Radical Sovereignty: Disha Karnad Jani Interviews Tony Wood

How did a pan-continental vision of “Latin America” emerge and intersect with changing ideas of the nation-state among leftists in Latin America in the interwar years? What impact did the Mexican Revolution and the Bolshevik Revolution have on the aspirational visions and political projects of social transformation within the region? How does one conceptualize and, subsequently, write a transnational history about a category like the “radical”? Tony Wood addresses these questions, and others, in this conversation with Disha Karnad Jani about his latest book Radical Sovereignty: Debating Race, Nation, and Empire in Interwar Latin America (University of California Press, 2025), which examines the history of ideas about race, anti-imperialism, indigeneity, the state, and sovereignty in Latin America during the early twentieth century.