Alan Knight, Lawless Robbery Under the Volcano

As part of his speaking commitments ahead of the Institute of Latin American Studies (ILAS) conference hosted at La Trobe University, Alan Knight (Emeritus Professor, University of Oxford) gave two talks at the University of Sydney.

The first was on ‘The Great Depression in Latin America, 1930-1940’ linked to an edited book co-edited by Paulo Drinot and Alan Knight, entitled The Great Depression and Latin America published by Duke University Press.

The second commitment was a Sydney Ideas public lecture, which is the one we have decided to feature here as a digital audio recording entitled ‘Lawless Robbery Under the Volcano: British Cultural Commentators on Revolutionary Mexico, 1920-1940’. We would like to thank the support of Meredith Hall as organiser of Sydney Ideas but also, importantly, the collaboration of the Sydney University Research Community for Latin America (SURCLA) and Fernanda Peñaloza for public outreach and support. Sydney Ideas also have the lecture posted HERE.

Alan Knight focuses on the British cultural commentators who travelled and wrote about Mexico during the period from the 1920s to the 1940s: Graham Greene, Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh and D.H. Lawrence and he asks why they were so negative, what they objected to, and what they tell us about the Mexican revolutionary project – or about themselves, and the interwar British society to which they belonged.

Author: Adam David Morton

Adam David Morton is Professor of Political Economy at the University of Sydney. He is author of Unravelling Gramsci: Hegemony and Passive Revolution in the Global Political Economy (2007); Revolution and State in Modern Mexico: The Political Economy of Uneven Development (2011), recipient of the 2012 Book Prize of the British International Studies Association (BISA) International Political Economy Group (IPEG); and co-author of Global Capitalism, Global War, Global Crisis (2018) with Andreas Bieler. The volume Henri Lefebvre, On the Rural: Economy, Sociology, Geography was published in 2022 with University of Minnesota Press, co-edited with Stuart Elden.

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