070284 UE Fremdsprachen in der Geschichtswissenschaft 1 (2025S)

This course guides students through reading and discussing historical sources in Serbo-Croatian (-Bosnian), Swahili, and English. Drawing on archival documents, newspaper articles, and ego-documents such as travelogues in their original wording, we will examine 20th-century en-counters between Southeast Europe and (South)East Africa from the interwar period through the decades of the global Cold War. Our focus on working with two non-Western languages in history is an important intervention in the field of global history, where the Anglophone domi-nance of both research and publication processes has been criticized by scholars in the field.

As historian Jeremy Adelman noted, despite global history’s “mantras of integration and the inclusion on the planetary scale, global history came with its own segregation – starting with language. […] As English became Globish, there was less incentive to learn foreign languages – the indispensable key to bridging ourselves and others” (Adelman 2017). With this seminar we encourage students to utilize their language proficiency in historical science and approach sources in their original language thus developing awareness for language-related nuances in interpretation and the mediating role of English.

Conceptually will focus on the East-South movement of people, goods and ideas which embody region-transcending entanglements, from the pioneer connections in the interwar period via individual East European ‘explorers’ visiting Africa until a more robust bilateral state relations in the Cold War context. Taking pointers from the burgeoning literature trying to ‘deprovincial-ize’ Eastern European and African history beyond the dominant narratives of Western-led globalization we want to see “how people from the eastern and central parts of Europe [as well as from South-East Africa] positioned themselves in a world growing closer together since the middle of the nineteenth century and how they shaped this entangled world.” (Castryck-Naumann 2021: 1)