Left Transnationalism: The Communist International and the National, Colonial, and Racial Questions (Volume 4) (Rethinking Canada in the World)

In 1919, Bolshevik Russia and its followers formed the Communist International, also known as the Comintern, to oversee the global communist movement. From the very beginning, the Comintern committed itself to ending world imperialism, supporting colonial liberation, and promoting racial equality. Coinciding with the centenary of the Comintern's founding, Left Transnationalism highlights the different approaches interwar communists took in responding to these issues. Bringing together leading and emerging scholars on the Communist International, individual communist parties, and national and colonial questions, this collection moves beyond the hyperpoliticized scholarship of the Cold War era and re-energizes the field. Contributors focus on transnational diasporic and cultural networks, comparative studies of key debates on race and anti-colonialism, the internationalizing impulse of the movement, and the evolution of communist platforms through transnational exchange. Essays further emphasize the involvement of communist and socialist parties across Canada, Australia, India, China, Japan, Southeast Asia, Latin America, South Africa, and Europe. Highlighting the active discussions on nationality, race, and imperialism that took place in Comintern circles, Left Transnationalism demonstrates that this organization - as well as communism in general - was, especially in the years before 1935, far more heterogeneous, creative, and unpredictable than the rubber stamp of the Soviet Union described in conventional historiography. Contributors include Michel Beaulieu (Lakehead University), Marc Becker (Truman State University), Anna Belogurova (Freie Universitat Berlin), Oleksa Drachewych (University of Guelph), Daria Dyakonova (Université de Montréal), Alastair Kocho-Williams (Clarkson University), Andrée Lévesque (McGill University), Lars T. Lih (Independent Scholar), Ian McKay (McMaster University), Sandra Pujals (University of Puerto Rico), John Riddell (Ontario Institute of Studies in Education), Evan Smith (Flinders University), S.A. Smith (All Souls College, Oxford), Xiaofei Tu (Appalachian State University), and Kankan Xie (Peking University). Colophon Contents Acknowledgments Note on Transliteration and Sources Introduction Part One: Orientations 1 “Revolutionary Social Democracy” and the Third International 2 The Russian Revolution, National Self-Determination,and Anti-Imperialism, 1917–1927 3 Origins of the Anti-Imperialist United Front: The Comintern and Asia, 1919–1925 4 Transnationality in the Soviet Challenge to British India,1917–1923 Part Two: Transnational Personal Relationships 5 Los poputchiki: Communist Fellow Travellers, Comintern Radical Networks, and the Forging of a Culture of Modernity in Latin America and the Caribbean 6 The Transnational Experience of Some Canadian Communists 7 Between the Comintern, the Japanese Communist Party,and the Chinese Communist Party: Nosaka Sanzo’s Betrayal Games Part Three: Race and Colonialism 8 Anti-Colonialism and the Imperial Dynamic in the Anglophone Communist Movements in South Africa, Australia,and Britain 9 Race, the Comintern, and Communist Parties in British Dominions, 1920–1943 10 The Comintern and the Question of Race in the South American Andes 11 Various Forms of Chineseness in the Origins of Southeast Asian Communism Part Four: National Questions 12 “Young” and “Adult” Canadian Communists: The Question of Nationhood and Ethnicity in the 1920s 13 “It Is Better to Retreat Now Than Be Crushed Altogether”:Questions of Ethnicity and the Communist Party of Canada at the Lakehead 14 Henri Gagnon, Tim Buck, Stanley Ryerson, and the Contested Legacy of the Comintern on the National Question: The Crisis of French-Canadian Communism in the 1940s 15 Nationalism and Internationalism in Chinese Communist Networks in the Americas Conclusion: Future Avenues for the Study of the Comintern and the National, Colonial, and Racial Questions Contributors Index "In 1919, Bolshevik Russia and its followers formed the Communist International, also known as the Comintern, to oversee the global communist movement. From the very beginning, the Comintern committed itself to ending world imperialism, supporting colonial liberation, and promoting racial equality. Coinciding with the centenary of the Comintern's founding, Left Transnationalism highlights the different approaches interwar communists took in responding to these issues. Bringing together leading and emerging scholars on the Communist International, individual communist parties, and national and colonial questions, this collection moves beyond the hyperpoliticized scholarship of the Cold War era and re-energizes the field. Contributors focus on transnational diasporic and cultural networks, comparative studies of key debates on race and anti-colonialism, the internationalizing impulse of the movement, and the evolution of communist platforms through transnational exchange. Essays further emphasize the involvement of communist and socialist parties across Canada, Australia, India, China, Japan, Southeast Asia, Latin America, South Africa and Europe. Highlighting the active discussions on nationality, race, and imperialism that took place in Comintern circles, Left Transnationalism demonstrates that this organization--as well as communism in general--was, especially in the years before 1935, far more heterogeneous, creative and unpredictable than the rubber stamp of the Soviet Union described in conventional historiography."-- Provided by publisher Using archival sources, novels, government reports, and works on tourism and heritage, Ian McKay and Robin Bates look at how state planners, key politicians, and cultural figures such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, long-time premier Angus L. Macdonald, and novelist Thomas Raddall were all instrumental in forming "tourism/history." The authors argue that Longfellow's 1847 poem Evangeline - on the brutal British expulsion of Acadians from Nova Scotia - became a template a new kind of profit-making history that exalted whiteness and excluded ethnic minorities, women, and working class movements. A remarkable look at the intersection of politics, leisure, and the presentation of public history, In the Province of History is a revealing account of how a region has both used and distorted its own past. An exploration of the ways interwar communism sought to combat imperialism, support self-determination of nations, and promote racial equality.