Doing Utopia: Radical utopian communities, mobility, and the body in the early twentieth century

Abstract

This article analyses communal projects in the first half of the twentieth century. It investigates communes in various places of the non-Western world, including the Tolstoy Farm in South Africa, the Nōson Seinen Sha’s anarchist commune in imperial Japan, and the Rastafarian Pinnacle Commune on Jamaica. At first glance these communes seem completely unrelated as they emerged in distinct cultural and historical contexts. However, bringing them into conversation demonstrates that these communes equally showcase a high degree of integration into global structural transformations of the early twentieth century. Mobility and the body are applied as analytical perspectives to underscore, firstly, the similarity and connectivity of these otherwise very different and distinctive communal projects. Secondly, mobility and the body also illustrate the importance of doing utopia, acknowledging historical experience and practice beyond established analysis of utopia that are too often concerned with mapping utopia’s discursive formation. And finally, this article complements transnational comparative and global connected history by accentuating similarity and the interplay of integration and marginality as analytical tools to narrate a decentred global history.