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: global history
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.
Colonia Hungaria: Hungarian Settlers and Colonial Imaginaries in Latin America in the Interwar Era
My paper explores competing visions of establishing a Hungarian colony in the context of Latin American Hungarian settlers in the interwar era. I introduce my concept of “transcoloniality” to traverse interconnected Eastern European and South American colonial contexts, and explore the trajectories of Hungarian colonialism through my concept “Colonial Hungaria.”
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.
Eastern Europe in Global Colonialism and Decolonization Debates
Transperiphery Conversations #1 History professor James Mark (University of Exeter) in conversation with Zoltán Ginelli discuss how to historicize Eastern Europe within the global histories of colonialism and decolonization with a focus on Hungarian experiences.
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.
Transperiphery Movement: Colonia Hungaria
The Transperiphery Movement attempts to recapture revolutionary action by tracing forgotten interperipheral circulations between Eastern Europe and the Global South. The transcolonial geographic history of “Colonia Hungaria” – a semi-fictitious Hungarian colonial ecumen – questions, dispositions, disorders and challenges hegemonic histories of global racial-colonial capitalism.
Decolonizing the Non-Colonizers? Historicizing Eastern Europe in Global Colonialism
What would it mean to ‘decolonize’ Eastern Europe? We aim to answer by situating Eastern Europe within broader colonial, anti-colonial and decolonial projects, to understand how the region’s historically and geographically shifting relations to coloniality and race inform current political dynamics.
Call for Papers | American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting | Seattle, WA | April 7–11, 2021 | Virtual Session convened by Zoltán Ginelli and Jonathan McCombs
Uncertain Notes from the Semi-periphery
Public and academic discussions have completely ignored the fact that the recent wave of anti-racism and decololonization movements have sparked intensive reactions from Eastern European countries, including Hungary, for the first time. These reactions dominantly focused on Western events but never actually defined decolonialism, nor looked at the global, geographical implications of colonialism. In Hungary, the local relevance of racism and decolonialism has been framed in a rather reductive manner (anti-Semitism, conditions of Romas), and there have been no serious discussions about the country’s specific historical relations to global colonialism, or any criticism of Eurocentric and racist knowledge. The presentation explores these issues and argues for Hungarian relevance to decolonization, and introduces in this context the main concept of a forthcoming exhibition project, The Transperiphery Movement.
Semiperipheral Empire: Hungarian Balkanism in Global Colonialism
In postcolonial studies, Eastern Europe’s colonial experiences and ambitions have been routinely silenced in the literature’s focus on (post)colonial centres and peripheries. The region remains largely absent from mainstream textbooks, which is indicative not only […]
Zoltán Ginelli 