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This edited volume firmly places African history into global history by highlighting connections between African and East German actors and institutions during the Cold War. With a special focus on negotiations and African influences on East Germany (and vice versa), the volume sheds light on personal and institutional agency, cultural cross-fertilization, migration, development, and solidarity.
For far too long, views of Eastern Europe as a negligible and peripheral region have shaped popular perceptions of this part of the world. Presenting new research, Globalizing Eastern Europe: Politics, Culture and Economics from the 18th to the 21st Century offers refreshing arguments to counter such misconceptions. Global politics and international law have been profoundly shaped by the experiences and expertise that emanated from this region. Migration to and from Eastern Europe, has fostered deep ties with neighbouring and distant societies, as have this area's literature and music. The importance of its agricultural development has reverberated in the global economy. This volume recasts Eastern Europe as a global region. It shows how people from this part of the world shaped the 'global', and how in turn, the 'global' shaped them. Authors from a range of disciplines, chart century-long traditions of entanglements and contemporary interactions. In doing so, this book further enriches the perennial debates regarding this region's spatial boundaries.
Pan-Africanism has been a global project aiming to unite people of African descent since the late nineteenth century. Notions of Black and African arts and aesthetics have functioned as a bridge and brought positive identification across national, ethnic, or class divides even when rifts have appeared unbridgeable. They were able to mediate Africanity positively, both prior to and during the struggle for liberation and at times when the dream of a unified African nation died. This study explores central aspects, proponents, and opponents of Pan-African aesthetics and shows that conceptualizations of Black, African, and Afrocentric aesthetics form a kaleidoscope that is constantly changing. B...
In the global context of the Cold War, the relationship between liberation movements and Eastern European states obviously changed and transformed. Similarly, forms of (material) aid and (ideological) encouragement underwent changes over time. The articles assembled in this volume argue that the traditional Cold War geography of bi-polar competition with the United States is not sufficient to fully grasp these transformations. The question of which side of the ideological divide was more successful (or lucky) in impacting actors and societies in the global south is still relevant, yet the Cold War perspective falls short in unfolding the complex geographies of connections and the multipolari...
In the long and protracted process of decolonization in sub-Saharan Africa (1957–1994), three key moments in the transitions from colonial/white-ruled states to independent majority-ruled states can be identified: 1957–1965, 1974–1980, and 1988–1994. These transitional phases of decolonization in sub-Saharan Africa – the beginnings of the process, a crucial turning-point in that process, and its endings – are worthy of reappraisal and invite comparisons of various kinds. The existing literature does not consider the roles of communist actors in these transitions from a comparative perspective. This is the main focus of this volume, which will be an essential work for scholars of African decolonization and will interest anyone concerned with the history of communism and the external activities of the countries of the Soviet bloc and other communist actors.
It is now widely recognised that a Cold War perspective falls short in unfolding the complex geographies of connections and the multipolarity of actions and transactions that were shaped through the movement of individuals and ideas from Africa to the "East" and from the "East" to Africa in the decades in which African countries moved to independence. Adopting an interdisciplinary, transregional perspective, this volume casts new light on aspects of the role of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the decolonisation of Africa. Taking further themes explored in a collection of essays published by the editors in 2019, the twelve case studies by authors from South Africa, Czech Republic, Port...
This book shows the many facets of African engagements with the world. It starts from the premise that current global asymmetries ascribing Africa to a marginalized position are the effects of colonial and imperial pasts still lingering on. The decolonization process of the post-war structure which privileges the West in both political and economic terms. While new dependencies emerged, several old bonds were maintained and continue to influence African affairs quite strikingly. It is appropriate, then, to call these continued unequal relations between Africa and the West frankly 'neo-colonial'. This designation applies all the more as the post-colonial states of Africa inherited a complex l...