-1
archive,paged,tag,tag-globalization,tag-134,paged-3,tag-paged-3,qode-social-login-1.1.3,qode-restaurant-1.1.1,stockholm-core-2.3,select-child-theme-ver-1.1,select-theme-ver-8.9,ajax_fade,page_not_loaded,paspartu_enabled,menu-animation-underline,fs-menu-animation-underline,header_top_hide_on_mobile,,qode_grid_1300,qode_menu_center,qode-mobile-logo-set,wpb-js-composer js-comp-ver-6.6.0,vc_responsive

The Singer of Shanghai – a play about the Jewish diaspora (with introduction)

[Scroll down for the complete script and an audio recording of the play as performed by the playwrights.]

Introducing The Singer of Shanghai

 
kari-anne innes & kevin ostoyich

What is historical theatre?

At its heart, historical theatre allows students to create and perform works that convey historical meaning to an audience. The goal is to break the traditional boundaries of the teacher-student echo chamber and encourage students to communicate with the past and educate the public of the present and future directly. Historical theatre encourages students to employ empathy, artistry and intellect to connect with and convey the humanity of the past. Historical theatre helps students to see history not merely as an academic exercise, but a living relationship between past and present. Historical theatre is not a genre, but a pedagogy that merges two disciplines to create a distinct product — whether it be a script or the performance thereof — that can be experienced and/or performed by others in an ongoing conversation of educational discovery and human understanding.

The genesis of The Singer of Shanghai

The Singer of Shanghai is the third play to result from our historical theatre programme. The previous plays, Knocking on the Doors of History: The Shanghai Jews (2016) and Shanghai Carousel: What Tomorrow Will Be (2019), were both written and performed at Valparaiso University.[1] The Singer of Shanghai arose from a series of interviews Kevin Ostoyich conducted with Harry J. Abraham as well as field research Ostoyich conducted in Frickhofen and Altenkirchen, Germany.[2] Ostoyich supplied students with the interviews with Abraham as well as those of other former Shanghai refugees. The group also read various articles that Ostoyich had written about Shanghai Jewish refugees, most importantly his article about Harry J. Abraham, ‘From Kristallnacht and Back: Searching for Meaning in the History of the Shanghai Jews‘ and his article that incorporates Ida Abraham’s experiences, ‘Mothers: Remembering Three Women on the 80th Anniversary of Kristallnacht’.[3] Ostoyich challenged the students to use the oral testimony and other materials to write a play about a sewing machine that accompanied the Abraham family on their long journey from Germany to China and ultimately to the USA. The format, structure and themes of the play were to be determined collectively by the students and professors. Each member of the group was to contribute research and writing to a script that would narrate the history of the Abraham family and convey the meaning of the sewing machine.

A note on historical accuracy

The Singer of Shanghai closely follows the history of the Abraham family and much of the ‘interview’ dialogue in the play comes directly from conversations with Harry. Nevertheless, there are several places in the script where the playwrights incorporated elements from other oral testimonies of former Shanghai Jewish refugees (all of which based on Ostoyich’s interviews). Therefore, the play is best considered a historical composite. The use of old parachute fabric in making clothes in Shanghai comes from the testimony of Inga Berkey — a former Shanghai Jewish refugee who is also a friend of Harry’s. The description of children playing with marbles and cigarette packs comes from the testimonies of Helga Silberberg and Gary Sternberg. The playwrights drew inspiration from the interaction of refugee children with American GIs immediately after the Second World War from several oral testimonies (including Harry’s). They drew most heavily from the testimony of Bert Reiner for this scene. It was thus appropriate that Bert Reiner played the American GI in the radio-theatre version of the play. The lyrics of the song You Look Just Like a GI, My Friend, which is sung in the background and inspired dialogue, originate from the Shanghai Jewish refugee community. Ostoyich found the German lyrics in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, translated them and provided his translation along with translated songs from Shanghai for use in the play. The group incorporated the song into the play because the lyrics echo the common refrain in the oral testimonies about how much the refugees (especially the children) were fascinated by the sudden influx of so many American GIs into the city. Whereas the interviews with Harry provided text for much of the play’s interview dialogue, the playwrights wrote original dialogue for the flashback sequences. Such instances allowed them to work creatively within the boundaries of the historical space. In such instances, students explored the connection between themselves and the history to write dialogue appropriate to the historical context and that expresses their own observations and reflections. This framework of performing stories of the other to inspire dialogue between the subject (the actor) and the object of study (individual stories of humanity) is inspired by the performance theories of Dwight Conquergood. Conquergood drafted a ‘moral map’ to guide performers toward a balance of committing to the embodiment of the other while remaining detached enough to respect that it is not their story.[4] Thus, students identify with the subject’s circumstances, words and feelings while acknowledging differences, therefore enabling them to approach history empathetically yet objectively. Each student’s understanding and experience of history becomes as personalised as the stories themselves. The student’s experience of history is affected – moved in mind and feeling. In turn, through performance, the student affects the audience, deepening the shared experience of history, an experience that is at once based on historical accuracy yet particularised to each individual’s understanding and reflections.

A brief introduction to the history of the Shanghai Jews

Facing increasing discrimination from the Nazis, many Jews started to look for a refuge. In the wake of the pogrom that swept through Germany and Austria on the night of 9/10 November 1938 (known as the Reichsprogramnacht, Kristallnacht, or ‘Night of Broken Glass’), many Jews (such as Albrecht Abraham in Altenkirchen and Sigfrid Rosenthal in Frickhofen) were rounded up and sent to concentration camps. Often, it then fell to women (such as Ida Abraham) to try to extract their husbands, fathers, brothers and/or sons from the camps and lead their families to safety. Immediately after Kristallnacht, it was still possible to secure release if assurances of emigration were given immediately. Nevertheless, the Jews found that doors to the West were often closed due to a combination of quota policies, bureaucratic obstacles and outright anti-Semitism. One peculiar destination became attractive because no entry visa was required: Shanghai, China. The British pried Shanghai open to the West following the Opium Wars in the 19th century. The city was split into different sections administered by Western colonial powers. The International Settlement was governed by the Shanghai Municipal Council (predominantly under British and American control), and the French Concession was under French control. During the 1930s, the Japanese invaded China. In 1937, the Japanese established control in north-eastern Shanghai. Thus, as Jewish refugees fled to Shanghai, they entered a city that was partitioned into various sections subject to varied administrative regimes. In December 1941, concurrent to attacking Pearl Harbor, the Japanese forcibly subjugated the International Settlement and started to intern British and American citizens as enemy combatants. This left European refugees vulnerable. Many of the Sephardic Jews who had roots in the city since the 19th century and who had helped the refugees with housing, kitchens and so on could no longer assist them because the Sephardic Jews, themselves, either fled the city or were forced into internment camps due to their being British citizenship. In February 1943, the Japanese occupiers proclaimed that all stateless persons who had entered the city after 1 January 1937 had to move into a ‘Designated Area’ in the depressed Hongkew district by 18 May 1943. Approximately half of the 16,000 to 20,000 refugees already lived in the Designated Area; others had to move (losing many possessions in the process). The Designated Area has often been called the ‘Shanghai Ghetto’. This should not be confused with the ghettos of Europe during the Holocaust (such as those in Warsaw, Łódź, etc). Though allied to the Germans during the Second World War, it was not Japanese policy to kill Jews. This did not, however, mean the Designated Area was pleasant. Refugees tend to remember the time in the Designated Area until the end of the war as a time of hunger, poverty and disease. Their movement was severely restricted, and they needed to apply for passes to leave the Designated Area. The application process was often humiliating, and passes were never assured. Shortly after the Americans dropped atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, the Japanese left Shanghai. As the Japanese left, American soldiers entered, met with jubilation and relief on the part of the refugees. Nevertheless, such euphoria was soon tempered by the tragic news of what had happened to the Jews in Europe during the war. Lists of those murdered in what would become known as the Holocaust or Shoah started to be posted in Shanghai. The refugees then started to realise how important Shanghai had been in shielding them from the fate of friends and relatives who succumbed to the Nazis. The history of the Shanghai refugees was long barely known. The refugees went on with their lives, and most chose not to speak of their past. In his interviews, Ostoyich has often heard that no one seemed very interested in their story. Recently, scholars and documentary filmmakers have discovered the history of the Shanghai refugees. They have found that, despite tremendous obstacles, the refugees were able to build a surprisingly vibrant community with art, theatre cabaret, music, cinemas, schools, etc in their ‘harbor from the Holocaust.’[5] We hope this play not only helps to introduce the history of the Shanghai refugees to a wider public, but also honours the artistic expression of those refugees. Most importantly, the playwrights have taken their cue from Harry J. Abraham in centring the story on the pogrom of 9/10 November 1938. The importance of Shanghai can only be understood in the context of the pogrom and the collective silence and inaction of people and countries to respond to the discrimination and violence that was being unleashed on the Jews.   [1] For more a more detailed description of historical theatre, see Kari-Anne Innes, Kevin Ostoyich, and Rebecca Ostoyich, ‘Turning “Limitations” into Opportunities: Online and Unbound’, in Undergraduate Research in Online, Virtual, and Hybrid Courses: Proactive Practices for Distant Students, ed. Jennifer G. Coleman, Nancy H. Hensel, and Campbell, William E. (New York: Stylus Publishing, 2022); Kari-Anne Innes and Kevin Ostoyich, ‘Characterizing Interdisciplinarity in Historical Theatre: Exploring Character with the History Student’, Theatre/Practice: The Online Journal of the Practice/Production Symposium of the Mid America Theatre Conference 10 (2021). (Published online, 8 April 2021: http://www.theatrepractice.us/current.html). [2] Ostoyich learned a great deal from Hubert Hecker in Frickhofen and Werner Ziedler in Altenkirchen. [3] Kevin Ostoyich, ‘From Kristallnacht and Back: Searching for Meaning in the History of the Shanghai Jews’ (History Faculty Publication, Valparaiso, 2017); Kevin Ostoyich, ‘Mothers: Remembering Three Women on the 80th Anniversary of Kristallnacht’, American Institute for Contemporary German Studies of Johns Hopkins University, accessed 4 January 2023, https://www.aicgs.org/2018/11/mothers-remembering-three-women-on-the-80th-anniversary-of-kristallnacht/. [4] Dwight Conquergood, ‘Performing as a Moral Act: Ethical Dimensions of the Ethnography of Performance’, in Cultural Struggles: Performance, Ethnography, Praxis, ed. Patrick E. Johnson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 65–80. [5] Tang Yating, ‘Reconstructing the Vanished Musical Life of the Shanghai Diaspora: A Report’, Ethnomusicology Forum 13, no. 1 (2004): 101–18, https://doi.org/10.1080/1741191042000215291. We draw here from the PBS documentary titled Harbor from the Holocaust, Director: Violet Du Fang, Writer: Lynne Squilla, 2020.
bibliography
Conquergood, Dwight. ‘Performing as a Moral Act: Ethical Dimensions of the Ethnography of Performance’. In Cultural Struggles: Performance, Ethnography, Praxis, edited by Patrick E. Johnson, 65–80. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013. Innes, Kari-Anne, and Kevin Ostoyich. ‘Characterizing Interdisciplinarity in Historical Theatre: Exploring Character with the History Student’. Theatre/Practice: The Online Journal of the Practice/Production Symposium of the Mid America Theatre Conference 10 (2021). Innes, Kari-Anne, Kevin Ostoyich, and Rebecca Ostoyich. ‘Turning ‘Limitations’ into Opportunities: Online and Unbound’. In Undergraduate Research in Online, Virtual, and Hybrid Courses: Proactive Practices for Distant Students, edited by Jennifer G. Coleman, Nancy H. Hensel, and Campbell, William E. New York: Stylus Publishing, 2022. Ostoyich, Kevin. ‘From Kristallnacht and Back: Searching for Meaning in the History of the Shanghai Jews’. History Faculty Publication. Valparaiso, 2017. ———. ‘Mothers: Remembering Three Women on the 80th Anniversary of Kristallnacht’. American Institute for Contempoary German Studies of Johns Hopkins University. Accessed 4 January 2023. https://www.aicgs.org/2018/11/mothers-remembering-three-women-on-the-80th-anniversary-of-kristallnacht/. Yating, Tang. ‘Reconstructing the Vanished Musical Life of the Shanghai Diaspora: A Report’. Ethnomusicology Forum 13, no. 1 (2004): 101–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/1741191042000215291.

The Singer of Shanghai, as performed by the playwrights

The Singer of Shanghai (complete script)

Ida Abraham's Nazi-issued passport from 1939 (Photo by Rebecca Ostoyich and courtesy of Harry J. Abraham and family)

Harry J. Abraham's Nazi-issued passport from 1939 (Photo by Rebecca Ostoyich and courtesy of Harry J. Abraham and family)

Harry J. Abraham posing beside his mother's sewing machine ca. 2017 (Photo courtesy Harry J. Abraham and family)

Harry J. Abraham's identification issued by the US consulate in Shanghai in 1947 for travel to the USA (Photo by Rebecca Ostoyich)

Figure 5: A memorial in the Frickhofen Jewish cemetery to the Jews murdered by the Nazis (Photo by Kevin Ostoyich)

A plaque on the Frickhofen town hall memorialising the 33 murdered Jews of the town and their suffering at the hands of the Nazis (Photo by Kevin Ostoyich)

Harry J. Abraham with his parents Ida and Albrecht in Shanghai (Photo courtesy Harry J. Abraham and family)

Continue Reading

Tanizaki in Maputo. Japanese cultural theory and the decolonisation of architectural education in Mozambique

nikolai brandes[1]
 

Figure 1: FAPF, front cover of the Mozambican edition of Tanizaki Jun'ichirō’s In Praise of Shadows, 1999, monochrome print, A4.

I first heard about Tanizaki last autumn in Rome, on a rainy day under the umbrellas of a café in Piazza Vittorio Emanuele II. I had an appointment with Maria Spina, an Italian architect, from whom I wanted to learn more about the history of the Faculty of Architecture (Faculdade de Arquitectura e Planeamento Físico, FAPF) at the Universidade Eduardo Mondlane in Maputo. Spina had been teaching at the FAPF since the 1980s under a cooperation agreement. She brought an inconspicuous brochure to our meeting, which revealed unexpected insights into the idiosyncratic programme of the small publishing house that the FAPF had established in the 1990s.[2] In the brochure, I was struck by the title In Praise of Shadows by the Japanese author Tanizaki Jun'ichirō. I had never heard of him. As I was soon to find out, Tanizaki’s essay, published in Japan in the 1930s, dealt with the changes that technological impulses from the West sparked in Japan’s material culture. The Mozambican translation in Edições FAPF was published in 1999.[3] The situation at the time made the publication of this text in Mozambique an unlikely undertaking. The war between government troops and RENAMO, supported by apartheid South Africa, was only a few years away. Mozambique was one of the poorest countries in the world.[4] Public works had to repair war-damaged infrastructure and provide housing for internally displaced persons and the exploding urban population.[5] Paper was scarce. But despite these challenges, the only architecture faculty in the country at the time not only maintained its own publishing company to produce manuals for cost-minimised DIY housing and instructional material adapted to local conditions, it also published theoretical works that only circulated among connoisseurs even in WEIRD countries.[6] Tanizaki was one of the most popular Japanese novelists in Europe in the 1960s and was translated into many languages. A first translation of his In Praise of Shadows into English was released in 1977 by Leete’s Island Books of Sedgewick, Maine. A German translation was published by Manesse in Zurich in 1987. In 1999, Relógio d’Água in Lisbon published a Portuguese translation. In 2007, the São Paulo-based publisher Companhia das Letras, a heavyweight in the Lusophone literary scene, published a translation into Brazilian Portuguese. Lisbon and São Paulo: the logic of the global book market demands that translations into Portuguese be driven by the big publishing houses from these two cities, not by those from Praia, Luanda, Macao, Luxembourg or Dili, cities shaped by the Portuguese language through colonialism and labour migration. The fact that a volume reflecting Mozambican DIY aesthetics appeared in 1999 with a run of 500 copies thus subverts the postcolonial script (even if, unlike the Portuguese and Brazilian editions, it is not available in online bookshops today). However, I am not interested here in the fact that the Mozambican guerrilla translation caught up with and surpassed publishers from Portugal and Brazil years after the guerrilla war. Rather, I want to look at the universalist claim inherent in this publication. By publishing Tanizaki, the FAPF self-consciously inscribed itself on a global architectural discourse despite and because of a multitude of disconnective structures that the country confronted amidst epistemological decolonisation, post-war reconstruction and structural adjustment programmes.

Conditions of translation

The Maputo edition, a plain, double-stapled brochure in A4 format, contains 44 pages. It was printed in black and white at the university print shop. The translation is based on the US edition and was provided by a local Portuguese UN staff member. The cover, like the text, is illustrated with architectural photographs taken from a book on Japanese architecture published in the USA in 1960. (The US edition was not illustrated.) Tanizaki’s essay develops a meandering reflection on cultural differences between Japan and Europe. It starts with architecture, touches on ideals of physical beauty, gastronomy, theatre and stagecraft, product design and the role of whiteness in Japanese identity formation, only to return repeatedly to the built environment. The author asks how cultural achievements from Japan and Europe could be integrated in equal measure in the construction of a modern house. A central feature of Japanese building culture is the use of shadows, which for Tanizaki constitutes part of Japanese aesthetics. For him, however, shadows also symbolise traditions endangered by the electric light imported from the West and the literal enlightenment of everyday life that results. Tanizaki calls for electric lights to be switched off occasionally ‘to see what it is like without them’.[7] Life without electric light: due to occasional power cuts while working in Maputo, this was probably familiar to the translator of the Mozambican edition. Her client, the FAPF, had started operations in 1986. The historical context in which the faculties in Maputo and elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa emerged have hardly been researched.[8] Apart from South Africa, where art schools were already training architects in the early 20th century, the first schools were only founded in late colonialism (Kumasi and Ibadan, 1952). In most countries, however, schools of architecture were founded after independence (Addis Ababa, 1954; Khartoum, 1957; Dar es Salaam, 1964). It took particularly long in Francophone Africa, where students of architecture necessarily made detours via Paris long after decolonisation (Lomé, 1976). The ideological orientations and institutional environments of these schools could hardly be more different. In Ethiopia, Swedish foreign aid supported the establishment of the school until experts from socialist states took over. In Togo, UNESCO set up a school that was to serve as a locus of education for all of Francophone Africa. And the structural adjustment measures of the 1990s prompted the establishment of numerous private schools across Africa. In Mozambique, founding schools was particularly challenging. The fascist government in Portugal refused decolonisation even when the African ‘wind of change’ proclaimed by British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in 1960 became cyclonic. Until 1975, the country had to fight for liberation from colonial rule ­­— a ‘liberation without decolonisation’, as the Mozambican historian Aquino de Bragança called it.[9] Whereas Great Britain began establishing local architecture schools from the 1950s onwards to prepare its colonies for independence, Lisbon never saw a need for such institutions. After independence, the erstwhile liberation movement rebuilt the country along Marxist-Leninist lines but remained undogmatic in its choice of international partners. In much of the country, there was war against the anti-communist RENAMO.[10] In this situation, the FAPF was founded on the initiative of José Forjaz. Forjaz, a Portuguese-born architect, worked in Mozambique as early as the 1950s, spent time in exile in Swaziland (now Eswatini) as a supporter of the liberation movement, and held key positions in the country’s public building sector after 1975. From the early 1980s, Forjaz proposed an ‘unorthodox school of architecture’ that would train ‘worker-students’ as experts in the basic needs of the population.[11] The well-connected Forjaz found allies for the budding  faculty at the Sapienza Università di Roma. Lecturers from Rome were also responsible for most of the catalogue of the in-house publishing house[12] and managed the teaching until a first cohort of Mozambican architects took over.  

Figure 2: Lucio Carbonara, FAPF teachers and first-year students in front of the architecture institute in Maputo, 1986, photo print.

Mozambique in the architecture world

Forjaz’s enthusiasm found was grounded in Mozambique’s long-standing integration in the global architectural discourse. The money that Portugal released for its colonial containment policy in Mozambique resulted in a building boom.[13] The eccentric manifestations of this boom, influenced by Oscar Niemeyer, critical regionalism and new brutalism, also astonished Udo Kultermann, as evidenced in his reference works on African modernism.[14] Professional networks stretching as far as Brazil, Portugal, South Africa and Nigeria shaped Mozambican construction. With Pancho Guedes, a unique figure in 20th-century architecture, Mozambique was also represented at the meetings of Team Ten, the elite architects’ club of post-war modernism. After 1975, however, disconnective forces were ascendent. The country decoupled from old colonial networks. The war worried investors and disrupted attempts to build new supply chains. And the impositions of international organisations and structural adjustment programmes limited Mozambican autonomy in construction partnerships. But political flexibility, financial constraints and sovereign decision-making induced a volatile situation in which new relationships emerged. In the Mozambican construction industry of the 1980s, Chilean exiles worked alongside East German, Cuban and Bulgarian state-owned enterprises, Swedish aid workers, US volunteers and the Roman delegation to the FAPF. Establishing a school of architecture was a means for architects and planners to empower themselves and forge new, independent relationships with the world. In this context, Tanizaki’s translation was perhaps most emblematic: a local publisher had autonomously decided to draw the attention of Mozambican students to a dusty essay from a country that was almost invisible in African construction at the time. But why this particular text?

Reading Tanizaki in Maputo

In praise of shadows was well received in architectural theory. Charles Moore, a pioneer of postmodern architecture, even wrote the foreword for the US edition. However, there is no evidence that Tanizaki circulated among African architects in the 1990s, though José Forjaz did teach in Japan. In fact, his designs may also be read as studies on shadows and shading. [Figure 3]. But local questions were what piqued interest in the text in Maputo. From the 1980s onwards, Mozambican architects such as Luis Lage, João Tique and Mário do Rosário at the FAPF had been looking for ways to cope with the country’s pressing building tasks — especially the construction of housing, schools and clinics — despite poverty and shortages of materials and skilled labour.

Figure 3: Nikolai Brandes, Escola Secundária da Polana (Forjaz and Tinoco, ca 1973), Maputo, 2012, digital photograph.

One answer to this challenge lay in local knowledge, in traditional, regionally diverse building materials and in the proficiency of local craftsmen.[15] In 1990, Forjaz further developed these considerations with his programmatic manifesto Between adobe and stainless steel, calling for decolonisation of architectural education and emphasising the potential of architectural planning based on local ‘solutions […] and a discipline liberated from the images and models generated by the colonial system’.[16] Forjaz was not only concerned with technical issues. Certainly, he criticised a design practice that ignored dependence on imported building materials and the lack of skilled labour for construction and maintenance and damaged the country’s ecosystems. Above all, however, he criticised the legacy of colonial axioms, which he contrasted with the urban population’s own knowledge:
The regular, linear and monumental pattern of grand avenues and boulevards and monumental squares do not in fact serve any identifiable use or have a clear meaning for the majority of our population. But they are still being designed and built. [A] productive use of land […] balanced with a regular distribution of market and service centres minimizing transport needs and providing employment could […] create a new […] urban environment. […] With our negative, stagnant or barely positive rates of economic growth against the explosive demographic growth it is vital to find alternatives to classic development strategies. The people of our cities are finding those alternatives by themselves and it is our responsibility as planners and architects to understand their ways and to help them resolve better the spatial problems that they face.[17]
  The opposition to imported technocratic expertise and directives of international donor agencies and the preference for local solutions had a distinctly disconnective, isolationist component. And yet, as an epistemological project, it was embedded in global discussions. In architecture, site-specific ways of life, architectural styles and building materials received increasing international attention by the 1970s. With the end of the great modernisation narratives, corresponding tendencies found expression in other fields too, first and foremost in social science. Paralleling postcolonial construction research at the FAPF, Mozambique saw the emergence of public intellectuals such as Aquino de Bragança, who viewed the anti-colonial liberation struggle as an incubator for new, practical knowledge about social dynamics. The rediscovery of these specifically Mozambican approaches was essential to the ‘epistemology of the South’, which sparked international interest in the social sciences.[18] Mozambique, however, not only contributed to a global discourse on local knowledge but also made use of geopolitically surprising models. For the editors at FAPF, Tanizaki had apparently raised questions in 1930s Japan that seemed significant for the future of architecture in postcolonial Mozambique.[19] Tanizaki discusses domains in which Japanese products, techniques and cultural practices are superior to Western innovations, from the quality of writing paper to optimising the interior climate of living spaces and the haptic quality of lacquerware crockery. However, he is not only concerned with nostalgia for a past universe. Rather, conservative Tanizaki is concerned about the disappearance of a material culture in which formal design and social practice meaningfully interpenetrate. The motif of shadows that characterises his description of architecture with semi-transparent paper walls and dark alcoves recurs consistently in other miniatures on Japanese society, especially when he declares particular technical and cultural imports from the West to be simply unsuitable to local needs. For example, he accuses the phonograph of cementing a Western understanding of music and sound that underrates pauses (the acoustic equivalent of shadows) in Japanese oral and musical culture. If modern medicine had originated in Japan, he suspects, the bedrooms of hospitals would not be white, but sand-coloured, and thus more beneficial to recovery processes. ‘Here again we have to come off the loser for having borrowed’,[20] he writes. Similarly, Forjaz fears that the ‘systematic adoption of values and forms imported from other cultures and societies’[21] might dramatically worsen the living conditions in Mozambican cities. What Tanizaki and Forjaz have in common is the concern about technological globalisation, which standardises uniform, often unsuitable solutions. But while Tanizaki nostalgically bids farewell to local idiosyncrasies, Forjaz thinks of the local more hopefully as a laboratory for future innovation:
Our role as architects and planners in the Third World is, primarily, to deepen the understanding of the economic, social and cultural characteristics of our society, and their dynamics of change in order to find adequate and necessarily new solutions to our spatial and building problems.[22]
  Compared to Tanizaki, Forjaz is clearly anti-traditionalist. Genuine and contemporary Mozambican architecture is yet to come:
Traditional societies in our region did not have to answer this scale of problems […]. We have to create now an architecture that expresses our new social order, and there is not much we can take from our architectural traditions. […] Like the cities of Europe […] need their cathedrals and their castles, their walls and great squares; like the typical American city needs its courthouse square and church, we need our tangible signs of an order superior to the tribal and different from the colonial.[23]
  In Mozambique, the international disconnect caused by extreme economic and political circumstances even invigorated participation in global academic discourses and prompted contributions to global transfers of theory.  A particularly unusual publication, this Mozambican edition also highlights the obstacles that continue to exclude African universities from global academic publishing. At the time, the decision to publish Tanizaki fit the search for a genuine path in the field of architecture, and it again relates to current discussions in South Africa and Great Britain about decolonising architectural education.   [1] This text was facilitated by a research grant from the German Historical Institute in Rome. [2] See Faculdade de Arquitectura e Planeamento Físico, Publicações FAPF (Maputo: Edições FAPF, ca. 2005). [3] See Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, Em Louvor às sombras, trans. Margarida David e Silva (Maputo: Edições FAPF, 1999). [4] In the year of the translation, Mozambique ranked third to last in the UNDP’s Human Development Index, see ‘Human Development Index’, ed. UNDP (2023). https://hdr.undp.org/data-center/human-development-index#/indicies/HDI.. [5] See José Forjaz, ‘Research Needs and Priorities in Housing and Construction in Mozambique’, Habitat Intl. 9, no. 2 (1985). [6] That is, Western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic. [7] See Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows, trans. Thomas J. Harper (Stony Creek: Leet's Island Books, 1977), 42.. [8] For an attempt in this direction, see Mark Olweny, ‘Architectural Education in Sub-Saharan Africa: An Investigation into Pedagogical Positions and Knowledge Frameworks’, Journal of Architecture 25, no. 6 (2022). [9] See Aquino de Bragança, ‘Independência sem descolonização: A transferência do poder em Moçambique, 1974 – 1975’, Estudos Moçambicanos 5-6 (1985). [10] See Marina Ottaway, ‘Afrocommunism Ten Years after: Crippled but Alive’, Issue: A Journal of Opinion 16, no. 1 (1987). [11] José Forjaz, Por uma escola de arquitectura não ortodoxa, ca. 1983, handwritten manuscript, FAPF archive, Maputo. [12] Some of these publications were pioneering works on Mozambican architectural history. [13] See Nikolai Brandes, ‘Developing the Late Colonial City: Strategies of a Middle Class Housing Cooperative in Mozambique, 1951–1975’, Cities 130, 103935 (2022), https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2022.103935. [14] See Udo Kultermann, New Directions in African Architecture (New York: George Braziller, 1969). [15] Nikolai Brandes, ‘“Das Ziel waren Wohnungen für die ganze Bevölkerung.” Ein Gespräch mit dem mosambikanischen Architekten Mário do Rosário, der in Maputo die Umsetzung eines der letzten Wohnungsbauprojekte der DDR im Ausland begleitete’, in Architekturexport DDR. Zwischen Sansibar und Halensee, ed. Andreas Butter and Thomas Flierl (Berlin: Lukas, 2023). [16] The essay first appeared in Arquitrave, the FAPF's student magazine, in 1990; in English translation in an exhibition catalogue in 1999; and finally on the website of Forjaz's architecture firm. I follow the online publication: ‘Between Adobe and Stainless Steel’, José Forjaz Arquitectos, 2021, accessed 6 September, 2023, https://www.joseforjazarquitectos.com/textosen/%E2%80%9C...between-adobe-and-stainless-steel%E2%80%9D. [17] Forjaz, ‘Between Adobe’. [18] See Boaventura Santos, ‘Aquino de Bragança: criador de futuros, mestre de heterodoxias, pioneiro das epistemologias do Su’, in Como fazer ciências sociais e humanas em África. Questões epistemológicas, metodológicas, teóricas e políticas, ed. Teresa Cruz e Silva, João Paulo Borges Coelho, and Amélia Neves de Souto (Dakar: CODESRIA, 2012). [19] This transfer of ideas is ironic in that Japan itself was aggressively building an empire at the time of Tanizaki's stance against Western cultural influence. [20] Tanizaki, In Praise, 12. [21] Forjaz, ‘Between Adobe’. [22] Forjaz, ‘Between Adobe’. [23] Forjaz, ‘Between Adobe’.
Bibliography
Bragança, Aquino de. ‘Independência Sem Descolonização: A Transferência Do Poder Em Moçambique, 1974 – 1975’. Estudos Moçambicanos 5-6 (1985): 7-28. Brandes, Nikolai. ‘“Das Ziel Waren Wohnungen Für Die Ganze Bevölkerung.” Ein Gespräch Mit Dem Mosambikanischen Architekten Mário Do Rosário, Der in Maputo Die Umsetzung Eines Der Letzten Wohnungsbauprojekte Der Ddr Im Ausland Begleitete’. In Architekturexport Ddr. Zwischen Sansibar Und Halensee, edited by Andreas Butter and Thomas Flierl, 60-75. Berlin: Lukas, 2023. ———. ‘Developing the Late Colonial City: Strategies of a Middle Class Housing Cooperative in Mozambique, 1951–1975’. Cities 130, 103935 (2022). https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2022.103935. Faculdade de Arquitectura e Planeamento Físico. Publicações Fapf. Maputo: Edições FAPF, ca. 2005. ‘Between Adobe and Stainless Steel’. José Forjaz Arquitectos, 2021, accessed 6 September, 2023, https://www.joseforjazarquitectos.com/textosen/%E2%80%9C...between-adobe-and-stainless-steel%E2%80%9D. Forjaz, José. Por Uma Escola De Arquitectura Não Ortodoxa. ca. 1983. handwritten manuscript. FAPF archive, Maputo. ———. ‘Research Needs and Priorities in Housing and Construction in Mozambique’. Habitat Intl. 9, no. 2 (1985): 65-72. ‘Human Development Index’. edited by UNDP, 2023. https://hdr.undp.org/data-center/human-development-index#/indicies/HDI. Kultermann, Udo. New Directions in African Architecture. New York: George Braziller, 1969. Olweny, Mark. ‘Architectural Education in Sub-Saharan Africa: An Investigation into Pedagogical Positions and Knowledge Frameworks’. Journal of Architecture 25, no. 6 (2022): 717-35. Ottaway, Marina. ‘Afrocommunism Ten Years After: Crippled but Alive’. Issue: A Journal of Opinion 16, no. 1 (1987): 11-17. Santos, Boaventura. ‘Aquino De Bragança: Criador De Futuros, Mestre De Heterodoxias, Pioneiro Das Epistemologias Do Su’. In Como Fazer Ciências Sociais E Humanas Em África. Questões Epistemológicas, Metodológicas, Teóricas E Políticas, edited by Teresa Cruz e Silva, João Paulo Borges Coelho and Amélia Neves de Souto, 13-61. Dakar: CODESRIA, 2012. Tanizaki, Jun’ichirō. Em Louvor Às Sombras. Translated by Margarida David e Silva. Maputo: Edições FAPF, 1999. ———. In Praise of Shadows. Translated by Thomas J. Harper. Stony Creek: Leet's Island Books, 1977.
citation information:
Brandes, Nikolai, 'Tanizaki in Maputo. Japanese Cultural Theory and the Decolonisation of Architectural Education in Mozambique', global dis:connect blog, 31.10.2023, 2023, https://www.globaldisconnect.org/10/31/tanizaki-in-maputo-japanese-cultural-theory-and-the-decolonisation-of-architectural-education-in-mozambique/.
Continue Reading

Finding aesthetics everywhere: recalling a workshop on ecology, aesthetics and everyday cultures of modernity

felix ehlers
 
Slow time can lead to more meaningful work

– Ananya Mishra, workshop attendee

Global dis:connect was honoured to host Ecology, aesthetics and everyday cultures of modernity, a fascinating workshop held on 10-11 July 2023 and conceived by our fellow Siddharth Pandey. The event brought together scholars from various fields to discuss linkages between ecology, everydayness and aesthetics by looking at the modern period from the 19th century to the present. The participants shed light on several topics related to aesthetics by looking at art — movies, paintings and literature — that confront humanities’ relationship with the environment. The sound of crickets chirping fills the air, which is heavy with the smell of freshly mowed grass and smoke from burning larch. I inhale the air and look over my laptop into green trees, moving in the wind of an approaching thunderstorm that’s already rumbling among the mountains. It’s a picturesque setting, inspiring surroundings for writing, reading and thinking. It is an aesthetic environment, a place that clearly collapses the illusory dichotomy between nature and culture. Somewhere in the Austrian mountains I can to write about culture in nature, and I do so using cultural practices and materials in an environment that feels wild and untouched but is designed by humans. This aesthetic place is the Anthropocene in microcosm, perfectly suited to write this reflection.

Where does nature begin and culture end? (Photo by the author)

The word Anthropocene, like the geological epoch, is charging ahead, having become a buzzword evoking dystopian images of environmental degradation, global human-caused pollution and mega-cities expanding in formerly wild environments. The world in the Anthropocene isn´t aesthetic, but what counts as aesthetic changes. Most people would consider winter in general and especially snow in the Alps beautiful, but prior to the rise of tourism and winter sports in the second half of the 19th century, winter in the mountains signified danger and death, not beauty and joy.[1] What is aesthetic? Siddharth Pandey claims reception through our physical senses provides the best access to the concept of aesthetics, which was later connected with evolving conceptions of beauty. Today, aesthetic and beautiful are practically synonyms. When reflecting on aesthetics, one starts see them everywhere — our aesthetic environment, the beautiful library of on the ground floor of our gd:c building, the alpine setting where I wrote this article. Aesthetics influence our thinking and our work as researchers. Even so, the Anthropocene was indelibly inscribed in the workshop’s topic and influenced the discussions of artworks showcasing the interplay between humans and the environment. But aesthetics offered an alternative to the stereotypically dystopian view of the Anthropocene. We noticed this already in the early stages of preparing the workshop when Siddharth Pandey, Daniel Bucher (another student assistant) and I met for the first time to discuss how to design the posters and flyers. The first drafts visualised a dystopic environment, but Siddharth Pandey wanted to reconceive the design. Using motifs by the British craftsperson, polymath and founder of the Arts and Crafts movement, William Morris, we combined the ideas of everyday culture, aesthetics and the intertwining of nature and culture. On two scorching days in July, the participants gathered in the gd:c library, where we discussed many topics. We listened to Salu Majhi’s poetry, saw photographs of sled dogs towing a sled through a shallow, crystal-blue lake on still-frozen sea ice, recalled our childhood memories with an analysis of the visual language Bambi, learned about Chile saltpetre in artworks and as a medium, virtually visited the Time Landscape project in lower Manhattan, and more.

The presenter's view of the library (Photo by Siddharth Pandey)

As a historian, I was unfamiliar with art historians’ and literary critics’ approaches, but all the panels were inspiring despite (or because of) that, relating easily to my own field and interests. Each presentation touched aspects of everyday life in some way. Our reliance on synthetic fertilisers to produce food, firsthand experiences of the effects of climate change and a childhood encounter with Caspar David Friedrich’s romantic paintings are just some examples. The workshop opened with David Whitley´s keynote on how the textual descriptions in the 1928 novel Bambi. A Life in the Woods by the hunter Felix Salten had been translated into visual forms in Disney´s Bambi movie. His analysis of a movie most of us recall from our childhood was fascinating, because the visual language is typically absorbed unconsciously. Whitely’s exposition of such aesthetic commonplaces set the tone for the following presentations. In the first panel on the language of plants, Sarah Moore spoke about Alan Sonfist’s Time Landscape project, in which he and the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation represented the ecological loss in Manhattan over the last 400 years with a slow-growing forest on a quarter-acre of land that was no longer maintained as a park. Moore connected this project with works of the 19th century that were already dealing with human-induced environmental degradation, like Thomas Cole’s works and contemporary seed banks. Moore presented Time Landscape as a place where trees bring us a message from the past, a message that recurred in other presentations. Next, Vera-Simone Schulz discussed images of plants, analysed how ecology and aesthetics influence these depictions, and why depictions of tropical plants can be intentionally misleading. The floral decorations at lunch were a glaring coincidence. Geopolitical aesthetics were the topic of the second panel treating mineral resources, their exploitation and related artworks. Nicolas Holt’s presentation focused on minerals, especially Chilean saltpetre, a powerful natural fertiliser that is less harmful than synthetic fertilisers gained by the Haber-Bosch-Method, as a medium in art history. The next presentation by Ananya Mishra focused on the translation Salu Majhi’s songs and analysed how local forms of protest against mining companies are expressed in his poetry, showing that Majhi considered his poetry as a form of protest as well as part of his everyday life. Beyond the topic itself, Mishra’s multidimensional presentation was intriguing. Not only did she show and discuss translations of the poems on a screen, she combined this with audio recordings of Salu Majhi singing the poems as ambient sound. Together with a video of her journey to Salu Majhi documenting her research, this blended the object of research, the act of research, the past, the present and the presentation. Hence we return to the quote opens starts this report. ‘Slow time leads to more meaningful work’. This is a concept I cherish in my own work: not working slowly in terms of pace and productivity, but taking and investing time for the best possible, most meaningful result is valuable and necessary. Of form and feeling was the topic of the third panel. Nathalie Kerschen opened the panel with her talk on expressing nature in architectural design and how the experience of nature, termed eco-phenomenology, influences design. She also touched on the importance for scholars not to lose their connection with everyday experiences. Touch grass. Following up was Jane Boddy with her presentation on form-feeling and the aesthetics of nature around 1900. She asked whether form-feeling was a general collective experience and about the role of nature in that experience. Boddy demonstrated the importance of looking at feelings and emotions. In her words ‘the feeling of a form (Formgefühl) is source and intuition of style’. The last panel on the first day was titled Between the known and unknown and dealt with experimental prehistory and Bermuda oceanographic expeditions. Jutta Teutenberg started her talk about experimental prehistoric research with a focus on recreating the conditions under which prehistoric artists created art and crafts by referring to the ethnographer Frank Hamilton. This again invoked positionality and the importance of considering feelings, as an experimental prehistoric researcher who feels like an artist will experience different things and produce different results than a researcher who does not.[2] Magdalena Grüner analysed three of Else Bostelmann’s 1934 paintings capturing fishes with watercolours as seen by oceanographic expeditions to Bermuda in their natural environment and by taking into account how the colour spectrum changed with the depth. She used taxidermically stuffed animals as models and descriptions by the deep-sea researcher William Beebe because Bostelmann hadn’t ever seen the real thing. Bostelmann therefore worked with her imagination and artistic methods, diverging from the aim of the expedition, which was to gain scientific knowledge. The fifth panel, titled The limits and edges of perception, opened with Jessie Alperin’s presentation about the imagination of the Earth from above in Odilon Redon’s Le paravent rouge, a folding screen made for André Bonger. She analysed this artwork as an everyday, aesthetic object, which made it possible to view the impossible: the Earth imagined from above visualised inside a home. The sixth panel on the prism of the pastoral began with Mihir Kumar Jha, who talked about spatialisation in colonial literature and the pastoral as a genre that deals with man’s interaction with nature. He analysed the pastoral landscape with a view to the surroundings of Hazaribagh as an ecological space between wilderness and civilisation, between nature and culture. From the pastoral in colonial literature, we moved to the pastoral in paintings by the Belgian artist Roger Raveel and his attempts to develop an aesthetics of complexity, as presented by Senne Schraeyen’s. This talk also focused on the nature-culture nexus and how the environment changed through the rapid economic change in the second half of the 20th century. Recalling how the Alps also changed radically in the last century and the ensuing sense of ecological loss, I felt compelled to ask whether the loss and damage, the pollution and the destruction are necessary to prompt new aesthetic perceptions of formerly inaccessible landscapes and our environment in general. The final panel was titled Ice tales and offered a stark contrast to the 34-degree temperatures that afternoon. Oliver Aas opened the last panel on the Artic Sea ice by analysing art that depicts melting sea ice and questioning how our view of the Artic changes in light of the effects of climate change. From the ice of the present, we moved to Kaila Howell’s close reading of Caspar David Friedrich’s The Sea of Ice and its historic depiction of ice of the past. She combined her analysis of the painting with Kant’s philosophy and the concept of scale in art history. After seven closely connected and very diverse panels with fascinating and inspiring presentations and discussions, Camille Serchuk’s concluding remarks were the grand finale. Serchuk wonderfully summarised the diverse presentations and related them to her own work on medieval maps, which demonstrated the relevance of the topic beyond its chosen modern period. Still, the end had to be aesthetic. Therefore, we enjoyed a walking tour through the English Garden in the sweltering heat, but it made for a perfectly aesthetic ending thanks to a field of wild flowers, a part of the English Garden uncultivated and untouched by landscapers, bringing us back full circle to the Time Landscape project.

Reflectively synthesising nature, culture and aesthetics

The workshop is over, but the associations and threads it spun continue. Holt’s paper, for example, evoked the relevance of mineral resources in the context of digitalisation, especially with regard to the humanities. Mineral resources make our daily life possible, though we take them for granted. Digitalisation, which is as indomitable as it is universal, also shapes our research practices and relies heavily on mineral resources. This text, for instance, was written on a laptop produced in Taiwan with mineral resources from China and Latin America, and I also use it to read digital papers by scholars from the Netherlands, the USA and India. The more we digitalise, the more we lose a genuine connection to our analogue environment. But ironically, that same digitalisation and environmental alienation coincides with greater environmental exploitation. Materials are a medium by which we surpass our natural boundaries and enter a digital space. We do well to remember, however, that this journey is predicated on natural resources. The virtuality of digitalization is an illusion. In the end, everything is analogue. Many of the presentations, especially those from Boddy, Grüner, Mishra and Moore highlighted the importance of reflecting on emotions in research. Art is emotion; it is, to paraphrase Benjamin Myers, the desire to cast the moment in amber.[3] Seeing Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings, hearing Salu Majhi’s songs, smelling the plants growing in the Time Landscape project makes us feel. Those feelings can be shared or disparate, again depending on our mindsets, experiences and many other factors. If a good poem breaks open the oyster shell of the mind to reveal the pearl within, as Benjamin Myers writes,[4] then art in general can have the same, if not a much more intrusive effect. This must be especially true for art that confronts humans’ impact on the environment, the nature—culture interaction and everyday life. In research as in life, we work with narratives, and our preconceptions, beliefs, values and feelings affect those narratives.[5] To observe and note the influence of our feelings as agents in the past and the present in producing and distributing knowledge is sensible for various reasons, but especially for art and aesthetics. The concept of aesthetics relies on our senses, which combine with and shape our feelings and emotions. Jha’s reflections prompted me to reconsider the landscape I feel close to, as he described a place totally different but then again very similar to the place in the southern Alps that inspired me and where I wrote these words. A landscape that seems wild, inhabited by wild fauna with wolves returning, but shaped by grazing cows, ruminating sheep and humans cutting trees and building ski slopes on which deer — animals designed to live in open spaces — spend the dawn reintroduces questions of perception and emotions. Would the Alps be perceived as beautiful were they wild rather than cultivated? Sharing these forests and mountain ridges with wolves, after their local extinction centuries ago, is changing my feelings for this region, but I’m not yet sure how. Perhaps the landscape will now feel wilder, and it would be more romantic if the call of the rutting deer mixes with the howling of a wolf. But even if they pose no threat to me, their effects on grazing livestock – possibly fatal – and measures to protect them, like herding dogs, will likely lead to a loss of human freedom and carefreeness. Superficially, we learned a lot about works of art treating and confronting humans’ impact on nature, a lot about art historical views on everydayness and ecology. Underneath that surface, though, the workshop raised far more questions, some of which I have raised here. Despite their apparent disconnection, when seen from above these questions might reconnect many things, including us as feeling, emotional beings, dependent on but alienated from our environment.   [1] For further information, see Andrew Denning, Skiing into Modernity: A Cultural and Environmental History (Oakland: University of California Press, 2014). [2] For further information on the effect of emotions in research, see Ute Frevert, Gefühle in der Geschichte (Göttingen: Vendenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2021). [3] Benjamin Myers, Offene See (Cologne: DuMont Buchverlag, 2020), 14. [4] Myers, Offene See, 2022, 111. [5] For further thoughts on how we shape our narratives, see Douglas Booth, "Seven (1+6) surfing stories: the practice of authoring," Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice 16, no. 4 (2012), https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2012.697284.

Bibliography

Booth, Douglas. "Seven (1+6) Surfing Stories: The Practice of Authoring." Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice 16, no. 4 (2012): 565-85. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2012.697284. Denning, Andrew. Skiing into Modernity: A Cultural and Environmental History. Oakland: University of California Press, 2014. Frevert, Ute. Gefühle in Der Geschichte. Göttingen: Vendenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2021. Myers, Benjamin. Offene See. Cologne: DuMont Buchverlag, 2020.
citation information
Ehlers, Felix, 'Finding aesthetics everywhere: recalling a workshop on ecology, aesthetics and everyday cultures of modernity " Ben Kamis ed. global dis:connect blog. Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect, 17 October 2023, 2023, https://www.globaldisconnect.org/10/17/finding-aesthetics-everywhere-recalling-a-workshop-on-ecology-aesthetics-and-everyday-cultures-of-modernity/.
Continue Reading

Yvonne Kleinmann joins global dis:connect

A warm welcome to our new fellow Yvonne Kleinmann who joins global dis:connect in early October. Yvonne Kleinmann is a professor of Eastern European history and director of the Aleksander Brückner Center for Polish Studies at Halle University Her project at gd:c, Communicating Constitutions: A Cultural and Entangled History of Poland’s Basic Orders, deals with Polish constitutional history from the 14th century to the present from the angle of cultural history and (transnational) entanglement.   Continue Reading

Welcome, Matthias Leanza!

In early October, Matthias Leanza joins global dis:connect as a new fellow. Welcome to Munich, Matthias! Matthias Leanza is a historical sociologist specialising in empires, colonialism and nation-state formation and is a senior lecturer at the University of Basel. At global dis:connect Matthias will complete his current book project on the legacy of German colonialism. Drawing on a wide range of sources from European and African archives, the study shows how and why the German overseas empire helped consolidate the nascent German nation-state. Germany soon lost its colonies, but their effects on the country persisted, leaving a complex legacy. Continue Reading

Valeska Huber takes up fellowship

In October Valeska Huber commenced her term as a fellow at global dis:connect. Welcome. Valeska Huber is a professor at the University of Vienna. She has led an Emmy Noether Research Group and has been a fellow at the German Historical Institute London. She is particularly interested in the mutual interdependence of opening and closure. During her fellowship at global dis:connect, she will work on a monograph about the 20th-century dream of universal literacy, tracing the Each One Teach One method propagated by US missionary Frank C. Laubach and applied around the globe from the Philippines to Cuba and Brazil. Continue Reading

Joël Glasman joins global dis:connect

A warm welcome to our new guest Joël Glasman who joins global dis:connect in october.

Joël is a Professor of African History at University of Bayreuth. He focuses on West and Central Africa in the 20th century, particularly colonialism, governmentality, humanitarianism and the production of power as framed by praxis theory and science and technology studies. His publications inquire into social classifications produced by state institutions, international governmentality and private corporations. He further engages with the theory of global history, global norms and colonialism. His last book, Les humanités humanitaires. Manuel d’autodéfense à l’usage des volontaires (2023), reflects on the practical use of the humanities.

Joël’s project At gd:c, Empire of waste, looks at imperialism as a regime of waste built on material exploitation and racial inequalities. Immobilisation, hiding and destruction of waste played a crucial role in imperial domination, as indicated by recent research on toxicity, waste dumping and radioactivity in Africa.

Continue Reading

Global Munich – a transfer project by global dis:connect

christian steinau
 

Making globalisation processes visible on the ground

Image courtesy of Adobe stock, adapted by the author.

Globalisation affects our world in diverse and complex ways. Based on the work at gd:c, the transfer project Global Munich shows how dis:connective globalisation processes shape the city of Munich, ranging from historical examples to astonishing contemporary references. From economic and cultural connections to more or less visible borders, Munich is linked to the world in many ways. But how do these links become manifest in the city itself? What makes Munich a global city? The gd:c TransferLab is the brains and motor behind Global Munich.[1] The mission of the TransferLab is to develop applications for our output and to draw on current developments in the field of transfer. Transfer refers to the ‘dialogical communication and transfer of scientific findings to society, culture, the economy and politics’ and vice versa.[2] Global Munich applies the concept of dis:connective globalisation to the city of Munich and relates it to concrete examples in the most local of contexts. It will create public documentation and provide opportunities for gd:c staff and fellows to get involved in the process. And Global Munich will engage stakeholders outside the university.

Munich as a global city? A first (dis:)connective look at the city

Due to its diverse connections to the world, Munich is a vivid example of how globalisation processes form a dense network. The city is a transport hub in the air and on land. People and goods move in all directions, as do data. This connectivity is the heart of Munich's globally connected economy. Munich is home to some of Germany's largest companies, and many international corporations do business here. Munich is a locus for culture and the arts, home to globally active and connected publishing houses, advertising agencies, film producers, art collections and museums. Tourism is a key economic factor, and the city receives millions of guests annually. Munich is also a magnet for international emigrants who contribute to a lively cultural exchange. Globalisation processes pervade the city and leave their visible and less visible traces all over the cityscape and in the lifeworlds of both visitors and inhabitants of Munich.
The Chinese Tower in the English Garden (Image: Adobe Stock)

The Chinese Tower in the English Garden (Image: Adobe Stock)

Many of these links and connections have a long history and reach back to imperial times or even further. Think of the Orientalism mirrored in the Chinese Tower in the English Garden, the role of the Bavarian ‘Chinese warriors’ from the Max II barracks in quelling the Boxer Rebellion and the global branding success of the ‘world's largest folk festival’, the Oktoberfest. Small wonder that the first impulse to document and make visible the various manifestations of these links originally came from the field of history. Global Munich takes its cue from this historical approach and extends it into the contemporary realm.

The concept of transfer in Global Munich

A particular concept of transfer underlies the content and methods of the TransferLab. Every transfer project must confront the question of what transfer means. What is to be ‘transferred’, how and why? What is the added value of the concept? There is no single definition of transfer. A range of transfer activities can perform the underlying transfer (Latin trānsferre = ‘to carry from one place to another’) of findings and knowledge, for instance in fields such as relationship management, entrepreneurship, scientific consulting, science dialogue and research and development with society.[3] Alongside the existence of the necessary institutional prerequisites, the quality of transfer depends on ‘more or less comprehensive, forward-looking, longer-term and interactive or dialogical processes’.[4] Accordingly, ‘a simple linear model of transfer in the sense of transferring already acquired explicit and documented knowledge to other areas of society is unrealistic in most cases and falls short’.[5] The TransferLab at gd:c is guided by the purpose of developing persuasive and innovative transfer, and Global Munich is one of its best examples. The historical data and sources on global places in Munich that our colleagues at the history department have gathered provide the raw material for a long-term transfer process that does not presuppose an epistemic conclusion, but expands and creates new knowledge on the basis of dialogue. The process pursues five principal goals:
  1. rooting the concept of dis:connective globalisation in the documentation of concrete local examples
  2. illuminating Munich’s municipal history and present from a new globally dis:connected perspective
  3. involving gd:c staff and fellows in a transfer project right at their doorstep
  4. systematically planning and implementing transfer activities, ranging from (dialogue-oriented) research communication to participatory processes involving non-academic stakeholders
  5. making the concept of dis:connectivity accessible to target groups outside the university

(Photo: Adobe Stock, adapted by the author)

Modules of Global Munich

Global Munich operates across these diverse transfer contexts with three modules, each of which relates to both content and methodology:
  • opening the historical perspective to (interdisciplinary) contemporary references
  • involving gd:c staff and fellows
  • involving stakeholders outside the university

Opening the historical perspective to (interdisciplinary) contemporary references

Global Munich is developing a collection of global historical sites in Munich. One component is expanding the range of sources to contemporary references and other, less historical perspectives. A transfer perspective recommends this because communication is successful precisely when it is relevant and current. So, where is dis:connection currently materialising in Munich? Integrating contemporary sources aims to highlight both the ubiquity as well as the complexity of globalisation processes and to infer new connections that define Munich as a global city. The project maintains the historical view of a rich urban history while seeking points of connection in the present. To extend the historical material, this historical knowledge is linked to new contexts from other disciplines and non-academic sources.

Involving staff and fellows

The core of global dis:connect are the research fellows. They enrich our academic exchange and add new perspectives to the discussion on dis:connectivity. Beyond broadening the question of where dis:connectivity appears historically and presently in Munich, Global Munich provides staff and fellows the opportunity to apply their art and research to the city of Munich. It offers a framework for exchanging ideas on our underlying research question through the location of Munich. Unlike colloquia or conferences, however, this exchange does not heed academic rules. There is no right or wrong, no obligation to participate in anything and no pressure to publish. The focus is on the curiosity about what constitutes dis:connectivity and where it appears in Munich. In addition to the TransferLab’s own research, the output of fellows and staff can feed into conclusive results. In this respect, Global Munich is based on cooperation and exchange that combines different bodies of knowledge in conversation about the city. This can include roundtables, walks, coffee talks and similar formats. The project is a space for dynamic, spontaneous exchange between fellows and staff. Transfer presupposes an open-ended exchange. Global Munich nudges staff and fellows to apply their knowledge in a new context, eliciting unusual insights and exciting discussions. Participation is voluntary, aiming to go beyond our research.

Involving stakeholders outside the university

The third module follows from the assumption that a project called Global Munich cannot be thought of solely from an academic point of view. Our circumstances are privileged. Public funding makes us independent of short-term economic vacillations. Without neglecting research, transfer adds a dimension of academic work. By reaching out beyond to diverse actors in Munich's urban society, new perspectives and sources for research emerge. Likewise, the diversity of urban society becomes methodologically visible. The focus is an open-ended exchange, without commitment to a final result, preferring a multi-layered image of Munich developed by project partners, stakeholders and communities. Global Munich is designed to be open-ended and to adapt through non-linear dialogue. Transfer aims to develop and explore of research perspectives with partners outside the university. The project attempts to go beyond typical academic work, to reflect on them and to complement them with practical, problem-solving research. By looking ‘outside’, scientific work changes. Global Munich proves that transfer can meaningfully complement research in the humanities and social sciences.

Formats of public documentation

This text could only provide a rough sketch of the possibilities for locating globalisation processes in Munich. Global Munich aims to explore where globalisation takes place in urban space as concretely and practically as possible and to make it accessible with texts, images and sources. Such documentation will form the conclusion of the project and will be compiled until spring 2025 as a test of global dis:connect’s hypotheses about dis:connectivity with reference to real-world examples. Various opportunities for communication emerge in the course of revising and expanding the non-academic source material on global places in Munich. Global Munich will continue to integrate narratives from our neighbours and cooperation partners.   [1] For more on the Transfer Lab, consult our webpage: https://www.globaldisconnect.org/transferlab/. [2] Wissenschaftsrat, Perspektiven des deutschen Wissenschaftssystems (Cologne, Bielefeld, 2013), 2, https://www.wissenschaftsrat.de/download/archiv/3228-13.html. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are by the author. [3] Andrea Frank et al., Transferbarometer: Executive Summary, Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft (Essen, 2022), https://www.stifterverband.org/transferbarometer/executive-summary. [4] Wissenschaftsrat, Wissens- und Technologietransfer als Gegenstand institutioneller Strategien (Weimar, 2016), 11, https://www.wissenschaftsrat.de/download/archiv/5665-16.html. [5] Wissenschaftsrat, Wissens- und Technologietransfer.

Bibliography

Frank, Andrea, Cornels Lehmann-Brauns, Frauke Lohr, Arne Meyer-Haake, and Daniel Riesenberg. Transferbarometer: Executive Summary. Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft (Essen: 2022). https://www.stifterverband.org/transferbarometer/executive-summary. Wissenschaftsrat. Perspektiven Des Deutschen Wissenschaftssystems. (Cologne, Bielefeld: 2013). https://www.wissenschaftsrat.de/download/archiv/3228-13.html. ———. Wissens- Und Technologietransfer Als Gegenstand Institutioneller Strategien. (Weimar: 2016). https://www.wissenschaftsrat.de/download/archiv/5665-16.html.  
citation information:
Steinau, Christian, 'Global Munich - a transfer project by global dis:connect', Ben Kamis ed. gd:c blog. Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect, 2 October, 2023, https://www.globaldisconnect.org/10/02/global-munich-a-transfer-project-by-global-disconnect/.
Continue Reading

David Motadel takes up fellowship

In September David Motadel commenced his term as a fellow at global dis:connect. Welcome. David Motadel is an associate professor of international history at the LSE. A former Gates Scholar at Cambridge, he has held visiting positions at Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Sciences Po and the Sorbonne. At gd:c he is working on a global history of Europe’s empires around the Second World War, 1935-1948, exploring the history of the war in the imperial world, its impact on colonial subjects; the history of the colonial soldiers who fought in Europe’s armies; the history of anti-colonial movements during the war, from the Viet Minh to the Quit India movement; and the war’s impact on the end of empire and twentieth-century world order. Continue Reading

Günther Sandner joins global dis:connect

A warm welcome to our new fellow Günther Sandner who joins global dis:connect in early September. Günther Sandner is a political scientist and historian. He works as a research fellow at the Institute Vienna Circle (University of Vienna) and teaches civic education extramurally. His research includes the history of logical empiricism and Isotype.   His project at gd:c, Following Isotype: visual languages and universal symbols in the decades after 1945, deals with projects that aimed to overcome the active absence of a universal language and to establish one with the help of pictures, graphics, symbols and pictograms. Its focus is on the 1950s and 1960s. Continue Reading