This edition of ReCentGlobe’s Druckfrisch Book Discussions on march 07 2023 at ReCentGlobe features the book “African Activists in a Decolonising World: The Making of an Anticolonial Culture, 1952–1966” by Ismay Milford, published by Cambridge University Press in the Global and International History Series. Three experts in the field joins the author Ismay Milford to critique the book and discuss its contributions to the global history of anticolonialism and decolonisation. Many thanks for the organization to Steffi Marung and Roman Krawielicki!

Author: Ismay Milford is a historian based at ReCentGlobe, with research interests in East and Central Africa, activism, education, religion, and Cold War information politics. The book is based on her PhD thesis, awarded by the European University Institute (Florence) in 2019.

Discussants:

• Ana Moledo is a PhD student in the project ‘“Free radicals”? Political mobilities and postcolonial re-spatialization processes in the second half of the 20th century’ within the SFB 1199 at Leipzig University. Her research interests lie in the field of global and transnational history, particularly with regard to colonialism and decolonization, transnational activism and radical politics and the Cold War in Southern Africa.

• Dr John Njenga Karugia is a researcher at the Institute of Asian and African Studies, Humboldt University, Berlin, and an independent consultant. His research specialisms include Chinese migration to Africa and the Indian Ocean as a memory space.

• Dr Mariusz Lukasiewicz is a historian of Southern Africa, based at the Leipzig University Centre for African Studies, with research and teaching interests in the history of economic institutions, financial intermediaries and business organisations.

Chair: The event will be chaired by Dr Steffi Marung, director of the Global and European Studies Institute and PI of “‘Free radicals’? Political mobilities and post-colonial processes of re-spatialization in the second half of the 20th century” at the Collaborative Research Centre (SFB) 1199 at Leipzig University.

About the book: As wars of liberation in Africa and Asia shook the post-war world, a cohort of activists from East and Central Africa, specifically the region encompassing present-day Malawi, Zambia, Uganda and mainland Tanzania, asked what role they could play in the global anticolonial landscape. Through the perspective of these activists, Ismay Milford presents a social and intellectual history of decolonisation and anticolonialism in the 1950s and 1960s. Drawing on multi-archival research, she brings together their trajectories for the first time, reconstructing the anticolonial culture that underpinned their journeys to Delhi, Cairo, London, Accra and beyond. Forming committees and publishing pamphlets, these activists worked with pan-African and Afro-Asian solidarity projects, Cold War student internationals, spiritual internationalists and diverse pressure groups. Milford argues that a focus on their everyday labour and knowledge production highlights certain limits of transnational and international activism, opening up a critical – albeit less heroic – perspective on the global history of anticolonial work and thought.

For more info, see the publisher: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/african-activists-in-a-decolonising-world/9628C2584632573703380F18B4EEE581