Anarchism and Worldmaking: Cultural Actors between China and Spain, 1898-1939

Dissertationsprojekt von Julia Lange - Dissertation abgeschlossen!

Betreuer: Prof. Dr. Roland Wenzlhuemer  Zweitbetreuer: Prof. Dr. Daniel Leese

This study, analysing the relations between Chinese and Spanish anarchism from 1898 to 1939, puts anarchist actors’ claim to a global anarchist culture able to surmount the
East-West binary at the centre of its enquiry. It asks how historical anarchism, as a global East-West cultural construct, was communicated, narrated, explained, and made visible on the ground, in its local manifestations – and by whom. This question gains relevance because anarchism possessed no institutionalised centres and many of its members never left their locality. The study accordingly stresses the role of local cultural actors, who were central in the making of symbolic knowledge and belief systems; an act that endowed them with political relevance as ‘worldmakers’, evoking Nelson Goodman and his “Ways of Worldmaking".

The chapters of this study transform its central enquiry into more specific sub questions. Chapter One asks how anarchist writers and journalists took recourse to patterns of global likeness to outline, delineate and ‘make’ the world for their readers, while Chapter Two engages with anarchist Esperantists’ embrace of the Esperanto movement as a counter-worldmaking endeavour against imperialism and militarism. Foregrounding anarchist educators, Chapter Three queries how anarchist pedagogy and education functioned as anarchism’s worldmaking tools. Chapter Four, returning to anarchist writers and journalists as central cultural actors, traces Chinese anarchism via its engagement for the Spanish Revolution as a symbolic and political act. Building on this, it asks what Spain represented for Chinese anarchists in the late 1930s.

This project draws onto Chinese (Classical and Modern), Spanish, French, Catalan and Esperanto primary sources in the form of journals, newspapers, and letters. It takes recourse to methods of global history and global microhistory.