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

The Comintern and the Global South: Global Designs/Local Encounters studies the relations and productive tensions between the Third International, intellectual histories of racial justice and anti-imperialism, as well as other forms of internationalism. Building on extant institutional histories of the Third International, it moves in new directions by focusing on the points of intersection – often conflictual and short-lived – with anti-imperialist, anti-racist, and nationalist organizing, making the Third International a site of encounter between a global political project and more local and regional contexts. Due to the broad range of geographic and linguistic expertise of the contributors, this book traces routes of exchange that are often elided in existing studies of the Third International. The chapters address how actors from Global South contexts shaped key debates on, for example, the role of Black, Indigenous, and migrant labor, the "Islamic question," and the "peasant question," which challenged Bolshevik epistemological frameworks. All such "questions" involved political subjectivities that the Comintern tried to reductively frame within a global revolution driven by Moscow, resulting in the Comintern’s ultimate disintegration. Nevertheless, this juncture between the Comintern’s global designs and its local encounters left a significant legacy that would later be reconfigured in mid-century anticolonial movements.

Anne Garland Mahler is Associate Professor at the University of Virginia and author of From the Tricontinental to the Global South: Race, Radicalism, and Transnational Solidarity (Duke, 2018). She is director of Global South Studies and lead editor of The Oxford Handbook of the History of the Global South (forthcoming).

Paolo Capuzzo is Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Bologna. His current fields of research are the history of material culture, Global Communism, and Gramsci. Capuzzo is the author of Culture del consumo (2006), the co-editor, with S. Pons, of Gramsci nel movimento comunista internazionale (2019); and the co-author, with Partha Chatterjee and Sobhanlal Datta Gupta, of Gramsci in India (forthcoming).