Last year I was invited to return to Ghana. I hadn’t been there for a decade. Although I had continued to read and write about Africa, my focus had been more on a macro-level (global) perspective than a local one. Africa in global history; Africa as part of processes of globalization; portals and ports of globalization in Africa. Africans as actors and agents of globalization but also its victims. Continue reading ““Africa is the continent of death” – Pessimistic realizations and future visions”
Holger Weiss
Inspired by space
About a year ago my colleagues and I decided to establish the Global History Laboratory. It was at a point when I had reached a crossroads in my own attempt to locate and position myself as a global historian. I had witnessed the expansion of global history as a vibrant and exciting perspective during the last decades. For me as an Africa(n) historian it was a rather typical step to take – several of my mentors, colleagues and friends belonged to the forerunners in the field and were leading advocates of challenging methodological nationalism and Eurocentrism. Questions, such as analysing global flows, networks or connections and their local articulations, opened hitherto closed spaces. Africa became part of the global story of human kind and ‘the global’ emerged as a complex factor that had to be defined and analysed. Was it only one of the new buzzwords that had been created, fluid and amorphous without any clear substance, or was there something more in it? What, then, was this ‘something’? Continue reading “Holger Weiss”