In the debate about colonial collections in ethnological and other museums, little attention has been paid to things acquired by European missionaries during conversion practices. These things do not fit into the current discussions of looted art and are barely subject to demands for repatriation.
Author Archive for editorial board
TraFo
The Allure of Airport Rhythms
by editorial board •
By Juan Miguel Leandro L. Quizon. Travel entails expectations, musings, and meanderings. The moment travelers make final confirmations of flight bookings, their minds begin to explore the countless possibilities of their new journey. However, this year reminded us how a pandemic can seize travel instantaneously.
TraFo
The Politics of the Female Body in Contemporary Turkey: Reproduction, Maternity and Sexuality
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By Ayşe Dayı and Hilal Alkan. The edited volume The Politics of the Female Body in Contemporary Turkey: Reproduction, Maternity and Sexuality illustrates and examines the various ways in which neoliberal modes of governing women’s bodies come together with religious, conservative, and authoritarian measures in contemporary Turkey.
TraFo
Islam and Heritage in Europe: Pasts, Presents and Future Possibilities
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By Katarzyna Puzon. This year marks the twentieth anniversary of 9/11 – an event that triggered a significant and sustained rise in prejudice, discrimination, and hate crimes against Muslims, which has increased steadily since then. The tragic developments that followed, especially the invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and of Iraq in 2003, still reverberate across Europe, not least in the recent ‘refugee crises’.
TraFo
The African Refugee Equilibrium
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By George Njung. Africans‘ lack of knowledge about our own shared refugee experiences continues to fuel hate and discrimination on the continent. For far too long, the global refugee situation has been misconstrued as static, with certain parts of the globe generating disproportionate numbers of refugees and others perpetually faced with the burden of hosting displaced peoples.
TraFo
Of Death and Dominion – Interview with Mohammed Bamyeh
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Mohammed Bamyeh’s 2007 book, Of Death and Dominion, was translated into German in 2020 and released by Turia + Kant. We spoke with the author about his research process, how death played out within historical power structures, and the role of mortality in contemporary society.
TraFo
Primordial History, Print Capitalism, and Egyptology in Nineteenth-Century Cairo
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By Adam Mestyan. Some years ago I came across a fragmented, nineteenth-century Arabic manuscript in Cairo. The work, The Garden of Ismail’s Praise, caught my eye as one of a number of compositions written in praise of Ismail Pasha (r. 1863–1879), the “khedive”, or Ottoman governor, of Egypt.
TraFo
From War-Torn Europe to Colonial Africa
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By Alfred Tembo and Jochen Lingelbach. While World War II was ravaging Europe, thousands of Polish people found a safe haven in British colonial Africa. This forgotten history shows us that migration patterns are constantly changing.
TraFo
The Strange Case of Portugal’s Returnees
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By Christoph Kalter. The year is 1975, and the footage comes from the Portuguese Red Cross. Who, or maybe what, are these people? Returnees or retornados is the term commonly assigned to more than half-a-million people, the vast majority of them white settlers from Angola and Mozambique, most of whom arrived in Lisbon in 1975.
TraFo
A Small Rift in the United States Regarding Palestine: A Shift in Rhetoric, But What About Foreign Policy?
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By Jeffrey G. Karam. For decades, the United States’ steadfast support for Israel has been one of the pillars of its foreign policy in the Middle East. This has allowed successive Israeli governments to act with impunity and evade accountability for crimes against Palestinians.
TraFo
Refugees and Religion
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By Birgit Meyer. The volume Refugees and Religion: Ethnographic Studies of Global Trajectories, co-edited by Birgit Meyer and Peter van der Veer, disputes a hard and fast distinction between migrants and refugees by showing how shifting legal arrangements as well as people’s varying statuses make the concept of ‘refugee’ dynamic.
TraFo
Essentialism and the Making of African Refugees
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By Rose Jaji. African “refugeeness” in the media, policy, and academia is an essentialist physical image conflating material deprivation and multiple victimhoods. Historically, African refugees were capable of political participation even to the point of building vibrant states in the new lands they fled to in precolonial Africa.
TraFo
Mozambique’s borders
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By Adérito Júlio Machava. During the period prior to the setting up of the Portuguese colonial administration in southeast Africa, there were important waves of forced migrations caused by, firstly, the Mfecane, and secondly the defeat of King Ngungunhane in 1895, and the subsequent overthrow of the Gaza Empire.
TraFo
Café Saqafat – Sufi Music Heritage in the Times of the Coronavirus Pandemic
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By Rafique Wassan. Initiated in the wake of the Coronavirus pandemic, Café Saqafat is a new online social media broadcasting cultural work – mediated through FaceBook live streaming and later on a recorded version uploaded on YouTube.
TraFo
Congo’s White ‘Refugees’
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By Lazlo Passemiers. Not all people seeking refuge in Africa have been black. One group of white refuge-seekers in Africa consisted of whites who fled from their African countries of residence after the fall of colonial and white minority rule.
TraFo
Book Review: Between East and South
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By Katharina Kreuder-Sonnen. Research on the global history of Cold War Eastern Europe is flourishing. This edited volume stems from two home-bases of the endeavour, Exeter and Leipzig, where most of the editors as well as the series Dialectics of the Global were or are based.
TraFo
Who compares? The commodification and decolonization of comparison
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By James D. Sidaway and Franz Waldenberger | The German gate of the fortress in the city of Landau, the hometown of one of the authors of this blog entry, shows the head of Louis XIV of France depicted as the sun with the Latin inscription “nec pluribus impar”.
TraFo
From the Niger to the Nile
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By Madina Thiam. On February 17, 1907, a brief note went out of the Dakar office of the Governor-General of French West Africa, addressed to subordinates. The governor had learned through French newspapers that: „According to a report on Northern Nigeria … thousands of Fulanis from the Middle Niger might be migrating from the French territory and heading towards the Nile valley.“
TraFo
Passing as a Refugee
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By Keren Weitzberg. Mahad was born in Kenya – a fact that neither his passport, nor carefully scripted biography suggests. For decades, Kenyan Somalis (citizens of Kenya who also identify as Somali) have faced discrimination in accessing legal documents, including national identity cards, passports, and birth certificates.
TraFo
Social Distancing: an Ancient Hindu Public Health Measure?
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By William S. Sax. Following the rapid spread of social distancing to slow the spread of the Corona virus, Hindu nationalists developed the thesis that the rest of the world was merely adopting practices developed thousands of years ago by “Hindu civilization.”
TraFo
Africa’s forgotten Refugee Convention
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By Marcia C. Schenck. In 1969, the OAU proposed its own refugee convention to reflect African values. Why did it not become policy across the continent?
TraFo
Histories of Refuge – An Introduction
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By Marcia C. Schenck. Are you interested in the history of refuge seeking in Africa? Please check out the recent blog series on Histories of Refuge. This series looks at how people have migrated, sought refuge, and settled, in and out of Africa. It also examines issues such as who gets to be called a refugee, and why?
TraFo
Jesuit legacy in Beijing: Sacred Buildings and Transcultural Spaces
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By Lianming Wang. Following the “global turn” in the 1990s, and particularly stimulated by Gauvin Alexander Bailey’s path-breaking Art on the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America, 1542–1773, the study of Jesuit art and architecture has grown into a remarkably dynamic field that provides marvellous insights for reading art history through a cross-cultural and transregional lens.
TraFo
Imagining Southern Spaces: Hemispheric and Transatlantic Souths in Antebellum US Writings
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By Deniz Bozkurt-Pekár. Let me set the scene: A rich meadow expanding by the bountiful river, a gentleman leaning on the white column of the porch of a haint-blue mansion, a pale-white lady in flamboyant attire sitting on a rocking-chair behind him, away from them yet within their eyesight are the cotton, corn, or tobacco fields hiding behind their crop the tired bodies of black men, women, and children.
TraFo
The National Frame: Art and State Violence in Turkey and Germany
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By Banu Karaca. The National Frame emerged out of my long-term interest in art, aesthetics and politics. I have always been fascinated by the dominant notion that art is inherently good, by the many values that are accorded to art – be it that art furthers individual agency and critical faculties, the emancipatory potential of art, or its civilizing impact – and the realities that shape the daily workings of the art world.
TraFo
The Long-lived “July Republic” and the Abolition of the Egyptian University’s Autonomy
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On September 28, 2020, a half-century had passed since the death of President Gamal Abdel Nasser. The legacy of the “July 1952 Republic”, whose legal and political pillars he built between 1952 and 1954 and that he ruled until his death in 1970, is still omnipresent in today’s Egypt.
TraFo
L’historiographie africaine et les défis de la périodisation européenne : un commentaire historique
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Un texte de Ihediwa Nkemjika Chimee. L’historiographie africaine suit des divisions, schémas et séquences imposés par les européens. Ceux-ci ont affirmé dans le passé que l’histoire africaine n’existait pas et que l’histoire de l’Afrique débute avec l’histoire des européens en Afrique.
TraFo
Notes from the Underground: Academic Freedom, (Un)Civil Society, and “Kulturkampf” in Hungary
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By Balázs Trencsényi. The attacks on the autonomy of universities and the attempts to curb the independence of research institutes, especially in the humanities and social sciences, have been central features of authoritarian political projects.
TraFo
Russia’s 1990s: Global Perspectives – An Interview with Andreas Hilger
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This article is part of the TRAFO series “Emerging Topics. Insights from ‘Behind the Scenes’”. Today, we put the spotlight on the workshop “Russia’s 1990s: Global Perspectives” which will take…
TraFo
Keeping the Distance: why Europeans Find it so Difficult to Learn from East Asia
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By Marina Rudyak, Maximilian Mayer and Marius Meinhof. “We need not be at this point.” Such was the verdict of virologist Isabella Eckerle commenting on the second lockdown in the German talk show “Hart aber fair (Tough but Fair).”
TraFo
Academic Presses in Czechoslovakia and Hungary under Communist Regimes
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Part of the TRAFO series “Academic Freedom” By Libora Oates-Indruchová Communist regimes recognized the political importance, and therefore danger, of the social sciences and the humanities. That is why they…
TraFo
Refugees in African History
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An interview with Marcia Schenck, Professor of Global History at the University of Potsdam, on her newly founded H-Net cross-network project “Refugees in African History”: „Historicizing the refugee experience is crucial to understanding that refugees are not exceptions but integral to the rise of nation-states.“
TraFo
Palsy-Walsy and Extremely Surly Social Distancing
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By Prem Poddar. As the uncertainty of the interregnum stretches and seems as pliable as a virus-stained concertina, I cannot go anytime soon to my cottage in the multikulti hills of the Himalayas on the Indian side. It is a fortune shared by a considerable number of folks stuck elsewhere and everywhere on this beleaguered planet.
TraFo
The Sociality of Theory
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By Francesco Anselmetti. A Flood in Baʿath Country, the 2003 documentary by Syrian filmmaker Omar Amiralay, opens with a stark confession on the director’s behalf. His career had begun in the early 1970s with a panegyric to the Baʿathist project of modernisation glorifying the construction of the Tabqa Dam on the Euphrates, near the northern Syrian city of Raqqa.
TraFo
When Neighbors Expect the EU to Help Them Transform: Survey Data From Protesting Belarus
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By Stas Gorelik. When mass demonstrations erupted in Belarus in August 2020, Russia supported President Alyaksandr Lukashenka with a loan of around 1.5 billion dollars. Yet, the question of how international players can influence protest mobilization has not been researched in earnest.
TraFo
What Kind of Academic Freedom and for Whom? Karl Jaspers’ Idea of the University
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By Sandra Richter. The history of the university and the history of academic freedom are intertwined but not identical. In certain historical situations they have even differed radically – whether it be for political, economic, or administrative reasons, or because of personal failure.
TraFo
How does populism reshape pluralism and marginality in liberal democracies? – 5in10 with Felipe Hernández
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What was intriguing to you when you were a child? What is it that you always wanted to know about the world? I grew up surrounded by an ethnic, linguistic…
TraFo
“Violence, Be It Visible or Invisible, Shapes All of Our Lives” – 5in10 with Sarah El Bulbeisi
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Sarah El Bulbeisi joined the Orient-Institut Beirut in November 2019 after completing her PhD at the Institute for Near and Middle East Studies at the LMU Munich, Germany. Prior to…
TraFo
The Suppression and Misuses of Academic Freedom During the Nazi Regime
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By Mitchell G. Ash. The freedom of science (Wissenschaftsfreiheit), or academic freedom, as it is called in English, has been addressed historically from multiple perspectives. In these remarks, I will focus on science and scholarship in one particularly infamous dictatorial regime.
TraFo
Urban Neighbourhood Formations: Boundaries, Narrations and Intimacies
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By Hilal Alkan and Nazan Maksudyan. Our edited book explores the themes of ‘neighbours’ and ‘neighbourhoods’ as points of departure for considering identity, coexistence, solidarity and violence, and their relationship to place.