Michael Goebel

The book, published by the Cambridge University Press in 2015, traces the spread of a global anti-imperialist consciousness from the vantage point of Paris between the two World Wars. It seeks to answer the questions of why and how Paris became a hatchery for many of the political and intellectual elites that rose to prominence in Africa, Asia, and Latin America after World War II. So far, the formative nature of Parisian stints of figures such as Zhou Enlai, Ho Chi Minh, Ferhat Abbas, Léopold Sédar Senghor, or Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre has been approached mostly from the angle of individual biographies. By contrast, this study explores the local social context in which these and other activists moved. The book therefore treats interwar Paris as a crossroads of global migrations, which through contact and exchange bred new forms of anti-imperialism subsequently catapulted onto a global stage. The book will speak to students and scholars of twentieth-century imperial, international, and global history as well as to social scientists interested in migration, race, and ethnicity in France.

Este libro analiza la interacción entre el nacionalismo y la política de la historia en la Argentina del siglo XX. Ambos conceptos, el de "nacionalismo" y el de "política de la historia", son objeto de debate, pero el segundo es más sencillo de definir. La mayoría de los historiadores coincidiría en afirmar que el conocimiento histórico es un medio fundamental en las luchas por el poder político. De allí se sigue que, consciente o inconscientemente, las interpretaciones de la historia suelen producirse, difundirse, apropiarse y utilizarse para fines políticos. Con "política de la historia" se remite a las formas en que se escribe y moviliza la historia con el objeto de afectar la distribución del poder político en una sociedad. Desde luego, las ideologías en cuyo nombre se hace ello varían, pero como las narrativas, los mitos y los símbolos históricos son la materia a partir de la cual se interpretan las identidades nacionales, muchas políticas de la historia se hallan integradas en los debates sobre qué constituye aquello que podríamos llamar los rasgos esenciales de un Estado-Nación determinado. Dicho de otro modo, no toda política de la historia es nacionalista, pero todos los nacionalismos profundizan en el pasado de la Nación como base de reivindicaciones políticas actuales.

""Argentina’s Partisan Past is a study about the production, the spread and the use of understandings of national history and identity for political purposes in twentieth-century Argentina. It analyses how nationalist views about what it meant to be Argentine were built into the country’s long drawn-out crisis of liberal democracy from the 1930s to the 1980s.

Eschewing the notion of any straightforward relationship between cultural customs, ideas and political practices, the study seeks to provide a more nuanced framework for understanding the interplay between popular culture, intellectuals and the state in the promotion, co-option and repression of conflicting narratives about the nation’s history. Particular attention is given to the conditions for the production and the political use of cultural goods, especially the writings of historians. The intimate linkage between history and politics, it is argued, helped Argentina’s partisan past of the period following independence to cast its shadow onto the middle decades of the twentieth century. This process is scrutinised within the framework of recent approaches to the study of nationalism, in an attempt to communicate the major scholarly debates of this field with the case of Argentina.

The book is written for both students of Argentine history and those interested in the ways in which nationalism has shaped our contemporary world.

Reviews:
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=8599787
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=35047
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1469-8129.2012.00560_9.x/abstract""
http://hahr.dukejournals.org/content/93/1/146.full.pdf+html

During the last two decades a revisionist wave has gripped the historiography about imperial breakups. A venerable topic at least since World War I, generations of historians strove to explain why multinational empires crumbled to give way to nation-states. The entire scholarly field of nationalism studies was in good part a branch of this gigantic question, which the Yugoslav Wars once more thrust on historians’ minds. Yet with the memory of these wars fading, the tables have turned. The tide of revisionism has been of such vast proportions as to become the new mainstream. In the academic field of global and imperial history today, hardly anyone argues that empires were doomed to be replaced by nation-states. It was all more complex and, above all, contingent, we learn instead. As I have argued in my last book, it is time to challenge this new revisionist mainstream.

The article examines the medium-term political fallouts of France's massive recruitment of colonial workers and soldiers during WWI. It argues that this move inaugurated lasting patterns of (post-)colonial migrations to France, which augured the Empire's crumbling in the course of worldwide decolonization after 1945.

This article examines the global travels and anti-colonial thought of the Indian revolutionary Manabendra Nath Roy. It focuses particularly on his little explored stay in revolutionary Mexico, where he became a founder of the Mexican Communist Party in 1919. Drawing on archival sources from various countries and Roy's own writings, the article situates Roy's exploits somewhere between a global anti-colonialism, transnational solidarity and diasporic nationalism. It explores particularly the possibilities and the limits of an image of Asia and Latin America as regions united in their oppression by imperialism, and warranting shared anti-colonial strategies in the framework of international Communism.

The article explores the connections of various forms of nationalism in Argentina with Arab countries and pan-Arabism, focusing on the 1960s. Contrary to much of the existing scholarship on Argentine nationalism, it maintains that nationalist ideas and movements were not necessarily undermined, but frequently fed by transnational exchange. Analyzing how cultural analogies between Argentina and Arab countries were construed on the basis of pre-existing notions of Argentina as a Hispanic country, the article eventually arrives at broader theoretical considerations about the advantages and predicaments of transnational history.

This article contributes to debates about fascist influences among Argentina’s guerrilla groups of the 1970s. From the overall perspective of developments in Argentine nationalism, it traces back the history of the far-right Alianza Libertadora Nacionalista and Tacuara and assesses their significance as the nuclei from which later guerrillas came. Based on police reports and periodical publications from the period in question (c.1937–c.1973), it makes some generalisations about the collective biographies of militants. While not contradicting the widely held view that originally fascist groupings played a role in the emergence of Argentine guerrillas, the article introduces some nuances into this argument. Particular emphasis is given to the role of Peronism and the Cuban Revolution as facilitators of changes in Argentine nationalism.

There are few recent books as deeply anchored in both global and urban history as Su Lin Lewis's exploration of urban life in early-twentieth-century Southeast Asian port cities. Combining a keen interest in the consequences of the world's growing connectedness during the tail end of the age of steam, a thorough familiarity with the places it studies, and painstaking archival research, the book showcases how two subfields of history can be merged to great benefit. While Lewis speaks to recent debates in global history, she successfully eschews the now familiar charge that the field's practitioners have veered too far from concrete, empirical studies of the local. The elegantly presented results of her research therefore should be read by a wide range of historians.

Historians of Latin America have needed a book like this for a long time, a necessarily-collaborative study that compares and contrasts the continent's immigration histories during a significant period in which Latin America's relationship with the world in economic, cultural and political terms was transformed.

Historians of migration have needed a book like this even more urgently, combining empirical detail with conceptual rigour to allow Latin American histories to enter debates on migration beyond oft-repeated references to the slave trade, Italians in Argentina or stand-alone studies of isolated, apparently unique European 'colonies'.

In today's society it is almost impossible to ignore the issue of, and the problems caused by, immigration. However, its prominence in press, media and political debate is not matched in the academic literature, especially on Latin America and the Caribbean. The publication of a new book covering the period 1850 to 1950, an edited volume with chapters by an array of respected scholars, is therefore to be welcomed. It is pleasing that the title overtly associates immigration with national identity and nationalism.

The agitated politics of 2016 have led intellectuals the world over to ponder the " end of the Anglo-American order, " the " bankruptcy of the postwar world order, " and the death of " liberalism. " That this death has been diagnosed before—for instance by the late Chris Bayly in the conclusion of his magisterial study of the globalizing nineteenth century—makes today's echoes of the past all the more eerie. But the precedent may also make historians chary of issuing premature death certificates. Urban history and global history can be combined fruitfully in thinking about past and current trends in democracy and populism.

Anxieties over the possible political fallouts of African and Asian migration to Europe have a much longer history than the current refugee crisis might have you suspect. Colonial migration to interwar Paris, as I argue in Anti-Imperial Metropolis, turned into an important engine for the spread of nationalism across the French Empire. Studying the everyday lives of these migrants, in turn, might also offer a way out of the impasse that global historians currently face.

The first part of an initially planned chapter of my forthcoming monograph, "Anti-Imperial Metropolis", the paper deals with the making of Chinese and Vietnamese anti-imperialists in interwar Paris. It pays particular attention to their interaction and examines how exchange between the two groups fomented the rise of a shared pan-Asianism.

This paper explores the political outgrowths of Vietnamese migration to interwar Paris. In contrast to the existing scholarship on Paris’ role as an incubator of nationalism and anti-imperialism at the global “periphery,” it treats Vietnamese students and workers in Paris foremost as migrants, applying a social-history lens. The paper thus argues that anti-imperialism in Vietnam and elsewhere in the French Empire had much to do with migration, which brought certain features of the imperial order into sharper relief, making Hồ and other Asian anticolonialists resemble “ethnopolitical entrepreneurs,” as Rogers Brubaker has called the spokespersons of migrant communities. Moreover, the paper examines the interaction between Vietnamese and other non-European migrants in Paris, showing how organizational expertise and political ideas crossed ethnic boundaries in a process that in miniature resembled post-WWII decolonization. The paper thereby reveals how interaction and contact between the metropole and non-European actors, as well as between the latter, played into the emergence of nationalisms at the “periphery,” which due to Paris’ role as a hub of intellectual exchange had global repercussions.

Latin America sits uncomfortably with the history of other world regions seen as belonging to the “Third World” or the “Global South,” having for the most part achieved formal national sovereignty by the early nineteenth century. And yet, an understanding that Latin America was, like large parts of Africa and Asia, a victim of empire and imperialism underpinned the self-perception of the region’s intellectual elites as much as a nascent understanding of a shared “Third World” status during the twentieth century. This course explores both manifestations of empire, in an economic and in a cultural sense, and anti-imperialist responses in Latin America, focusing on the period from roughly 1870 to 1980.

This seminar provides an overview over various theories of nationalism and seeks to test their applicability through case studies since the early nineteenth century from Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Its aim is therefore to gauge the potential and the limits of what so far has been a distinctly Eurocentric brand of theorizing. A first part of the seminar familiarizes students with the most common theoretical approaches to the study of nationalism from an interdisciplinary perspective, framed around the well-known debate between modernists such as Ernest Gellner and primordialists such as Anthony Smith. A second part deals with a series of case studies, which aim at allowing for teasing out intercontinental comparisons as well as ideological transfers in the history of the spread of nationalism since 1800. The ultimate aim is to provide students with a firmer grasp of how manifold forms of nationalism have profoundly shaped our contemporary world.

Obgleich Lateinamerika im globalen Vergleich – insbesondere in der Kolonialzeit – stets eine stark urbanisierte Weltregion war und seit den 1950er Jahren mehrere megacities aufwies, behandelte die lateinamerikanische Geschichte ihre Städte lange Zeit stiefkindlich. Dieses Seminar beschäftigt sich einerseits mit der Bedeutung der Stadt für die lateinamerikanische Geschichte allgemein, inklusive mit Ideologien über die Rolle der Stadt seit der Kolonialzeit. Andererseits befasst es sich mit konkreten historischen Entwicklungen im urbanen Raum anhand einiger Beispiele, vor allem ab der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts.

Long before Kenneth Pomeranz famously diagnosed a “Great Divergence” in the economic development of coastal China and Northwestern Europe beginning around 1800, economic historians debated the dissimilar economic performances of North and Latin America. Here, too, the accumulation of wealth in the United States and the descent into poverty of many Latin American countries was by no means foreordained – Latin America had in fact boasted some of the world’s richest cities in the seventeenth century. Building on recent approaches in global economic history, such as Pomeranz’s, this seminar thus takes up an older debate to enquire into the reasons for the disparate economic histories of North and Latin America. After a short survey of the possible weight of colonial institutions in this development, the seminar will concentrate mostly on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, blending a series of theoretical approaches, large-scale comparisons, and specific case studies, and examining the role of economic and political institutions, natural resources, culture, and religion.

This seminar provides an overview over various theories of nationalism and seeks to test their applicability through case studies since the early nineteenth century from Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Its aim is therefore to gauge the potential and the limits of what so far has been a distinctly Eurocentric brand of theorizing. A first part of the seminar familiarizes students with the most common theoretical approaches to the study of nationalism from an interdisciplinary perspective, framed around the well-known debate between modernists such as Ernest Gellner and primordialists such as Anthony Smith. A second part deals with a series of case studies, which aim at allowing for teasing out intercontinental comparisons as well as ideological transfers in the history of the spread of nationalism since 1800. The ultimate aim is to provide students with a firmer grasp of how manifold forms of nationalism have profoundly shaped our contemporary world.

This seminar provides an overview over the major scholarly trends in the burgeoning field of migration history since the emergence of the Chicago School of Sociology in the 1920s. It then proceeds to test different theoretical and methodological approaches on the basis of comparative case studies, focusing on long-distance migration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly in the Atlantic world and, to a lesser, extent, in Asia. Students will thus learn about the history of some of the best-known countries of mass immigration, such as the United States and Argentina, but also familiarize themselves with examples of other types of migration in other world regions, such as indentured laborers in South(east) Asia and the Caribbean. The ultimate aim is twofold: First, debate the extent to which migration in the period that we study should be analyzed as a single phenomenon at all; second, learn about the reasons for and the long-term consequences of migration for our contemporary world.

Economic and financial crises have plagued few world regions as much as Latin America. This seminar seeks to trace some of the historical reasons for Latin America’s proneness to recurring crises. The seminar’s first part offers a theoretical approach to the economic history of Latin America. It raises the question, for instance, of whether and how specific institutions derived from colonial times shaped the region’s economic history. We will also address the role that ideas played in the formulation of economic policies. The second (and larger) part of the seminar deals with a series of historical case studies of economic and financial crises and phenomena, ranging from colonial times through to the present.

Evoking the painful failure of overcoming the fallout of centuries of slavery in the United States and conjuring up the specter of state-enforced apartheid in South Africa, “segregation” nowadays appears to be almost ubiquitously condemned, but at the same time seemingly impossible to eradicate. Looking at (primarily urban, spatial, ethnic) segregation from a global angle, this seminar will reveal that the phenomenon has indeed plagued a great many societies since 1500, albeit in varying degrees and changing forms. Starting from recent arguments by historians (esp. Nightingale 2012) that segregation was primarily the result of state action, this seminar looks beyond the classic cases of the U.S. and South Africa in order to ask to what extent we should understand segregation as a side effect of the history of increasing global connectedness. Moving from rarely studied examples, such as 17th-century Ayutthaya, to better-known cases of late 19th-century Atlantic immigration cities, such as Buenos Aires, the seminar thus seeks to tease out the reasons and consequences of urban ethnic unmixing through wide-ranging comparisons.

This course offers an introduction to history as an academic discipline. It is especially geared towards students of the MA in Global History who come from a background in area studies or hold a first degree from any field other than history. The course provides the basic tools for non-historians to understand the state of the field before the recent surge in “global history.” Most of the course will be structured chronologically, providing a survey of the history of historiography that focuses chiefly on the twentieth century. We will grant particular attention to the rise of social history in the 1960s and the subsequent “cultural turn,” which both swept through much of Europe and the U.S. At the same time, the course familiarizes students with some of history’s cornerstone heuristic instruments. We will thus deal with the distinction between primary and secondary sources, the framing of history-specific research questions, and the writing of papers in history.

This seminar offers a cursory overview of recent approaches to global history. By discussing writings and research widely drawn upon by global historians, the seminar provides students with a toolkit for understanding better the last decades' turn away from nation-centered ways of seeing history, which have given way to histories focusing on the movements of people, goods, and ideas across boundaries and on how these movements have been determinants of historical change. The seminar situates global history within related fields, such as transnational history or imperial history. It is also designed to guide students in the exploration of their particular research interests to be followed during the second year of this MA.

The Department of History at the Freie Universität Berlin invites applications for two positions (50%) for Doctoral Students / Research and Teaching Associates (Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiter) in Global and in Latin American History, commencing September 1, 2015. These are half-time (50% of pay grade 13 TV-L FU), non-tenure track appointments for three years, with a teaching commitment of one course per semester and the goal of writing a Ph.D. dissertation. Ideally, one appointee specializes in Latin American history, the other one in any field related to global history.

Applicants must have an M.A. in History or in a closely related field. They should have an interest in and knowledge of recent approaches to global and social history, which they will apply to their future doctoral theses. They should also be willing to contribute to the institute’s existing fields of research, in particular relating to the global history of cities since 1800. Basic knowledge of German and other languages as well as an interest in the Digital Humanities – and more particularly in Historical GIS – can be additional advantages.

For further queries please contact Michael Goebel (mgoebel@zedat.fu-berlin.de). The deadline for applications is July 17, 2015. Please submit a cover letter, a curriculum vitae, a certificate of your M.A. or equivalent, and a one-page abstract each of your M.A. thesis and your planned Ph.D. by email to:

Contact:
Dr. Michael Goebel
Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut, Koserstraße 20, 14195 Berlin
E-Mail: mgoebel@zedat.fu-berlin.de
URL: http://ow.ly/MPINU