Love is Worldmaking

Abstract

Love constitutes the global because it is normatively implicated in worldmaking work. I illustrate this empirically via a close and contextualized reading of the political novel Gora , which was set during a key moment of worldmaking during empire and penned by the first non-European Nobel Laureate in literature, Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941). Tagore is an under- appreciated figure in global international relations (IR) who not only traversed multiple political circles during the British empire but also saw himself as a confluence of several cultures. I read Gora as lending insight into love as a site of normative contestation-ethically indeterminate, and intimately involved in worldmaking projects, including nationalism, cosmopoli- tanism, and inter-communalism in an India on the eve of its independence. Setting Tagore's thought in conversation with contemporary research in international history, and normative and anti-colonial international political theory, makes two im- portant offerings to the study of IR: it reveals how a sociological examination of the micropolitics of love helps us to understand and explain the innumerable ways in which intimacies animate worldmaking and equips us with a normative typology for engaging it. Show more