The Comintern and the Global South. Global Designs/Local Encounters

This book’s essays are written by an international and interdisciplinary group of leading scholars whose research spans Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Europe. The essays bridgestudies of the Third International with postcolonial studies and other more recent formations such as Global South studies. These frameworks have challenged scholars to rethink the history of global political movements, shifting from Euro-centric approaches to more dialogic South to South and South to North exchanges that better capture their complexity. This book traces such multidirectional maps ––both physical and ideological ––of communist internationalism, exploring the sites, subjects, and social and political practices that facilitated the Comintern project. Global Designs/Local Encounters is organized into two, closely related sections. The first section, “Global Designs: The Comintern Imaginary,” lays historical and theoretical groundwork through broad studies of issues at the heart of communist internationalism. This includes essays on the early roots of political concepts that later became crystallized under the Third International as well as the analysis of how its project intersected with other political forms, like Islamic Internationalism. The second section, “Local Encounters: Confluences and Conflicts” focuses on case studies of understudied figures, locations, and ideological sites of exchange relevant to the operations of the Third International’s global network. These essays detail the contributions of little-known activist-intellectuals and map the processes of ideological and linguistic translation that made the Comintern’s transnational collaborations possible. From India to Mexico to China and beyond, the ideas at the heart of the Third International were incorporated and transformed to local contexts, joining people together and fomenting debate and conflict across disparate geographies. Featuring scholars whose research covers wide-ranging regions and who work in academic institutions in China, India, Italy, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Netherlands, the continental United States, and the United Kingdom, Global Designs/Local Encounters seeks to capture the global and trans-linguistic nature of this movement.