Radical Utopian Communities in Global History Perspectives, c. 1900-1950

Abstract

At the turn to the twentieth century, radical utopian communities were built all around the world to put ideals of a better society into practice. Many of these communal experiments have already been subject of historical inquiry, but were mostly approached within a narrow national framework. This paper, on the contrary, analyzes radical utopian communities as important sites for the history of globalization, and exemplary for the connectivity and intersectionality of the modern world. Based on case studies located in Jamaica, Japan, and South Africa, it asks why such communities emerged in a similar form at a particular time with equivalent attention to bodily practices, and if their laboratory models constituted transcultural and transnational templates for a wider scope of community building.