Vol. 24, October 2020.
Have you published something new in Global Urban History?
We'd like our members to know. Contact Ayan Meer with details.
GUHP is now a member-supported organization. To join or renew your membership, visit our Homepage. | | Subversive Seas. Anticolonial Networks Across the Twentieth Century Dutch Empire
by Kris Alexanderson, University of the Pacific, USA
(Cambridge University Press, 2019)
This revealing portrait of the Dutch Empire repositions our understanding of modern empires from the terrestrial to the oceanic. It highlights the importance of shipping, port cities, and maritime culture to the political struggles of the 1920s and 30s. Port cities such as Jeddah, Shanghai, and Batavia were hotbeds for the spread of nationalism, communism, pan-Islamism, and pan-Asianism, and became important centers of opposition to Dutch imperialism through the circulation of passengers, laborers, and religious pilgrims. This innovative study exposes how anti-colonialism was shaped not only within the terrestrial confines of metropole and colony, but across the transoceanic spaces in between. [more] | | | | Securing Lviv's "Polish Character". Local Politics in a Multiethnic City of the Habsburg Monarchy.
by Heidi Hein-Kircher, Herder Institute, Germany.
(Franz Steiner Verlag, 2020, published in German)
The nationalization and modernization policy of the multiethnic Galician capital Lviv led to an escalation of the nationality conflict between Poles and Ruthenians before 1914. Here, the local political actors constructed the "Polish character" of the city in a discursive manner in order to implement their political agenda and to marginalize the Jewish and Ukrainian population. By analyzing central topics of urban development, cultural, educational and historical policy, the author makes the fundamental discourses and practices, strategies and visions of Lviv local politics visible. [more] | | | | "Revisiting the transnational building of a modern planning regime in Iran"
by Elmira Jafari & Carola Hein
Planning Perspectives, July 2020
In the late 1960s, the first Tehran Master Plan (TMP) was envisioned by a constellation of local and foreign experts. The TMP, which has been extensively studied, is usually credited to big-name planner and architect Victor Gruen. Scholars have neglected the contributions of local professionals in shaping the plan. Many depict the TMP as the product of Cold War geopolitics and a scheme directly exported to Tehran to facilitate top-down modernization promoted by the pro-American Shah. This popular narrative flattens the complexity of transnational urbanism and obscures the transformative role performed by locals therein.
[Access the article here]
| | | "Paris, Capitale du Tiers Monde"
In this French documentary by Juliette Sénik based on Michael Goebel's book Anti-Imperialist Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism, we discover Paris as the home of many emigrants, some of them on the forefront of the struggle for emancipation from colonial empires. Three men in particular end up under surveillance by the CAI, a service collecting intelligence on the "indigènes." These are Messali Hadj, a worker who will go on to become the spokesman of Algerians in France and a key figure of Algerian nationalism, a young Hô Chi Minh, who takes part in the foundation of the French communist party before fleeing to Moscow, and finally Lamine Senghor, a Senegalese political leader, veteran "tirailleur" during the world war, and founding member in 1927 of the League Against Imperialism and Colonial Oppression.
| Related Networks and Events
| | eTropic Journal CfP: "Pandemic, Plague, Pestilence and the Tropics"
Deadline: December 1, 2020
The Tropics has long been associated with exotic diseases and epidemics. However, this characterization as a region of pandemic, plague and pestilence has been challenged during this global pandemic. The theme of this special issue opens to complex intertwinings involving nature and culture, humans and animals, colonialism and indigeneity, science and conspiracy, histories and futures, reality and fiction, myth and ritual. This special issue invites a wide range of scholary articles and creative works from researchers who live in, or engage with, the tropical and subtropical regions of the world. [more]
| | | | "The Global Plantation" Symposium
Online, October 15-17, 2020
This symposium brings together scholars and artists from around the world to interrogate representations of plantations across a range of geographic locales as well as disciplinary and aesthetic modes. As physical, economic and material interventions in a landscape, as sites of labor and production, the plantation also exists powerfully in people’s imaginations. As our title suggests, we are interested in the plantation’s iterations across temporal and spatial geographies, for we wonder if the transformations they wrought across the globe might also create possibilities to imagine the intimacies and particularities of time and space differently. We hope the symposium will be a time of engaged and collegial conversation, despite the virtual format. [more] | | | |