10 Feb 2020 3:00pm - 5:00pm CRASSH Meeting Room, Alison Richard Building, Cambridge, CB3 9DT

Description

*This session has been cancelled – apologies for the inconvenience*

The Global Imaginaries through the Ages reading group is a collective endeavour to investigate, interpret, and discuss imaginaries of the global in different sites and especially in different times. We will chronologically go through eight periods of human history, from the ‘first societies’ of the ‘Neolithic agricultural revolution’ to the ‘Classics’, ‘Middle Ages,’ and ‘Modernity’.

The question in focus will be how collectives and individuals in these respective periods of history have conceived themselves in, and in relation to, the world. What was their imaginary of the global? When – if ever – have subjects started to conceive of themselves as global, or part of a global? We will discuss how useful it is to speak of a global imaginary and the extent to which this concept must be tied to a specific temporality. Furthermore, we will reflect on our own outlooks to the world and try to historicise our respective understanding(s) of globality, both as a mode of subjectification and as a historical tool: how can we study historical subjects in their relation to and understanding of ‘the global’ without projecting our geographical and temporal understandings of globality onto the material? In order to stimulate these discussions, the reading group will draw on a range of texts that not only span millennia but also focus on different aspects of ‘globality’, both material and ideational: agricultural labour, knowledge production, migration, empire, trade, and the diffusion of ideologies and worldviews.

This reading group is convened by Felix Anderl. If you have any queries about the events or reading, please don’t hesitate to email.
Lent Term – 10 February 2020:

Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan And the Making of the Modern World (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2017).

Charles H Parker, Global Interactions in the Early Modern Age, 1400–1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2010).

 

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gloknos is initially funded for 5 years by the European Research Council through a Consolidator Grant awarded to Dr Inanna Hamati-Ataya for her project ARTEFACT (2017-2022). ARTEFACT is funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Framework Programme for Research and Innovation (ERC grant agreement no. 724451). For information about gloknos or ARTEFACT please contact the administrator in the first instance.

Programme

28 October 2019

Prehistory: Agriculture and the Societal Imaginary

James Scott, Against the Grain (Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2017).

11 November 2019

Mobile Knowledges before the Classics

Eleanor Robson, Ancient Knowledge Networks: A Social Geography of Cuneiform Scholarship in First-Millennium Assyria and Babylonia (London: UCL Press, 2019).

25 November 2019

CANCELLED

9 December 2019

Global Classics?

Ray Laurence and Francesco Trifilò, ‘The Global and the Local in the Roman Empire: Connectivity and Mobility from an Urban Perspective’, in Globalisation and the Roman World: World History, Connectivity and Material Culture, ed. Martin Pitts and Miguel John Versluys (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014): pp. 99-122.

Michael Sommer, ‘OIKOYMENH: longue durée perspectives on ancient Mediterranean ‘globality’’, in Globalisation and the Roman World: World History, Connectivity and Material Culture, ed. Martin Pitts and Miguel John Versluys (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014): pp. 175-197.

27 January 2020

Economic Globalisation in the late First Millennium

Jason D Hawkes and Stephanie Wynne-Jones, ‘India in Africa: Trade Goods and Connections of the Late First Millenium’, Afriques 6 (2015): Open Access Online Publication.

Edward Pollard and Okeny Charles Kinyera, ‘The Swahili Coast and the Indian Ocean Trade Patterns in the 7th–10th Centuries CE’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 43, 5 (2017): pp. 927-947.

10 February 2020

Imperial Imaginaries and the Making of Modernity

Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan And the Making of the Modern World (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2017).

Charles H Parker, Global Interactions in the Early Modern Age, 1400–1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2010).

24 February 2020

Towards the Modern Subject

Catherine Holmes and Naomi Standen, ‘Introduction: Towards a Global Middle Ages’, Past & Present 238, 13 (2018): pp. 1-44.

Manfred Steger, ‘Chapter Four: Third-World Liberationism and Other Cold War Isms: No End to Ideology’, in The Rise of the Global Imaginary: Political Ideologies from the French Revolution to the Global War on Terror (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008): pp. 129-169.

Manfred Steger, ‘Chapter Five: Market Globalism and Justice Globalism in the Roaring Nineties’, in The Rise of the Global Imaginary: Political Ideologies from the French Revolution to the Global War on Terror (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008): pp. 170-212.

9 March 2020

The Imaginaries We Were Born Into

Quinn Slobodian, The Globalists. The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).

James N Rosenau, The Study of Global Interdependence: Essays on Transnationalization of World Affairs (London: Pinter Publications, 1980).

23 March 2020

Hyper Globalism and the Retreat to the Local

Jan Aart Scholte and Roland Robertson (ed.s), ‘Globality’, in Encyclopedia of Globalization (New York and London: Routledge, 2007): pp. 524-526.

McKinsey Global Institute, ‘The Coming Global Labor Market’ (2007).

Morten Axel Pedersen, ‘Common Nonsense: A Review of Certain Recent Reviews of the “Ontological Turn”’, Anthropology of this Century 5 (2012): online publication.

James Laidlaw and Paolo Heywood, ‘One More Turn and You’re There’ Anthropology of this Century 7 (2013): online publication.

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