We are pleased to announce Professor Matthew J Smith will present ‘Pressing Against Babel: Frank Hill and the Creation Story of Jamaica’
Date: 5 February 2026
Time: 18:00-19:30
Venue: Queen Mary University London, Mile End Campus: Room TBA
Tickets: Fee
Book: tinyurl.com/QMSmith
This lecture will discuss the incredible but oft-forgotten contributions of labour activist, Marxist, historian and journalist Frank Hill, a leading critical voice in Jamaica in the 1950s-1970s. Hill and his brother Ken were founding members of the People's National Party in 1938 but were famously expelled for their Marxist views in 1954. Where Richard Hart and other leftist contemporaries left the island, the Hill brothers remained and continued their political and union activism, developing idiosyncratic perspectives on history, identity, radicalism and anti-imperialism. The lecture reconsiders Frank Hill’s role as an intellectual shaper of nationalist thought in Jamaica in these crucial years of its becoming. It explores how his work compares and contrasts with his more celebrated, mobile contemporaries, figures like CLR James and George Padmore, charting debates about the future of the Caribbean at a moment of independence and confrontation.
Matthew J Smith is Professor of History and Director of the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery at University College London. Professor Smith has a special interest in the nineteenth and twentieth-century histories of Haiti and Jamaica. His many publications include Red and Black in Haiti: Radicalism, Conflict and Political Change, 1934-1957 (2009), Liberty, Fraternity, Exile: Haiti and Jamaica After Emancipation (2014), and (as co-Editor) The Jamaica Reader: History, Culture, Politics (2021). Professor Smith is currently writing a social history of Jamaican popular music.
The George Padmore Institute (GPI) Annual Lecture is hosted by the Department of History at Queen Mary University of London. The series celebrates the GPI's work as an archive and educational resource centre, operating out of Finsbury Park, north London, since 1991. The annual lecture platforms new scholarship on anti-imperialism, internationalism, anti-racism, and the relationship between politics and culture. These themes animate the GPI's collections and reflect the spirit of both the Institute's namesake, the pan-Africanist George Padmore (1903-1959), and its co-founder, the Trinidadian poet, publisher and activist John La Rose (1927-2006). Please consider supporting the GPI here.
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