Preliminary Programme

Wed 23 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Thu 24 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 17.30

Fri 25 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Sat 26 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

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Wednesday 23 April 2014 11.00 - 13.00
A-2 WOR16 Transnational Social History
Hörsaal 07 raised ground floor
Network: World History Chair: Florencia Peyrou
Organizer: Florencia Peyrou Discussants: -
Olavi Fält : Global and Networked Science: Yokohama as a Stage for Western Science in the World during the Early 1870s
One of the main aspects in the development of globalization has been the harmonization of the principles of scientific thinking, and its impact on the increase in worldwide mutual dependence. Using globalization and network theories, this paper examines the Japanese city of Yokohama as an example of Western scientific influence ... (Show more)
One of the main aspects in the development of globalization has been the harmonization of the principles of scientific thinking, and its impact on the increase in worldwide mutual dependence. Using globalization and network theories, this paper examines the Japanese city of Yokohama as an example of Western scientific influence in the world during the early 1870s. It deals with the period after the establishment of Western cultural hegemony in Japan. By the 1870s, the Western community that had emerged in Yokohama since 1859 as a consequence of Western expansion had already developed a wide range of practices and activities in different cultural areas, for example in science.
First, the paper discusses the position of Western culture with respect to Eastern cultures in the increasingly global world, then Yokohama’s development into a new part of the Western cultural network, and finally science as a promoter of Western cultural hegemony. For that purpose, the activity of the Asiatic Society of Japan in the years 1872 and 1874 is chosen for particular scrutiny. The scientific activities of Westerners in Japan are analyzed with the help of news printed in the Western newspapers that were published in Japan.
Lectures held at monthly meetings of the Asiatic Society of Japan were quite clearly divided into different topic areas. Depictions of travels were important, as Japan outside the treaty ports was completely unknown to most. Another topic area was related to getting with Japan’s culture. Japanese language, religion, history, customs, and practices as a new field of research were interesting from the viewpoint of Western science. The third large category was comprised of topics related in one way or other to the development of Japan according to the Western model, such as metallurgy, meteorology, botany, hydrographical surveying, and banking. In these topics the Westerners willingly acted as teachers, not in the least to prove their own cultural superiority. The fourth topic area dealt with the most common new scientific questions, such as optics, Herbert Spencer’s theories, and current phenomena in astronomy.
In all, Yokohama’s new position as a part of the Western cultural network, the establishment and activity of the Asiatic Society of Japan, and the scientific presentations that were held are an excellent example of how Western scientific hegemony advanced and spread its network in the nineteenth century, in this case with the British Royal Asiatic Society functioning as its center. Western science was used to first take over the new, unknown culture by linking it to the global scientific network. After that it was used as a fresh scientific viewpoint, field, and material in the promotion and application of scientific knowledge. At the same, time it communicated the transcendence and universal applicability of the Western conception of science.
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Hugo García : Anti-fascism as a Transnational Culture: the Case of Spain during the 1930s
The transnational perspective seems ideally fitted to analyze large political and ideological movements in the 20th Century. Anti-fascism, which flourished in Europe and elsewhere between 1933 and 1945, appears indeed as the ideal type of a transnational movement. Its main advocates –socialists, communists, anarchists, freemasons– belonged to long-standing international organizations ... (Show more)
The transnational perspective seems ideally fitted to analyze large political and ideological movements in the 20th Century. Anti-fascism, which flourished in Europe and elsewhere between 1933 and 1945, appears indeed as the ideal type of a transnational movement. Its main advocates –socialists, communists, anarchists, freemasons– belonged to long-standing international organizations having strong channels of communication and social networks. Anti-fascist militants had therefore a transnational consciousness (Horn, 1996) and viewed politics from a cosmopolitan perspective, constantly engaging in distant conflicts, whether in Spain or in China (Prezioso, 2007; Buchanan, 2012). Anti-fascism was in itself a transnational culture, which blended together influences from all over the world in a mix which allowed militants to recognize one another as part of a single imagined community.

Historians of anti-fascism agree on its transnational nature, yet very few (Horn 1996, Copsey 2011, Richet 2012) have studied it in transnational terms. This paper attempts to do this by emphasizing the transnational features of anti-fascism in Spain, a country where this was a late and imported phenomenon, but which became the center of the global anti-fascist struggle during the Civil War (1936-39). First, I will describe the variegated channels through which the Spanish left came to know and fear Fascism long before it appeared in Spain –translations of foreign books and articles, connections to political exiles from Italy and Germany, visits by Spaniards to Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Then, I will analyze various transnational-elements in Spanish anti-fascist culture as it evolved during the 1930s –foreign ideas such as the Popular Front, foreign gestures such as the clenched fist, foreign causes such as Thälmann, foreign aesthetics such as political photomontage.

Bibliography

Buchanan, Tom, “Shanghai-Madrid Axis’? Comparing British Responses to the Conflicts in Spain and China, 1936-39”, Contemporary European History 21.4 (November 2012), pp. 533-552.

Copsey, Nigel, “Communists and the inter-war anti-Fascist struggle in the United States and Britain”, Labour History Review, 76 (3), pp. 184-206.

Horn, Gerd-Rainer, European socialists respond to fascism: Ideology, Activism and Contingency in the 1930s, Oxford University Press, 1996.

Prezioso, Stéphanie, “Aujourd’hui en Espagne, demain en Italie: l’exil antifasciste italien et la prise d’armes révolutionnaire”, Vingtième siècle, 93, 2007, p. 79-92.

Richet, Isabelle, “Marion Cave Roselli and the Transnational Women’s Antifascist networks”, Journal of Women´s History, 24(3), 2012.
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Juan Luis Simal : Exile and Transnational History, 1775-1848.
In a world pervaded by globalization, in the last years transnational history has become a fashionable way to look at almost every aspect of the past. This paper interrogates the application of a transnational perspective to the study of exile in the Age of Revolutions. The purpose is two-fold: 1) ... (Show more)
In a world pervaded by globalization, in the last years transnational history has become a fashionable way to look at almost every aspect of the past. This paper interrogates the application of a transnational perspective to the study of exile in the Age of Revolutions. The purpose is two-fold: 1) to acknowledge the benefits of the transnational approach for studying the phenomenon of exile in Europe and the Americas in this time-period, especially in order to understand the parallel formation of international liberalism and European counterrevolution; 2) to question some of the limitations of this approach, especially if it means neglecting the national framework in a context of intense nation-building, like the late 18th- and early19th-centuries. An interpretation that understands exiles merely as transnational agents misses how important for them the nation was, for it shaped both their politics and their identities. (Show less)

Mercedes Yusta : The Unión de Mujeres Españolas and the Women International Democratic Federation: Transnational Women’s Activism in the Struggle against Francoism
In the 1940s, during their exile in France a group of Spanish Republican women with close ties to the Spanish Communist Party founded a women's antifascist organization called the Unión de Mujeres Españolas, heir of the 1930s women's antifascist group Agrupación de Mujeres Antifascistas. Its aim was to provide Spanish ... (Show more)
In the 1940s, during their exile in France a group of Spanish Republican women with close ties to the Spanish Communist Party founded a women's antifascist organization called the Unión de Mujeres Españolas, heir of the 1930s women's antifascist group Agrupación de Mujeres Antifascistas. Its aim was to provide Spanish women exiles with a political network as a means to participate in the struggle against the Franco dictatorship. The Unión de Mujeres Españolas became a member of the Women’s International Democratic Federation, a transnational women's organization founded in 1945 to defend world peace and to fight against the last remnants of fascism. These organizations shared common objectives, political discourse and even leaders. Dolores Ibárruri, La Pasionaria, was respectively president and vice-president of the two groups. As a result, transnational influence provided by the WDIF was used by Spanish communist women in order to denounce Franco’s crimes and legitimize anti-francoist resistance. On the other hand, both organizations developed a gendered discourse, especially through the use of motherhood, as a strategy of empowerment to legitimize women's political action in the public sphere. But this discourse was also employed to defend sovietic interests in the context of the beginning of the Cold War.
This paper will provide a gendered analysis of these organizations, their aims, their successes and also their contradictions. We will pay special attention to some questions about the relationship between the two organizations : how Spanish women dealed with national identity and transnational activism ; which transferts of political discourses and practices were established between both organizations ; and in which ways the two of them dealed between their will to empower women in the public sphere and an apparent submission to traditional gender roles.
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