We propose a different periodisation of globalisation and the process of the advent of the world system. Starting from the main lines of Amin, Braudel, Wallerstein, Arrighi and Polanyi, we sketch out a complementary and competing periodisation. It is based on the phyletic tree of humanity and the processes of social reproduction from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic and the ancient phases. epistemes show that modernity has begun without being disconnected from metaphysics. we postulate the advent of an initially megaloensemble composed of world systems that ignore each other until their agglomeration through the unrecognised syncretism of the epistemes and the expansion of the capitalist mode of production and the eurocentric erasure of the contributions of the history of the others, mainly by the victors , the west again the rest. political hegemony of the reconstruction of world history goes beyond coloniality and opens up a perspective in which modernity is still ahead of us.

In response to human activities becoming the largest geological force shaping the planet, the Anthropocene has been proposed as a new (geological) epoch in the history of the Earth. The concept has been enormously successful and has established itself solidly in the academic discourse (and beyond) since its proposal in 2000. Critics, however, have highlighted how the Anthropocene remains highly contradictory, as it seeks to problematise human dominance while reaffirming this very dominance through elevating the human to its own epoch, as well as ignoring social and cultural differences within human communities. Moreover, this human epoch is declared at the exact moment, when humans notice that it is not just them who shape the planet but that we are part of a multi-species collective making the world. The paper will ask and explore, whether the Anthropocene and its intermingling of human and natural history can be conceived as a new universal history or whether the Anthropocene demands a new universal history; what might be at stake if we acknowledge the Anthropocene as a new universal history; and whether this proves a productive or a problematic universal history. The paper will explore, in other words, whether and how the Anthropocene raises the question of universal history anew. For this, I will take recourse to Susan Buck-Morss’ reappraisal of universal history via a materialist critique of Hegel and suggest, that the Anthropocene indeed demands a new universal history if we want to move past it.

This paper takes as its point of departure the critical (re)activation of the small within contemporary visual culture. The word ‘small’ is mainly used to refer to things or events of a size considered less than normal, while it is also used to describe that which is deemed insignificant or unimportant. At best, the small is read as undemonstrative, unassuming, and unnoticeable. At worst, it speaks of extremes of precarity, deprivation, and disempowerment.
As a critical response to such conceptions, this project is interested in the idea, condition and intentional activation of small as a site of resistance. By galvanising small as a tactical refusal – a refusal to conform, live up or cede to the large and the monumental – this research investigates how questions of scale and weight (of reach and importance) bear on select creative processes and artefacts. This paper draws on and is grounded in examples of visual and material culture stemming from the South African and larger African context that show such an interest in scale as a site of tension and socio-political engagement. By drawing on select examples of creative outputs (be it in art, popular and material culture, activism or creative engagements with archives and public spaces) from (South) African visual culture, this paper turns to small as a critical answer to the monolithic, the patriarchal and the normative.

This paper reflects on my ongoing experience of writing a world history, focusing particularly on how my interpretations have been influenced by my positionality as a scholar based in the southern tip of the African continent, whose work has hitherto focused on that region, with the rest of the world only featuring in its connections to the subcontinent. I will reflect on the ways this has informed my divergence from such established foci in the existing field of world history as accounting for the rise of the West, and marshalling the findings of the natural sciences to explicate longue durée historical outcomes. By contrast, African Studies has since the 1970s been dominated by questions of underdevelopment, with historiography no exception. Underdevelopment is by definition a comparative term, which is the sense in which I have approached it. But the process of historicising the question has also highlighted the need for a transnational approach, given the manner in which inequality between civilizations is as often as not the outcome of contact between them. Empire’s close entanglement with development has contributed to me making imperialism the connecting tissue in my world history; my questions have also inevitably given my work a subaltern flavour; and they have also informed a reluctance to accept the supposed decrees of ‘nature’ as answers to them. The paper will present the most important findings of my research, and reflect on the principal methodological challenges that have arisen and been overcome in undertaking it.