Projekt

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The project analyzes radical utopian communities in the first half of the twentieth century. It investigates communes in various places of the non-Western world, connecting South Africa, Japan, and Jamaica with Palestine and Manchuria. All chosen case studies differed in terms of political positions and religious orientations. Yet all of them developed surprisingly similar strategies to cope with the challenges of the modern world. They were both retreat and hub for activists, reformers, and revolutionaries, facilitating the meeting of people and sharing of ideas and experiences worldwide. Radical Utopian Communities is a global history that unearths marginalized histories of communal projects with new archival evidence and innovative historical narration. The communities are showcases for the high degree of mobility and connection in the early twentieth century. Simultaneously, the project critically engages with the image of borderless mobility and ideals of communal harmony. Nevertheless, analyzing people and communities who too often fall through the cracks of mainstream historiography provide unexpected angles to look at the modern world and its make-up from the margins. They open up horizons of possibilities - and they allow insights into actual accomplished alternative forms of community and subjectivity.

• Dr. Robert Kramm

  Universität München
  Historisches Seminar
  Fakultät für Geschichts- und Kunstwissenschaften
  Munich Centre for Global History
  München
  

• Trans-Imperial Anarchism: Cooperatist Communalist Theory and Practice in Imperial Japan

• Radical Utopian Living Together