Transnational and Global History Approaches: Critical Reflections on Southern African and Eastern Europe (Double Panel) Part 1

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E Global History and Decoloniality

Transnational and Global History Approaches: Critical Reflections on Southern African and Eastern Europe (Double Panel) Part 1

Event Details

Date

II. Thursday, 11th September, 08:30-10:30
Location
K1051 (hybrid)
Theme
E Global History and Decoloniality

Convenor

Lena Dallywater (Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography)
Christopher Saunders (University of Cape Town)

Chair

Lena Dallywater (Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography)

Panelists

Christopher Saunders (University of Cape Town)
Ernst van der Wal (University of Stellenbosch)
Beáta Hock (GWZO Leipzig)
Lena Dallywater (Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography)
Derya Bozat (University of Bern)

Papers

Christopher Saunders

From national to transnational and global approaches: Southern African reflections

From national to transnational and global approaches: Southern African reflections

Building on my survey of South Africa’s evolving historiography in my monograph entitled The Making of the South African Past, this paper will offer critical reflections on the advance in that historiography from the national histories that were written after South Africa came into existence in 1910 to, in recent decades, transnational and global approaches to the South African past. While it will be shown that giant steps have been taken, drawing on methodological advances in other historiographies, by historians based both in South Africa and abroad, the paper will reflect, for example, on the failure of the most significant recent history of the country, the Cambridge History of South Africa, to incorporate an adequate discussion of South Africa’s colonial intrusion into the region. The paper will go on to offer reflections on recent histories of the southern African region as a whole, focusing in particular on the work that has been done on the histories of the late twentieth century liberation movements. It will be argued, interalia, that while transregional approaches to such histories were inevitable, given the nature of the liberation struggles, new approaches are needed to situate these struggles in a global context, in particular that of the Cold War.
Ernst van der Wal

Small: Scale and Strategies of Subversion in (South) African Visual Culture

Small: Scale and Strategies of Subversion in (South) African Visual Culture

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.
Beáta Hock

Facing Colonial Moments of National History in Central and Eastern Europe

Facing Colonial Moments of National History in Central and Eastern Europe

This contribution engages with strategies of decolonial museology and artistic interventions that aim to elicit critical self-reflection both from museum professionals and exhibition-goers, thus fostering the rethinking of established historical narratives. By way of selected case studies, I will reflect on how questions of race and ethnicity, decolonial thinking, and minority artists’ access to representation have shaped museum landscapes in East-Central Europe in the past decade. Part of this "exercise" necessitates giving up the belief in "colonial innocence" or victimhood and facing, instead, historical moments that entangled East European nations in Europe's broader, global colonial project. My examples will straddle museum interventions in the Art Museum of Estonia (2021) andLeipzig's Grassi Museum (ongoing) as well as artistic and curatorial performance projects at a 2020 summer school in Kuldiga, Latvia and the 56th Venice Biennale (2015, representing Poland).
Derya Bozat

Cold War Connections: Decentering the Soviet Narrative through Nigerian Student Experiences

Cold War Connections: Decentering the Soviet Narrative through Nigerian Student Experiences

Between 1960 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, over 43,500 students from Sub-Saharan Africa graduated from Soviet universities, with Nigerians comprising about 12 percent of this group. These Soviet-sponsored educational programs were a key component of Moscow’s cultural diplomacy, designed to establish a Soviet-friendly intelligentsia in postcolonial Sub-Saharan Africa. Despite three decades of educational exchanges between the Global South and the Soviet Union, the perspectives and agency of Nigerian students remain understudied. A notable research gap exists regarding their cultural encounters, including friendships, experiences of racism, and their freedom to travel within the Soviet Union and to Western Europe. At the Congress on Universal and Global History in Växjö, I will examine the friendships Nigerian students developed with Soviet and international peers. Their residence in shared dormitories fostered interaction, while Russian language proficiency became essential for navigating life behind the Iron Curtain. These experiences often led to significant cross-cultural relationships. Moreover, Nigerian students had travel freedoms that Soviet citizens lacked, which impacted their status in complex ways. This micro-level analysis will decenter the dominant Soviet perspective, instead foregrounding the personal experiences of Nigerian students. By drawing on oral history interviews and private archives, I aim to uncover the dynamics of interpersonal encounters and the formation (or absence) of friendships. This approach will offer fresh insights into the significance and limitations of international friendships forged in this unique historical context.
A Global History from the South

A Global History from the South

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.
Lena Dallywater

Liberating Humanity – A New Look at Transregional Solidarity Networks

Liberating Humanity – A New Look at Transregional Solidarity Networks

Excellent research has been published in recent years on transregional actors in phases of decolonisation, especially in Cold War and Global History, much has been researched from the perspective of Geography in relation to decolonisation and space. Due to disciplinary specializations, findings were only partially related. The paper proposes a closer look at individuals with a religious-anticolonial mindset to uncover completely new perspectives on ‘orientation’ at a time when the world order is undergoing radical change, and new insights into how actors have actually, and also metaphorically, orientated themselves. The paper sets out from three points: decolonisation –religion –space. It introduces the actions and journeys of selected individuals who were supported in, or gave support in, transregionally operating faith-based networks in the momentous 40 years between 1957 and 1997, and the spatial imaginations that inform their doing, to ultimately propose a new methodology to research faith-based transregional solidarity networks in African decolonial transitions that transcends disciplinary boundaries.

Abstract

This panel will bring together a set of papers relating to on the one hand Southern African, and on the other hand Eastern European cases of transnational and global history-writing. In an interdisciplinary dialogue it contributes to the rethinking of historical narratives and established foci in the existing field of world history. In addition to a look at local historiographies in their interplay with global approaches, the panel will explore the question: How can artistic expression advance the rethinking of historical narratives? One of the contributions will focus on Southern Africa, showing how history-writing developed there from a national to a transnational focus, especially relating to the history of the region’s liberation movements in the late twentieth century. Another will reflect on what a world history being written from Africa will look like and how such a history may affect and influence the local historiography. A third paper takes as its point of departure the critical (re)activation of the small within contemporary visual culture. It is interested in the idea, condition and intentional activation of small as a site of resistance. A fourth contribution uses selected examples of interventions in the museum context to illustrate how artists and curators from Eastern Europe have in recent years come to terms with the participation of their own nation in a global colonial history and thereby generated new historical narratives. A new methodology to research faith-based transregional solidarity networks in African decolonial transitions that transcends disciplinary boundaries is proposed in the fifth paper. Lastly, dominant narratives are decentred through attention to individuals’ experiences. All the papers will offer critical reflections on the various approaches they analyse, and the methodological challenges that have arisen.