Thursday 17 October 2024

Warsaw Spatial Humanities seminar

 Dear Colleagues!

We are happy to invite you to the Warsaw Spatial Humanities seminar. It will be our 9th #WarSHum already! This time our speaker is going to be Professor Maciej Gorny from the Institute of History, Polish Academy of Sciences. The title of the lecture is:

"Geopolitical thinking starts from cradle: Erwin Hanslik's life and work (1880-1940)".

Attached poster will give you more details about the presentation. Please, register here (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScHJ1gPRRlDwzVK_jMGMaYfK1QLMy5MPxU1a9JqNJ61zMqXxQ/viewform) to join us on the 29th of October, 2024. We start the seminar at 12:00 CET (11:00 London time).


Best regards

Francis, Tomasz, and Wieslawa [Warsaw Spatial Humanities]

Wednesday 16 October 2024

hybrid event: Bálint Varga (Universität Graz). Longing for the White Man’s Burden: Images of Civilization, Race, and the Colonial World Order in East-Central Europe, 1878–1939.´ Monday, October 21, 15:00 CET // 9 am EST

 hybrid event: Bálint Varga (Universität Graz). Longing for the White Man’s Burden: Images of Civilization, Race, and the Colonial World Order in East-Central Europe, 1878–1939. Monday, October 21, 15:00 CET // 9 am EST. Zoom & Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences

In 1886, the Bohemian medical doctor and traveler Emil Holub tried to Europeanize female fashion in Pandamatenga, a trading station near the Zambezi River, by distributing European-tailored skirts to local women. Holub’s attempt was deeply rooted in the conviction of the superiority of European-Christian-White lifestyle and norms. The feeling of being superior to people stuck at an earlier stage of development came along with a sense of duty to lead the backward toward progress. This sense of duty – the White Man’s Burden, as British poet Rudyard Kipling powerfully put it in his famous, homonymous poem – was widespread among colonizer societies, especially in the 19th century.

This talk will argue that the discourse of the White Man’s Burden can also be found in a Habsburg and post-Habsburg setting, indeed, among Czech, Hungarian, and Polish actors traditionally less associated with global interests. The talk will identify three different geographical areas where these actors imagined carrying the White Man’s Burden: in the Habsburg-ruled Bosnia; in Southeast Europe and the Ottoman Empire among the (imagined) Slavic and Turkic kin peoples; and in South America via settler-colonists. A fourth special group that thematized the White Man’s Burden consisted of missionaries who worked mostly in Africa and Asia. The talk will argue that this discourse was fragmented and often served as a narrative tool to argue for belonging to an imagined and idealized Europe.


Details and zoom link: https://www.mua.cas.cz/cs/udalost/longing-for-the-white-man-s-burden-images-of-civilization-race-and-the-colonial-world-order-in-east-central-europe-1878-1939


Image: Czech physician and explorer Emil Holub.

Sunday 13 October 2024

Call for Papers Central European History Convention, July 17th—19th 2025, University of Vienna

Call for Papers Central European History Convention, July 17th—19th 2025, University of Vienna / in person (not hybrid)

Further information: https://tinyurl.com/cehc-cfp

Deadline for proposals: January 31st 2025

Notification: February 24th 2025

Lin Lewis, Nana Osei-Opare (eds.): Socialism, Internationalism, and Development in the Third World: Envisioning Modernity in the Era of Decolonization

Su Lin Lewis, Nana Osei-Opare (eds.): Socialism, Internationalism, and Development in the Third World: Envisioning Modernity in the Era of Decolonization. London: Bloomsbury 2024. ISBN 9781350413436. open access


Description

In the wake of colonial and racial exploitation, political leaders, technocrats, activists, and workers across the Third World turned to socialism to offer a new vision of post-colonial development. Against a backdrop of decolonization, white supremacy, and the Cold War, they fostered anti-colonial solidarity and created cooperative frameworks for self-reliance.


In following these actors, the contributions to this volume show that “development” was not merely exported from North to South: people across the Global South collaborated with each other while engaging with a diversity of socialist ideas, from European Fabianism and Marxism to tailored African, Asian, and Latin American models. They led debates on race and inequality from the 1920s and 1930s and spearheaded local, regional, and internationalist efforts to re-envision modernity by the 1950s and 1960s.


By examining the limitations and legacies of socialist development initiatives in and across the Third World, Socialism, Internationalism, and Development in the Third World offers new perspectives on the intertwined histories of socialism, development, and international cooperation, with lessons for both past and present.



The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by UKRI and Rice University, USA. URL: https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/monograph?docid=b-9781350420175

Table of Contents

Introduction: Development Dreams from the Socialist South, Su Lin Lewis (Bristol University, UK) and Nana Osei-Opare (Rice University, USA).


1. Development and Difference: Alternative Genealogies of Uneven Development, 1920–1940, Kelvin Ng (Yale University, USA)

2. Debating Race and Revolutionary Socialism from the Latin American South, Jo Crow (University of Bristol, UK)

3. Pan-Africa, African Socialism, and the 'Federal Moment' of Decolonization, Marc Matera (University of California Santa Cruz,, USA)

4. Socialism, Internationalism, and Regime Survival: The Guomindang, China, and Taiwan in the 1940s and 1950s, Tehyun Ma (University of Sheffield, UK)

5. Three Logics of Indian Socialism: Historicizing Development under Capital, Matthew Shutzer (Duke University, USA)

6. Socialism and the Question of Third World Development in the Ideas of the Indonesian Socialist Party (PSI), Pradipto Niwandhono (Universitas Airlangga, Indonesia)

7. Cuban Internationalismo, Berthold Unfried and Claudia Martinez (both University of Vienna, Austria)

8. Politics of Development at Afro-Asian Women's Conferences, Su Lin Lewis (University of Bristol, UK) and Wildan Sena Utama (University of Gadjah Madah, Indonesia)

9. Ahmad Ali Kohzad's visit to China 1958: A Critical Reading, William Figueroa (University of Groningen, the Netherlands)

10. Forging the Vanguard of Developmental Socialism: Nationalization, Respectability and Ideological Struggles at Kivukoni College, Tanzania, Eric Burton (University of Innsbruck, Austria)

11. Fish, Discontent, and Socialist Modernities and Dreams in Kwame Nkrumah's Ghana, Nana Osei-Opare (Rice University, USA)

12, Indians as Experts on Democracy and Development: South-South Cooperation in the Nehru Years, Taylor Sherman (University of New South Wales, Australia)

13. Confronting Capitalism in Twentieth-Century Latin America, Kevin Young (University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA)

Afterword: Rethinking Socialist Developmentalisms in the “Third World”, David C. Engerman (Yale University, USA)

Oleksandr Avramchuk: Budując Republikę Ducha. Historia Programu Fulbrighta w Polsce w latach 1945–2020 [Building a Republic of the Spirit. A history of the Fulbright Program in Poland from 1945 to 2020].

Oleksandr Avramchuk: Budując Republikę Ducha. Historia Programu Fulbrighta w Polsce w latach 1945–2020 [Building a Republic of the Spirit. A history of the Fulbright Program in Poland from 1945 to 2020]. Warszawa: PWN 2024. ISBN: 9788301238629. URL: https://ksiegarnia.pwn.pl/Budujac-Republike-Ducha.,1070317688,p.html


Budując Republikę Ducha.

Publikacja historyczna przedstawiająca kulisy rozpoczęcia działalności Programu Fulbrighta, jednego z najbardziej prestiżowych programów stypendialnych na świecie. Autor prowadzi czytelników przez zawirowania historii i powojennej polityki, pokazując jak z czasem, w kolejnych dekadach zmieniał się sam program, nastawienie władz do niego, a także jak wpływał on na losy absolwentów.

Wednesday 9 October 2024

Call for papers: Navigating Epistemic, Cultural, and Legal Translations: Processes, Hierarchies, Spaces

 Call for papers: Navigating Epistemic, Cultural, and Legal Translations: Processes, Hierarchies, Spaces - Regensburg 04/2025


Organiser: Leibniz ScienceCampus Europe and America in the Modern World (University of Regensburg & Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies)


Place: Regensburg (Germany)

Time: 23 - 25 April 2025


Deadline for Paper Proposals: 31 October 2024

All cultural, social, political and legal exchanges involve processes of transfer and translation. They include not only linguistic and cultural transfer, but also the transposition and therefore resemantization of meanings, symbols, institutions, norms, practices, and discourses across time, spaces and legal systems.

For instance, avantgarde movements, such as surrealism, as a transregional phenomenon comprising Europe and the Americas, translated cultural meaning back and forward within and between regional or linguistic contexts and artistic forms. Other processes of transfer and translations include networked social and political movements such as Latin American or East European feminisms. Legal orders – both domestic and international – are also shaped by processes of transfer and translation. Recent approaches in comparative law seek to take into account movements of norms and their contextualization. And even the language and vocabulary of international law, which is associated with the idea of universality, seems to be approached, adapted and applied differently by state and non-state actors in different locations. All these processes of cultural, social, and legal transfer and translation can be analyzed in terms of traveling ideas, practices, and aesthetics whose meanings, functions, and reception change in their new surroundings, particularly when polycentric, post-colonial, or post-imperial settings are at play.

Individual and collective actors – who navigate, renegotiate, and challenge interpretations and meanings – play important roles as intermediaries. Alongside social and cultural structures, they make transregional transfer processes interactive, interconnected, and productive. However, these processes also go hand in hand with substantial scopes for at times unexpected adaptations, contestatory re-appropriations, or creative re-translations. They evolve in contexts of local, regional and global power imbalances, cultural differences, and historical legacies of colonial or imperial inequalities, which engender frictions (Tsing), effects of mimicry (Bhabha), but also spark potential for cultural and social innovation. Hence, moving beyond the idea of translation processes conceived as uncontested one-way streets in neutral spaces, our aim is to shed light on the multifaceted implications of translation, transfer, and circulation of culturally situated knowledge and (legal) norms from different disciplinary, theoretical, and empirical perspectives.


Combining area studies-focused research in the social sciences, cultural studies, media studies, and literary studies, the conference seeks to attract a wide range of papers that analyse processes of transfer and translation in polycentric contexts. It focuses on the transatlantic entanglements of the Americas with Western and Southern Europe, and of the Americas with Eastern Europe - broadly defined to include East and East-Central Europe, Southeast Europe, the South Caucasus, and Central Asia - from the 18th century to the present. Our aim is to promote a multidisciplinary dialogue on the analysis, theoretical frameworks and broader narrativisation of transfer and translation processes.


Further information can be found in the Call for Papers, downloadable here: https://forhistiur.net/media/nachrichten/CfP_LSC_Conference_2025.pdf

online talk: Jan Surman: Cow. An Entangled History

Monday, October 14 at 15:00 CET / 9 am EDT (in person in Prague, online/zoom everywhere else).

We cordially invite you to the lecture:

Jan Jakub Surman (MÚA AV ČR): COW. AN ENTANGLED HISTORY

In the late 19th century, cattle farming in Central Europe became professionalized. This included not only new husbandry practices but also the breeding of more efficient animals. Using Polish Red Cattle in Galicia as a case study, I will discuss how this process can be described through the lens of entangled history - with a broad meaning of entanglement, ranging from intercultural to intersectional to interspecies.

Zoom link:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87087465366

Meeting ID: 870 8746 5366

In person participation

Admission free, no registration required. Masaryk Institute and Archives of the CAS, v. v. i., Gabčíkova 2362/10, Praha 8

Warsaw Spatial Humanities seminar

 Dear Colleagues! We are happy to invite you to the Warsaw Spatial Humanities seminar. It will be our 9th #WarSHum already! This time our sp...