At the turn of the twentieth century, communal life was conceptualized and exercised all around the world. Communal projects ranged from socio-political communes to religious sects, encompassing the political spectrum from the radical left to the far right. Many communities attempted to put theories of anarchism and socialism into practice. Religiously inspired groups combined a variety—and at times conflicting set—of political and cultural ideas to articulate and live a utopian model society. In African, Asian, Latin American and Western countries, such communities were built in spatially remote and sometimes also socially secluded colonies apart from the urbanizing metropoles and developing industrial centers. Communal life often followed the aim of creating a self-governed, autarchic lifestyle based on collective agricultural labor. They served as retreats for anarchists as well as other activists, reformers and revolutionaries. Yet they simultaneously constituted laboratories for radical thought and practice, hubs for the meeting of people and the circulation of knowledge, and thus as nodal points for the development of new ideas of community and human existence. Many of these community projects have been the subject of historical inquiry but were often approached as singular cases and within national frameworks. This panel, on the contrary, analyzes them as marginalized yet key places to dissect complex transcultural, indeed global entanglements of the modern world.

Based on various case studies located in the extra-European and non-Northern American—read: non-Western world, this multiregional and transcultural panel highlights the astounding global pervasiveness of communal life in the first half of the twentieth century. The panel’s individual presentations investigate communes and communities in, between and across East Asia, Southern Africa, and the Caribbean. Exploring mostly anarchist, at least deliberate anti-statist and outright anti-capitalist groups and movements, the presentations discuss issues of self-governance, cooperation as well as connectivity and mobility of radical politics set in different yet entwined, imperial formations. The panel thus engages in questions about similarity and simultaneity of challenging the power of state and capital in form of communal life in different regional and cultural contexts. It asks if there were connections, appropriations or reverberations between the ideas advocating and the people actual practicing communal life in different places of the world. Furthermore, it inquires if there was a distinct historical moment for a distinct form of communal life in the first half of the twentieth century that is historically different from communal experiments until the late nineteenth century and the ones in the 1960/70s in the postwar era. In doing so, the panel and its presentations shed new light on human subjectivity, community, and mobility across cultural and social boundaries—key issues in the contemporary world—and thereby contribute with historical analyses to current debates. Analyzing people and communities who too often fall through the cracks of mainstream historiography thereby provide unexpected angles to look at the modern world and its make-up from the margins. And they open up horizons of possibilities as they allow insights into actual accomplished alternative forms of community and subjectivity.