The Politics and Poetics of Community within the Anglophone Left

International Conference

Sorbonne University / Paris Nanterre University

Paris and Nanterre, France

March 21-23, 2024

“Community” is what W. B. Gallie (1955) would call an “essentially contested concept.” Various groups and social scientists debate the importance of institutions, geography, social practices, culture, polity, etc., when defining the concept (Chatterjee & Koleski, 1979; Coburn & Gormally, 2017). Neither pure logic nor empirical evidence appears capable of definitively settling such debates; rather, the contours and ends of community are the theater of continuous struggle. P. Ruopp (1953) captures this tension when he affirms community “is at the same time a descriptive and a normative concept” (p. 4). This conference seeks to explore this generative tension by comparing the political and cultural practices of community movements within the English-speaking world whose normative principles are associated with the political left.

In recent decades, scholars have researched changing and conflicting perspectives on community in the wake of neoliberal globalization, industrial reorganization, and technological revolution (Blackshaw, 2010; Coburn & Gormally, 2017). F. Tonnies’ (1887) classic dichotomy between “community” (Gemeinschaft) and “society” (Gesellschaft), the former being characterized by personal relationships and shared customs, the latter by impersonal interactions and formal rules, retains conceptual relevance across the political spectrum. Conservatives have criticized modern society for eroding traditional values and rural or small-town communities (Nisbit, 2010), while communitarians have rebuked the atomistic individualism of neoliberal society (Walzer, 1990; Putman, 2000). Liberals have responded by defending individual freedom against the potentially oppressive and exclusionary nature of both conservative communities and ethnic minority enclaves (Shapiro, 1995). However, less attention has been given to a revival of more radical uses of community to contest both neoliberal capitalism and conservative communitarianism.

The Anglophone left has a long tradition of using the concept of community to promote radical democracy and social empowerment against capitalist exploitation and alienation. Communitarianism originally referred to the utopian communal experiments of the nineteenth century (Jennings, 2016). Radical communitarian experiments reemerged in the late 1960s as part of the counterculture movement (Miller, 1992). Since the turn of the twenty-first century, community wealth building initiatives have developed as an alternative to neoliberal capitalism, state socialism, and conservative or ethno-religious forms of community (Williamson, Imbroscio, & Alperovitz, 2002; Alperovitz, 2005, 2017; Guinan & O’Neill, 2020; Kelly & Howard, 2019).

The latest wave of leftwing approaches to community within the Anglosphere provides a fertile terrain for research. The purpose of this conference is to unite social scientists, humanities scholars, and artists whose work can enhance our understanding of these contemporary movements and shed new light on those of the past. How have actors within the Anglophone left offered distinct approaches to community using values such as social empowerment, equality, liberty, inclusion, and solidarity? What political strategies have they used and what success and obstacles have they encountered? What role do the literary, visual, and performing arts play in representing, building, and maintaining leftwing communities? How have technological innovations transformed the conception, scale, and strategies of these communities to achieve their political and cultural objectives? By exploring these questions and others, the conference aims to contribute to the theory and practice of community by mapping the contrasting leftwing approaches to community circulating in various English-speaking countries, and by encouraging both interdisciplinarity and intermediality (Müller, 2000) through the combination of scholarly research and artistic performances.

The first line of inquiry involves political uses of community within the Anglophone left. Utopian experiments, for example, are intentional communities founded as laboratories for social empowerment. They are distinct from both social-democratic and Marxist approaches in that they generally shun party politics and adopt an interstitial strategy for social transformation (Wright, 2010). Community development initiatives, on the other hand, tend to take a more social-democratic approach by uniting elected officials and community leaders around municipal projects aimed at gradually improving the civil engagement and economic well-being of local communities (Defilippis & Saegert, 2012). Community wealth building combines aspects of both of these approaches to transform cities into experiments for a democratic economy (Brown & Jones, 2021; Guinan & O’Neill, 2020; Kelly & Howard, 2019). Community organizing mobilizes community members for leftwing political objectives at the grassroots level (Alinsky, 1946; Brady & O’Connor, 2014). Feminist and queer activists have developed new models of community building and organizing that make novel use of public space, vulnerability, and mutual aid (Butler, Gambetti & Sabsay, 2016; Erbaugh, 2002; Halberstam, 2011; Spade, 2020). Analyzing the diversity and circulation of these approaches within the Anglosphere will contribute to our understanding of the history and theory of the politics of community.

The second line of inquiry involves aesthetic uses of community within the Anglophone left. Writers, artists, filmmakers, etc. have found that a functioning community enables the fulfillment of material needs, while it also inspires the development and transmission of shared artistic projects and political horizons (Reynolds, 1988; Rogin, 1992; Ross, 1988, 2002, 2015). In the 20th century, Allen Ginsberg (1954) defined art as a “community effort.” The first half of that century offers many examples of the importance of community from a leftwing literary perspective, such as the magazines The Masses (1911-1917) and New Masses (1926-1948), or Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth (1906-1917). Art and literature are frequently at the forefront of the political imagination of communities founded on leftwing principles. One could think, for example, of Walt Whitman’s individual and collective lyric self, especially in connection to his representation of working-class life in Leaves of Grass (1855);or British poet Sean Bonney’s capacious “us,” which stretches from Thomas Münzer to Katarina Gogou and mobilizes trans-historical solidarity against a tangibly present adversary. Finally,the visual, literary, and performing arts all play a central role in the construction of community through shared cultural references, practices, and memories (Coghlan, 2016). One can think here of the Young British Artists (YBA) as well as Isadora Duncan’s dance schools for proletarian children founded in France and the Soviet Union. In order to illustrate the intimate relation between art, research, and community, the conference will include poetry readings and dance performances in addition to traditional conference papers, and we encourage participants to propose practice-based talks.

This conference is part of an ongoing project to unite scholars and practitioners on the theme of community building and leftwing social transformation. A research seminar entitled “Local Laboratories for Global Emancipation” was launched in 2022-2023 at Paris Nanterre University and will continue in 2023-2024 and beyond. The conference aims to pursue the diversification and internationalization of this research network by inviting comparative perspectives on experiences throughout the English-speaking world, including those of communities built within English-speaking countries by members originating from non-Anglophone cultural areas. The conference will result in the publication of a collective work evaluated by a scientific committee. In each of these projects, doctoral students and young researchers are part of the organizing committee and given an extended platform to present their work. Finally, the project aims to strengthen the ties between science, art, and society by applying research-creation to the concept of community and by producing studies that can notably interest public officials, associations, and the cooperative sector.

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