SUMMER 2020
Matthew Rothwell is the host of the People's History of Ideas Podcast (peopleshistoryofideas.com), a podcast which explores the history of the global influence of the Chinese Revolution. He is also the author of Transpacific Revolutionaries: The Chinese Revolution in Latin America and several articles on global Maoism.
Dr. Rothwell has taught Latin American, world, and Chinese history at several universities in the United States and China.
Transpacific Revolutionaries shows how Maoism was globalized during the 1949-1976 period, highlighting the agency of both Latin American and Chinese actors. While Maoism has long been known to have been influential in many social movements and guerrilla groups in Latin America, Transpacific Revolutionaries is the first book to establish the way in which Latin American communists domesticated Maoism to Latin American conditions and turned Maoism into an influential political trend in many countries. By utilizing case studies of the formation of Maoist guerrilla groups and political parties in Mexico, Peru and Bolivia, the book shows how the movement of Chinese communist ideas to Latin America was the product of a highly organized effort that involved formal connections between Latin American activists and the People's Republic of China. It represents a major contribution to three developing fields of historical inquiry: Latin America in the Cold War, the global 1960s, and Chinese Maoist foreign relations.
The paperback version of Transpacific Revolutionaries is now available. You can buy it here.
Reviews of Transpacific Revolutionaries can be read here and here. The Peruvian blog Historia Global Online also features Transpacific Revolutionaries here.
Dr. Rothwell's political biography of the Chilean painter José Venturelli, titled "Secret Agent for International Maoism: José Venturelli, Chinese Informal Diplomacy and Latin American Maoism," can be found here: Radical Americas Journal.
Dr. Rothwell’s article on the relationship between counter-revolution in China and the end of the ‘60s, “The Road Is Tortuous: The Chinese Revolution and the End of the Global Sixties,” can be found in the Chilean journal Revista Izquierdas.
Dr. Rothwell’s most recent article, “Gonzalo in the Middle Kingdom: What Abimael Guzmán Tells Us in His Three Discussions of His Two Trips to China,” can be found in Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World.
Contact: rothwellmattd (at) gmail.com
Above: in El Alto, Bolivia