The Left Book Club and its associates: transnational circulation of socialist ideas in an Atlantic network (1935-1947)

• Grant number: 17/13528-4
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: January 01, 2018
• End date: June 04, 2020
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - History - Modern and Contemporary History
• Principal Investigator: Tania Regina de Luca
• Grantee: Matheus Cardoso da Silva
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Ciências e Letras (FCL-ASSIS). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Assis. Assis , SP, Brazil
• Associated scholarship(s): 19/04659-3 - The Left Book Club and its associates: transnational circulation of socialist ideas in the Atlantic network (1935-1947), BE.EP.PD

Abstract

This project intends to consider the relations of the Left Book Club (LBC), the first book club of the modern era in Britain, with the themes of imperialism and colonialism, in view of its transnational performance between 1935 and 1948, the period of its functioning. The club has founded more than 1500 sections spread across several British cities and 15 others around the globe. We understand that the transnational performance of the LBC favored the creation of an international circuit of circulation of ideas in a double-lane way: from London to the colonies, but also from these to the Metropolis, in a process that seeks to supplant the notion of copying and imitation in favor of the notion of appropriation, although one could argue that the flow was more intense in the first of the mentioned directions. To address this problem, we will focus on LBC relations with three international sections: The New Era Fellowship (founded in South Africa in 1937), The Current Affairs Group (founded in Southern Rhodesia in 1938) and the Left Club in Jamaica (founded in Jamaica in 1938). From the relations of these three sections with London, we intend to map a network of circulation of ideas created between the Caribbean, Africa and Europe. In this circuit, we will highlight the movement of non-European intellectuals in these transnational networks, who acted as carriers of anticolonial, anti-imperial, anti-racist and nationalist ideas. These issues were already discussed in regional networks, both in the extreme south of the African continent and in the Caribbean region, independently of relations with Europeans. However, the transnational performance of the London´s club contributed to the circulation of what was produced within these local networks, which helped to expand the debates to other national contexts, especially in the Atlantic region, then under British influence.