism, anti-racism, internationalism, and the relationship between politics and culture.
The series carries on the spirit of the Trinidadian poet, publisher, and activist John La Rose, who strove to honour the pan-Africanist George Padmore and his “independent, radical vision and outlook connecting the Caribbean, Africa, Europe, North America, and Asia.”
The lecture centred around Walter Rodney's How Europe Underdeveloped Africa and the Genealogy of Caribbean Intellectual Traditions, with Professor David Scott, Ruth and William Lubic Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University.
Dr Chris Moffat, Senior Lecturer in South Asian History at Queen Mary said: “It was an honour to welcome Professor Scott to Queen Mary and his reflections on radical politics, the nature of intellectual traditions, and the peculiar ‘problem-space’ of our twenty-first century present set the perfect tone for this new series of George Padmore Institute Annual Lectures. The packed ArtsTwo lecture hall brought together students and senior scholars, activists and organisers, journalists and poets, all drawn in different ways to this question of what the struggles of the past can teach us in the present.”
The George Padmore Institute (GPI) was established in 1991 by La Rose and others associated with New Beacon Books, Britain’s first black publisher and bookshop; both are based in Finsbury Park, North London. In the decades since, the GPI has become an essential archive and much-used educational resource centre for the study of black communities of Caribbean, African, and Asian descent in post-war Britain and continental Europe.
This lecture series, a new collaboration with Queen Mary's School of History, celebrates the GPI’s work and its influence on education, academic scholarship, art, culture, and community organizing in contemporary Britain.
More about Professor David Scott:
Professor David Scott is the Ruth and William Lubic Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. He is the founder and editor of Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism and the author of many books, including Formations of Ritual (1994), Refashioning Futures (1999), Conscripts of Modernity (2004), Omens of Adversity (2014) and Stuart Hall’s Voice (2017). Professor Scott has recently published The Paradox of Freedom (with Orlando Patterson, 2023) and Irreparable Evil (2024). He is currently completing a biography of Stuart Hall.