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.
Címke: Africa
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).
Erdei Ferenc Afrikában
Erdei Ferenc a Hazafias Népfront Országos Tanácsának főtitkáraként és az országgyűlés mezőgazdasági bizottságának elnökeként vezette azt az 1964-es magyar parlamenti delegációt, amely Mali és Guinea mellett Ghánába is ellátogatott. Ez volt az első magyar parlamenti delegáció Ghánában. Erről is szót ejtek majd, amikor a pécsi Afrika-hét első napján egy órán át beszélek a magyar-ghánai kapcsolatainkról a globális történetírás megközelítésében.
The ‘Ghana Job’: Opening Semiperipheral Hungary to the Postcolonial World
This paper follows 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. The paper focuses on József Bognár, a hugely important but forgotten political figure in socialist era Hungarian economics and foreign economic policy-making. In 1963, Bognár founded a government think tank, the Centre for AfroAsian Research (CAAR) at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (renamed in 1973 as the Institute for World Economy). The institute evolved out of Bognár’s “Ghana job”: Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah, on the occasion of his Eastern European round-trip in 1961, asked Bognár to develop Ghana’s First Seven-Year Plan.
Global South Students in Eastern EuropE
Transperiphery Conversations #2 Photographer and curator Bartosz Nowicki in conversation with Zoltán Ginelli talk about the socialist era history of Global South students in Eastern Europe by focusing on Poland and Hungary, and introduce Nowicki’s Afro-PRL (Polish People’s Republic) project showcased in the exhibition.
Négritude and Pan-Africanism in Eastern EUrope
Transperiphery Conversations #3 Philosopher and cultural theorist Ovidiu Ţichindeleanu talks with Zoltán Ginelli about Négritude and Pan-Africanism in Eastern Europe by focusing on case studies and insights from Hungary and Romania.
The Transperiphery Movement Exhibition: Towards a Global History of Peripheral Connections
In Poliko Podcast’s 4th episode, Dávid Karas talks with Zoltán Ginelli, a Hungarian critical geographer whose research repositions the semi-peripheral experience of Hungarian modernization in a global context, by studying the many points of connections linking peoples, ideas, expertise, institutions and political utopias in Hungary to other peripheries in the postcolonial Global South. Zoltán has co-curated with Eszter Szakács a fantastic exhibition in Budapest entitled Transperiphery Movement, where he examines these trans-peripheral connections in collaboration with a host of artists and scholars. They talk about Zoltán’s own research on postcoloniality, race and global history from an Eastern European perspective, and the themes through which the exhibition examines these topics.
“Third way” development politics and culture war in Hungary after 1945
Check out our panel at the ASEEES Summer Convention in Zagreb in 14-16 June 2019, to be held at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb. Organizer: Zoltán Ginelli How did Hungarian politics, in […]
Szerelemre vágyó kannibálok
Szatmármegyei Közlöny, 1912, 38. évfolyam, 40. szám, október 6.
Magyar úti leírások és regényirodalom a gyarmati világról
Összegyűjtöttem egy kb. 800 könyvnyi adatbázist a (poszt)koloniális világról szóló, magyar szerzőktől származó vagy magyar nyelvre lefordított úti leírásokból és regényirodalomból – kiadási adatokkal (szerző, fordító, évszám, kiadó, oldalszám, sorozat, link) és borítóképekkel. Köztük vannak ponyvák és tudományos munkák is, 19. század közepi írások és egészen a rendszerváltásig (1989) megjelenő szövegek, illetve másodlagos irodalom is erről a témáról.
I compiled a database with around 800 books about the (post)colonial world, mostly travelogues and novels written or translated by Hungarians – with book covers and publication details (author, translator, date, publisher, length, series, link). These books range from pulp fiction and scientific studies, mid-19th century writings up until the system change (1989), and include secondary literature on the topic.
Zoltán Ginelli 