More Than An Archive

By Leonard Butingan, PhD Candidate in History, University of California, Santa Cruz

Since the summer of 2022, I’ve been conducting research at the George Padmore Institute (GPI) as part of my history dissertation on Black radicalism and cultural politics in 1980s and 1990s Britain. As travel restrictions of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic were lifted, I was finally able to begin work in person at an institution I had long revered from afar. Walking up the steps to the GPI above New Beacon Books–Britain’s first Caribbean publishing house–I felt the magnitude of the political and cultural legacy embedded in that space. For a decade I have researched Black histories in Britain, and I can say without hesitation that I have rarely encountered a figure as unique as John La Rose. His life was transnational and prolific, encompassing the life of an activist, trade unionist, poet/writer, publisher, and educator in Trinidad, Venezuela, Britain, and beyond. La Rose was involved in Trinidad’s anti-colonial movement, shifting to Britain where he played a pivotal role in the Black bookshops, dissemination of Black arts and literature, supplementary schools, anti-racist activism, book fairs, and much more. He was mentored by C.L.R. James, but refused to be a gatekeeper, taking students, artists, parents, teachers and activists under his wing and fostering intergenerational, collective resistance. John La Rose’s multifaceted, borderless, and community centric legacy infuses every corner of the GPI. And yet, despite his immense contributions, La Rose remains largely unknown to the wider British public and within the academy. This is no accident, it is part of a broader pattern of marginalization that often renders Black radical traditions invisible. But perhaps that anonymity was never his concern. After conducting oral histories with many of his comrades, it’s clear that legacy, for La Rose, was measured not in self-aggrandizement but in the vitality and continuity of the struggle itself.

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So when I arrived at the GPI, I was both intellectually inspired and slightly overwhelmed. The archive is vast and truly encyclopedic. The GPI spans struggles from Britain, Africa, Caribbean and beyond. It documents resistance to state violence, institutional racism, and colonial legacies, but also captures cultural life: from the Caribbean Artist Movement to Carnival. I sought out GPI with the desire to further enrich the historical record of Black resistance in Britain and combat the colonial theories of British and wider European history. I wanted to tell a history of Black liberation, not just through street protests in isolation, but combined with the currents of cultural and intellectual production. 

My first archival focus was the International Book Fairs of Radical Black and Third World Books, held from 1982 to 1995. The phrase ‘book fair’ is misleading–these were not commercial events centered around sales and branding. Rather, they were radical political and cultural convenings that brought together thinkers, writers, activists, and community members from across the globe. The Book Fairs offered forums for urgent conversations on South African apartheid, the Grenadian Revolution, feminist publishing, the reemergence of racism and fascism in Europe, technology and the workday, and much more. Attendees included literary giants and political thinkers like Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, June Jordan, Mikey Smith, Jayne Cortez, Abdul Alkalimat, Margaret Busby, Wole Soyinka, and Barbara Smith, but also youth leaders, supplementary school teachers, sound system operators, and grassroots organizers. The Fairs were also deeply embedded in community practice. They ran on minimal budgets without institutional sponsorship. International guests were hosted in local homes, and events extended beyond official venues into private living rooms and kitchens. Political discussion and sharing space continued at John La Rose and Sarah White’s home marking the politicization of domestic space. It was an extension of the radical ethics of care and hospitality that underpinned the entire endeavor.

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These Fairs modeled a decommodified cultural politics. As Gus John reminded me in an interview, ‘Publishing was not a commercial venture’.

Instead, books, films, poetry, and music were not separate from political organizing–they were central to it. In this, the Book Fairs presented a powerful counterexample to the corporatized literary festivals/bookshops of today. They showed us what it means to use culture as infrastructure for movement-building.

The second collection that shaped my research was the archive of European Action for Racial Equality and Social Justice (EARESJ), a transcontinental anti-racist network active between 1990 and 1993. The network brought together activists from Britain, France, Germany, and elsewhere, many of whom had first encountered one another at the Book Fairs. EARESJ offers a crucial lens through which to rethink post-1989 European history. In dominant narratives, the collapse of the Berlin Wall and USSR marked the triumph of liberal democracy and the rise of a unified Europe. Yet, for La Rose and his comrades, the early 1990s were marked not by celebration, but by renewed struggle. They observed the intensifying racism across Europe–seen in attacks on migrants and asylum seekers, in rising far-right parties, and in everyday policing and surveillance of racialized communities. In the German context, Black activists like Nii Addy and May Ayim drew attention to persistent colonial amnesia, the lingering presence of Nazism, and the marginalization of Black Germans. In France, organizers like Mogniss Abdallah traced the racialized fallout of the Algerian War and the structures of institutional racism directed at Arab youth. EARESJ brought together an intergenerational coalition of people of Afro-Caribbean and Asian, as well as radical white comrades that had been involved in anti-racism, police monitoring, and community activism. Through publishing, filmmaking, and direct protest, EARESJ sounded the alarm. Their slogan–’Don’t wait until the ovens begin to burn–act now!’, recalled the memory of Malcolm X and the global Black freedom struggle. It also refused to isolate the Nazi Holocaust from ongoing racism and emphasized the continuities between past and present. The resonance of their warning is chillingly clear today as seen in Brexit, the Windrush Scandal, Grenfell Tower fire, the ongoing refugee crisis at Europe’s borders, and in the emboldenment of far-right movements across the continent.

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The GPI is not just a repository of documents; it is a living archive of Black resistance and imagination. It reveals how community, culture, and politics are inseparable–and how the tools of memory become instruments of change. In a time when the humanities are under threat, when archives are being defunded or closed, and when the legacies of colonialism are increasingly politicized, the GPI offers a model for how we might preserve and activate radical histories. It demands our attention–not as a site of nostalgia, but as a resource for building futures of liberation. 

For me, the GPI is more than an archive. It is a place of intellectual and emotional grounding. It holds the blueprints of collective action, the voices of elders and comrades, the poetry of resistance. To be there is to share space with the generations who dared to imagine liberation–not as a distant horizon, but as something to be organized, written, and fought for.