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.
Author Archive for editorial board
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.
TraFo
Academic Freedom is the Freedom to Know
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By Pascal Engel. We observe violations of academic freedom all the time. Speakers are “deplatformed” because of their political views, professors become the victims of campaigns in the media and social networks.
TraFo
On Twisted Logics and the Pandemic
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By Maria José de Abreu. The coronavirus pandemic has brought to the fore the powers of numbers. As a vast stream of graphics, numbers and curves in yielding the global spreading of the virus makes apparent, numbers appear to count for how we are breathing in the world.
TraFo
On Cultural Omnivorousness: Reinvention of Anatolian Pop as Turkish Psychedelic
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By Yaprak Melike Uyar. Due to globally unified measures for controlling the Covid-19 pandemic, it has been almost one year since musicians have not met their audiences.
TraFo
Threats to Academic Freedom – Historical and Contemporary Remarks
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An introduction by Gisèle Sapiro, Amr Hamzawy, and Başak Tuğ. Academic freedom is under threat today in many places of the world and it is urgent to create spaces of collective reflection on a principle that is fundamental to all intellectual practice.
TraFo
Book Review: Exile and the Nation – The Parsi Community of India and the Making of Modern Iran
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By Katja Rieck. In his most recent monograph, Exile and the Nation – The Parsi Community of India and the Making of Modern Iran (2020), Afshin Marashi provides a new perspective on Iranian nationalism.
TraFo
The West and the Word: Imagining, Formatting, and Ordering the American West in Nineteenth-Century Cultural Discourse
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by Steffen Wöll. Academic studies about the western American peripheries date back to as early as 1893. In this year, a young professor from Wisconsin named Frederick Jackson Turner presented a conference paper to crowds at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition.
TraFo
Rezension: Philipp Ammon, Georgien zwischen Eigenstaatlichkeit und russischer Okkupation
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Von Hans-Christian Günther. Philipp Ammon stellt sich in seinem Buch ,Georgien zwischen Eigenstaatlichkeit und russischer Okkupation‘ die Aufgabe, einen hochaktuellen geopolitischen Konflikt in seinen historischen Kontext zu stellen.
TraFo
“There Are a Lot of Parallels Between the Production of Knowledge and the Production of Cultural Memories” – 5in10 with Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska
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Born in 1980, Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska studied cultural studies and sociology at the Universities in Lodz, Giessen and Mainz. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Lodz in 2008 and…
TraFo
The Historical Junkyards of Cairo
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By Shehab Ismail. The city of Cairo was surrounded by human-made mounds composed of rubbish and debris that had been piling up on the same spots for centuries. This blog post narrates how the author encountered the rubbish mounds during his research on the history of sanitation in Cairo. It explores two materials that were commonly found in the city’s dumpsters: archeological finds and organic fertilizers.
TraFo
Book Review: Global Publics: Their Power and Their Limits, 1870-1990
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By Christoph Streb In light of recent phenomena of global communication like #MeToo, Fridays for Future, and the proliferating conspiracy theories about the Coronavirus pandemic, this book on the history…
TraFo
The League Against Imperialism: Lives and Afterlives
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Founded in Brussels in 1927, the League Against Imperialism attracted anticolonial activists like Nehru, Sukarno, and Kenyatta, as well as figures like Einstein and Madame Sun Yat-Sen. Its immediate goals were to develop solidarity between communists, socialists, and anti-colonial nationalists worldwide.
TraFo
On Dersim and the Banality of Evil: The Diary of Yusuf Kenan Akım
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By Zeynep Türkyilmaz. Entering my usual keywords randomly to see what is out there in my areas of interest, I came across a diary of a Turkish soldier kept during the year 1938.
TraFo
“The Ideological Deportation of Foreigners and ‘Local Subjects of Foreign Extraction’ in Interwar Egypt” – Interview with Rim Naguib
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Rim Naguib’s article, “The Ideological Deportation of Foreigners and ‘Local Subjects of Foreign Extraction’ in Interwar Egypt”, was published by the Arab Studies Journal this fall. In this interview, Rim discusses her research interests, her recent article, and the complex relationships between colonial legacies and processes of national independence in (interwar) Egypt.
TraFo
Nation-building as Entangled History: Turkey and the League of Nations
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Carolin Liebisch-Gümüş, Research Fellow at the GHI Washington, published her first monograph titled „Verflochtene Nationsbildung. Die Neue Türkei und der Völkerbund 1918–38“ this summer. Here, she gives us some insights into her recent publication.
TraFo
Modernization Dreams, Lusotropical Promises: A Global Studies Perspective on Brazil-Mozambique Development Discourse
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By Ana Beatriz Ribeiro. Across disciplines, scholars writing on Brazil used to take for granted the state actor’s image as a particularly open-minded “emerging power.”
TraFo
“In the face of a systematic erosion of memory, I was intrigued by the preservation of what was gone” – 5in10 with Sana Tannoury-Karam
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Sana Tannoury-Karam is a historian of the modern Middle East, writing on the intellectual history of the Left in the Levant. She is a EUME fellow 2020-2021 at the Forum Transregionale Studien.
TraFo
Three Questions That Make One
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By Bashir Bashir and Leila Farsakh. Over the past two decades, Middle Eastern and European politics have been impacted by three critical developments that call into question dominant understandings of nationalism, citizenship, and decolonization. The aggressive and ongoing colonization of Palestine created irreversible realities that cast serious doubts on the feasibility of partition and the “two-state solution.”
TraFo
“Research in local archives and the exchange with colleagues led to a shift of my research focus” – 5in10 with Mario Peters
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Mario Peters is a Research Fellow in American and Transatlantic History at the GHI Washington. His current research interests are spread across the intersection of mobility studies, environmental history, and the study of Inter-American relations. In his new project, he examines the development of Pan-American transportation infrastructures between 1870 and 1970, focusing on the cooperation and exchange of knowledge between North American and Latin American experts who contributed to the planning and construction of these infrastructures.
TraFo
“So, surely with hardship comes ease” (Quran 94:5): Seeking acceptance and the quest for unity during the Corona pandemic
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By Yanti Hölzchen and Gulniza Taalaibekova. When the Corona pandemic gained momentum in early 2020, Kyrgyzstan was among the first countries worldwide to shut down international air traffic, to close their borders for foreign nationals, and to go into a governmentally initiated state of emergency.
TraFo
Taboo, Trauma and Identity: Subject Constructions of Palestinians in Germany and in Switzerland, 1960 to 2015
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By Sarah El Bulbeisi. Since 1947, more than 700,000 Palestinians have been displaced from their homes in what is now Israel, and have become refugees. As a traumatic experience, the Nakba has become a crucial part of the collective memory and the identities of the Palestinians.
TraFo
“As a Historian, the Archive Remains the Foundation of My Practice” – 5in10 with Pascale Siegrist
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Pascale Siegrist joined the GHI London in October 2020. She is an intellectual historian interested in the margins of the canon; her first book project deals with the ‘global’ thought of fin-de-siècle anarchists. At the GHI London she is developing a new project on the worlds of invented languages.
TraFo
Migrant Dreams: Egyptian Workers in the Gulf States
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Interview with Samuli Schielke. Samuli Schielke’s latest book, Migrant Dreams: Egyptian Workers in the Gulf States (AUC Press, 2020), is a vivid ethnography of Egyptian migrants to the Arab Gulf states. It investigates the imagination that migration thrives on, and the hopes and ambitions generated by the repeated experience of leaving and returning home.
TraFo
Exiled Among Nations: German and Mennonite Mythologies in a Transnational Age – Interview with John P.R. Eicher
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Earlier this year, the monograph “Exiled Among Nations: German and Mennonite Mythologies in a Transnational Age” by John P.R. Eicher was published by Cambridge University Press, in the Publications of the German Historical Institute Series. We talked with the author about the origins of his book, the role of institutions for diasporic groups and links between his research and today’s world.
TraFo
Book Review: A. Getachew: Worldmaking after Empire
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By Christopher J. Lee. Worldmaking after Empire is a study of political thought and institution building during the twentieth century, with a specific focus on black Anglophone leaders and intellectuals such as W. E. B. Du Bois, George Padmore, Kwame Nkrumah, Michael Manley, and Julius Nyerere. The central argument of the book is that the anticolonialism they promoted was not solely concerned with national self-determination and the establishment of nation-states.