Radical Utopianism and Communal Life in and between East Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, 1900–50

The first half of the twentieth century witnessed an increase in new forms of communal life all over the world. Usually located at the margins of modern society, these communes never existed in enclosed circles. Rather, they were both niche and hub for early twentieth century anarchists, radicals and reformers. Communal life were places of intimate encounter characterized by mostly self-sustaining agricultural production, surviving harsh environmental conditions, and struggling with hostile neighbors as well as agents of the state—especially the police and bureaucracy. Simultaneously, communes and their inhabitants and visitors facilitated the conjunction of people and ideas beyond the commune’s locale, allowing radical thought and politics to be appropriated and shared across established borders and boundaries. Hence, communal life in the early twentieth century, a historical moment of increasing and accelerated mobility of people, goods and knowledge, constantly oscillated between local everyday experiences and global entanglements.

Radical Utopianism and Communal Life builds on multiple case studies in Africa, East Asia, and the Caribbean. Its analysis includes the Tolstoy Farm in South Africa, the Nōson Seinen Sha’s anarchist commune in imperial Japan, and the Rastafarian Pinnacle Commune on Jamaica. The deliberate, very diverse set of case studies demonstrates the global scale of communal living in the first half of the twentieth century. Yet it also enables to put culturally different and historically specific communal experiments into conversation, exploring similarities and differences as well as connections and disconnections of radical utopianism and communal life across regional, national, and imperial boundaries.