Global Intellectuals; M.N. Roy and other anti-colonial outsiders 1915 - 1950

This is a dissertation about a tiny minority of intellectuals who, in the 20th century, moved in the magnetic field between the poles of difference and identity, between global universality and particularity, between 'humanity' and civilisations. Because people, goods, ideas, and communication became increasingly mobile during the twentieth century, there was a need for figures to represent the increased connectivity of the world, to enact it, and to develop it - all vis-à-vis different audiences. Global intellectuals did this with reference to globalising ideologies - communism, liberalism, humanism and modernisation theory - embodying the ‘world’ both in their writing and in their physical selves. These ideologies claim the universal validity of their laws, meaning they apply to all of mankind - much like proselytising religions such as Christianity and Islam. Other forces rather worked against universality: war, nationalism and racism, to mention a few. Global intellectuals move where the universal and the particular meet, because it is in part through their particularities that they support universalising ideologies. They either display difference, or erase it, making them potential messengers for two meta-narratives being tried out in the twentieth century - either: we are all equal, or: some are more equal than others.

To make the studying of these claims operational, the dissertation focuses on the life, works and networks of one particular intellectual: M.N. Roy (1887 - 1954). Because of the extent of Roy’s travels and networks - bringing him from Bengal to Indonesia, Japan, China, in 1915-16, the US, and Mexico in 1917-20, Western Europe, Moscow, and Central Asia between 1920 and 1925, China in 1926/27, Moscow and Berlin in the late twenties before returning to India in 1930 - as well as his interacting with several globalising ideologies - anti-colonial nationalism, international communism, humanism and developmentalism - Roy is a particularly striking example of a global intellectual. The dissertation focuses more on practices of lives lived transnationally and globalising ideologies represented for particular audiences than it does on the translations and adaptations of particular concepts, placing it in the history of intellectuals and speaking to the literature on transnational biographies.

contact: leonie.wolters@fu-berlin.de