About Me Zoltán Ginelli által

About me

I’m an independent researcher and a critical geographer, historian of science and global historian. My research is in the geographies of knowledge, world-systems analysis, and the histories of geography, colonialism and racism, with a focus on the historical relations between Eastern Europe and the Global South or the Third World.

I am currently working on two books. One for Cambridge University Press with James Mark and Péter Apor about the global histories of Hungarian relations to colonialism and anti-colonialism in the long 20th century, entitled “Hungary Between the Colonial and Anti-Colonial Worlds”. The other is my individual book project based on my doctoral research about the global histories of the “quantitative revolution” in geography.

I founded the social media group Decolonizing Eastern Europe (Facebook, Twitter).

English Blog Zoltán Ginelli által
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Tracing the Global History of the Quantitative Revolution: The Transnational History of Central Place Theory

My book project is about the global histories of the “quantitative revolution” in geography. The quantitative revolution has been an epochal textbook chapter in geography’s canonical history, when the discipline transformed into a rigorous social science backed by predictive mathematical methods in the early Cold War. An iconic scientific concept of this quantitative movement, most notably related to Walter Christaller (1933) and August Lösch (1939), was central place theory (CPT). With the globalization of the quantitative revolution after its emergence from the Second World War in the United States, location theories such as CPT became widespread in urban and regional planning across the world. How did quantitative spatial analysis and planning develop in different parts of the world? In what different geographical contexts were location theories like CPT read, reinterpreted, applied, and mobilized? How were these often very different contexts connected? This book offers to fill this significant gap in geography’s twentieth century global history by deconstructing the mainstream Anglo-American narrative and tracing the quantitative revolution through the circulation and local applications of CPT in the “Second” and “Third” worlds and into the pre-Cold War era.

English Blog Zoltán Ginelli által

Hungary and Ghana: What do Their 1960s Forgotten Relations Tell Us about the ‘Southern Opening’ After 2015?

My paper for the international conference “Visegrad countries and Africa: History and Contemporaneity” held online on 27 April 2022. I follow a world-systemic and decolonial approach to investigate Hungarian semiperipheral positioning strategies in global colonial history by looking at the interactions and converging interests of Hungary and Ghana in the early 1960s.

English Blog Zoltán Ginelli által

‘Hungarian Indians’: Race, Colonialism and Memory Politics in Hungarian ‘Indian Play’

I talk about how semiperipheral “whiteness” should reconfigure our ideas of Eastern European racial and colonial history through the case of Hungarian ‘Indian play’. The “tradition” of whites playing out Native Americans in cultural and racial performances was often an antagonistic practice of anti-colonial solidarity and colonial appropriation. In the Eastern European case, it often became a way of contesting Western hegemony, but through mimicking Western colonial cultures of appropriation and “nativism”. Today, the Orbán government is building on this colonial and racial heritage through nationalist anti-communist memory politics.

English Blog Zoltán Ginelli által

The Return of the Colonial: Understanding the Role of Eastern Europe in Global Colonization Debates and Decolonial Struggles 

I was honored to present my paper The Return of the Colonial: Understanding the Role of Eastern Europe in Global Colonization Debates and Decolonial Struggles at the opening event of the Decolonize Hellas project and research platform on 19 May, 2021. In my paper, I introduced my world-sytemic approach to conceptualizing semiperipheral Hungarian and Eastern European colonial histories and decolonialism from a global perspective.

Magyar Blog Zoltán Ginelli által
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Magyarország Globálban: Elfeledett Kapcsolataink Ghánával

Ghána 1957-ben elsőként vált független szubszaharai afrikai országgá, méghozzá a legígéretesebbek egyikévé. Azonban Európa- és nyugatközpontú történelmi emlékezetünk elfeledtette velünk, hogy nekünk magyaroknak milyen fontos szerepünk is volt Ghána fejlődésében. Vajon hogyan érthetjük meg Magyarország globális történelmét a dekolonizáció és a gyarmati múltú Ghána felől nézve?

English Blog Zoltán Ginelli által
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János Fekete in Ghana

After President Nkrumah’s visit to Ghana in 1961, the president requested a wide range of expertise and investment projects from Hungary. Among them was the secret mission of János Fekete as a financial adviser in the summer of 1962 to work out currency management solutions for Ghana, which was heavily dependent on world market prices and loans from Western countries (USA, UK).

Magyar Blog Zoltán Ginelli által
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Fekete János Ghánában

Nkrumah ghánai elnök 1961-es látogatása után sokféle szakértői és beruházási megbízást kért Magyarországtól. Közéjük tartozott 1962 nyarán Fekete János titkos pénzügyi tanácsadói kiküldetése, hogy a nyugati országok hiteleitől (USA, Egyesült Királyság) és a világpiaci áraktól erősen függő Ghánának valutagazdálkodási megoldásokat dolgozzon ki.