Course Description
Drawing on cutting-edge interdisciplinary scholarship surrounding the “global city” and anti-colonialism, this course explores how urban spaces became and acted as centers of anti-colonialism. Students will critically examine how metropoles around the world have acted as hubs for anti-colonial networks between the late nineteenth century and the late twentieth century. The global cities and the anti-colonial spaces within them expanded and evolved between the age of high imperialism and decolonization. Key concepts to be explored include anti-imperialism, Pan-Africanism, Pan-Asianism, Non-Alignment, NIEO, international socialism, globalization, and economic development.

Syllabus structure
Part I: Global Cities, Imperial Expansion, and Anti-Colonial Networks
Part II: Anti-Colonial Metropolises - Case Studies

Learning outcomes
This course takes a comparative approach to give students improved insights into how cities can be understood as global urban spaces of globalization and its discontents — as both centers of imperial power as well of anti-colonial dissent.

The course will be taught through a combination of lectures, group discussion of weekly readings, and small-group exercises. Students are expected to contribute to class. This will also include one oral presentation and a final research paper.
Students will be expected to do the required readings and to attend class regularly. Attendance is compulsory for all students. Required readings will be designated on a weekly basis.
Group work mixing nationalities will be encouraged. Research essays must include bibliographical references and footnotes.
The course will involve site visits (e.g. Biennale Arte 2024 – 60th Anniversary Art Exhibition)

Evaluation method
Essay – A short 2000-word research essay – 50% of the final grade.
Presentation –An oral presentation in class – 40% of the final grade.
Class participation – Overall class participation, in terms of both attendance and interaction, will count for 10% of the final grade.

Bibliography

Simon Curtis, Global Cities and Global Order (2016).

Diane E. Davis, “Cities in Global Context: A Brief Intellectual History,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29 (2005): 92-109.

Babacar M’Baye, Black Cosmopolitanism and Anticolonialism (2017).

Faranak Miraftab, Neema Kudva, eds., Cities of the Global South Reader (2015).

Xuefei Ren, Roger Keil, eds., The Globalizing Cities Reader (2018).

A. K. Sandoval-Strausz, Nancy H. Kwak, eds., Making Cities Global: The Transnational Turn in Urban History (2018).

Goran Therborn, Cities of Power: The Urban, the National, the Popular, the Global (2021).

Theodore Hermann Von Laue, The Global City: Freedom, Power, and Necessity in the Age of World Revolutions (1969).

Case Studies

Select case studies will be explored in seminars. Students will also be encouraged to build upon the examples below for their essays and presentations. Case studies might include:

Addis Ababa

Bernhard H. Bayerlein, “Addis Ababa, Rio De Janeiro and Moscow 1935: The Double Failure of Comintern Anti-Fascism and Anti-Colonialism,” in Kasper Braskén, Nigel Copsey, and David J. Featherstone, eds., Anti-Fascism in a Global Perspective (2020), chap. 11.

Algiers

Jeffrey James Byrne, Mecca of Revolution: Algeria, Decolonization, and the Third World Order (2016).

Bandung

Su Lin Lewis, Carolien Stolte, “Other Bandungs: Afro-Asian Internationalisms in the Early Cold War,” Journal of World History 30 (2019): 1-19.

Gerard McCann, “Where was the Afro in Afro-Asian Solidarity?: Africa's 'Bandung Moment' in 1950s Asia,” Journal of World History 30 (2019): 89-123

Andrew Phillips, “Beyond Bandung: The 1955 Asian-African Conference and Its Legacies for International Order,” Australian Journal of International Affairs 70 (2016): 329-341

Sinderpal Singh, “From Delhi to Bandung: Nehru, ‘Indian-ness” and ‘Pan-Asian-ness,’” South Asia 34 (2011): 51-64

Berlin

Nathanael Kuck, “Anti-colonialism in a Post-imperial Environment – The Case of Berlin, 1914-33,” Journal of Contemporary History 49 (2014): 134-159.

Douglas T. McGetchin, “Asian Anti-Imperialism and Leftist Antagonism in Weimar Germany,” in Joanne Cho, et al., eds., Transcultural Encounters Between Germany and India (2013)

Fredrik Petersson, “Hub of the Anti-Imperialist Movement: The League Against Imperialism and Berlin, 1927-1933,” International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 16 (2014): 49-71.

Bombay

Preshant Kidambi, “Nationalism and the City in Colonial India: Bombay, c. 1890-1940,” Journal of Urban History 38 (2012): 950-967

Aashish Velkar, ‘Swadeshi Capitalism in Colonial Bombay,’ Historical Journal 64 (2021): 1009-1034.

Brussels

Daniel Laqua, The Age of Internationalism and Belgium, 1880-1930 (2015).

Michele Louro, Comrades Against Imperialism: Nehru, India, and Interwar Internationalism (2018)

Michele Louro et al., eds., The League Against Imperialism: Lives and Afterlives (2020).

Fredrik Petersson, “‘A Man of the World’. Encounters and Articulations of Anti-Imperialism as Cosmopolitanism,” Twentieth Century Communism 10 (2016)

Jean-Baptiste Malet, “Pacifists and the Capital of the World,” Le Monde Diplomatique (Sept. 2022), https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2022/09/MALET/65036

Budapest

James Mark, et al., ed., Socialism Goes Global: The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the Age of Decolonization (2022).

Zoltan Ginelli, “The Clash of Colonialisms: Hungarian Communist and Anti-Communist Decolonialism in the Third World,”

Bucharest

Barbara B. Crane, “The Politics of Bucharest: Population, Development, and the New International Economic Order,” Population and Development Review 1 (1975): 87-114

Corina Dobos, “For a more just world”: population and politics at the World Population Conference, Bucharest 1974,” Romanian Journal of Population Studies 9 (2015): 152-164

Buenos Ares

Steven Hyland, Jr., “A Sacred Duty: Nationalist and Anti-Imperialist Activisms in Buenos Aires, 1916-1930,” Journal of Urban History 46 (2020): 1317-1340

Cairo

W. J. Berridge, “Imperialist and Nationalist Voices in the Struggle for Egyptian Independence, 1919-22,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 42 (2014): 420-439.

Noor Khan, Egyptian-Indian Nationalist Collaboration and the British Empire (2011).
Zoe Genevieve LeBlanc, “Circulating Anti-Colonial Cairo: Decolonizing Information and Constructing the Third World in Egypt, 1952-1966” (Ph.D. diss., Vanderbilt University, 2019).

Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (2007) Chapter 3, “President Wilson Arrives in Cairo.”

C. Alison McIntosh and Jason L. Finkle, “The Cairo Conference on Population and Development: A New Paradigm?,” Population and Development Review 21 (1995): 223-260

Nancy Reynolds, A City Consumed: Urban Commerce, the Cairo Fire, and the Politics of Decolonization in Egypt (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2012), chap. 3.

Calcutta

Manu Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space (2004).

Michele Louro, Comrades Against Imperialism: Nehru, India, and Interwar Internationalism (2018).

Kris Manjapara, Age of Entanglement: German and Indian Intellectuals Across Empire (2014).

Benjamin Zachariah, Developing India (2005).

Delhi

Tim Harper, Underground Asia: Global Revolutionaries and the Assault on Empire (2020).

Dublin

Kate O’Malley, Ireland, India and Empire: Indo-Irish Radical Connections, 1919-64 (2017).

Havana

Barry Carr, ‘“Across Seas and Borders”: Chartin the Webs of Radical Internationalism in the Circum-Caribbean,’ in Exile and the Politics of Exclusion in the Americas, eds. Luis Roniger, James N. Green, and Pablo Yankelvich (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2012).

Hong Kong

Peter Hamilton, Made in Hong Kong: Transpacific Networks and a New History of Globalization (2021).

Lu Yan, Crossed Paths: Labor Activism and Colonial Governance in Hong Kong, 1938-1958 (2019).

Istanbul

Burak Sayim, “Occupied Istanbul as a Cominternian Hub: Sailors, Soldiers, and Post-Imperial Networks (1918-1923),” Itinerario 46 (2022): 128-149.

Jakarta

Tim Harper, Underground Asia: Global Revolutionaries and the Assault on Empire (2020).

Doreen Lee, “Styling the Revolution: Masculinities, Youth, and Street Politics in Jakarta, Indonesia,” Journal of Urban History 37 (2011): 933-951.

London

Stephen Howe, Anticolonialism in British Politics: The Left and the End of Empire, 1918-1964 (1993).

Winston James, “Letters from London in Black and Red: Claude McKay, Marcus Garvey and the Negro World,” History Workshop Journal 85 (2018): 281-293.

Marc Matera, Black London: The Imperial Metropolis and Decolonization in the Twentieth Century (2015).

Nicholas Owen, The British Left and India: Metropolitan Anti-Imperialism, 1885-1947 (2007)

Jonathan Schneer, “Anti-Imperial London: The Pan-African Conference of 1900,” in Felix Driver and David Gilbert, eds., Imperial Cities (2017): 254-267

Neelam Srivastava, “A Partisan Press: Sylvia Pankhurst, British Anti-colonialism and the Crisis of Empire,” in Italian Colonialism and Resistances to Empire, 1930-1970 (2018)

Mexico City

Roland Burke, “Competing for the Last Utopia?: The NIEO, Human Rights, and the World Conference for the International Women’s Year, Mexico City, June 1975,” Humanity 6 (2015): 47-61.

Thomas K. Lindner, A City Against Empire: Transnational Anti-Imperialism in Mexico City, 1920-30 (Liverpool University Press, 2023, Open Access).

Robert Chao Romerio, The Chinese in Mexico, 1882-1940 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2010).

Christy Thornton, “A Mexican International Economic Order? Tracing the Hidden Roots of the Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States,” Humanity 9 (2018): 389-421.

New York City

Jennifer Guglielmo, Living the Revolution: Italian Women’s Resistance and Radicalism in New York City, 1880-1945 (2010).

Stuart A. Kallen, Marcus Garvey and the Back to Africa Movement (2006).

Neelam Srivastava, “Harlem’s Ethiopia: Literary Pan-Africanism and the Italian Invasion,” Italian Colonialism and Resistances to Empire, 1930-1970 (2018).

Ronald J. Stephens and Adam Ewing, eds., Global Garveyism (2019)

Paris

Jennifer Anne Boittin, Colonial Metropolis: The Urban Grounds of Anti-Imperialism and Feminism in Interwar Paris (2010).

Michael Fabre, From Harlem to Paris: Black American Writers in France, 1840-1980 (1993).

Michael Goebel, Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism (2015).

J. Ayo Langley, “Pan Africanism in Paris, 1924-1936,” Journal of Modern African Studies 7 (1969): 69-94.

Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (2007).

Seoul

Wonsik Jeong, “The Urban Development Politics of Seoul as a Colonial City,” Journal of Urban History 27 (2001): 158-177.

Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (2007) Chapter 6 “Seizing the Moment in Seoul.”

Shanghai

Tim Harper, Underground Asia: Global Revolutionaries and the Assault on Empire (2020).

Tehran

Arang Keshavarzian, Ali Mirsepassi, eds., Global 1979: Geographies and Histories of the Iranian Revolution (2021).

Tokyo

Alex Finn Macartney, “The Japanese New Left, the Vietnam War, and Anti-Imperial Protest,” in Alexander Sedlmaier, ed., Protest in the Vietnam War Era (2022): 235-261.

Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (1991).

Venice/Italy

Federico Ferretti, “Anti-Colonialism in Italy in the Age of Empire (1875-1914),”
Guido Panvini, “Third Worldism in Italy,” in S. Berger and C. Cornelissen, eds., Marxist Historical Cultures and Social Movements During the Cold War (2019): 289-308.

Antonino Scalia, “The Manifold Partisan: Anti-Fascism, Anti-Imperialism, and Leftist Internationalism in Italy, 1964-76,” Radical History Review 138 (2020): 11-38.

Neelam Srivastava, “Anti-Colonialism and the Italian Left: Resistances to the Fascist Invasion of Ethiopia,” International Journal of Post-Colonial Studies 8 (2006): 413-429.

Neelam Srivastava, “Italian Anti-colonialism and the Ethiopian War,” “Internationalism and Third-Worldism in Postwar Italy,” and “African Decolonization and the Resistance Aesthetics of Pontecorvo, Orsini and Pirelli,” in Italian Colonialism and Resistances to Empire, 1930-1970 (2018)

Petra Terhoeven, “The Hour of the Gun: Anti-Imperialist Struggle as the New Left’s Hope of Salvation in Germany and Italy,” in S. Berger and C. Cornelissen, eds., Marxist Historical Cultures and Social Movements During the Cold War (2019): 257-287.

Last updated: January 22, 2024