slave trade. 6 These histories give race a different set of baggage than it has elsewhere. My focus here is on elements of the history of black mobilities. African people arrived in the New World as a result of forced mobility. Once there they were
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Nighttime Navigating
Moving a Container Ship through Darkness
Maria Borovnik
or for convivial activities; they have to be on call for watchkeeping duties and for docking duties in ports. 21 Joyful social evening occasions are welcome yet may feel as though times of rest are being traded in for little fun. Social studies of
A World Event (On Circumnavigation, 1519-1522)
Excerpt from Guillermo Giucci's Tierra del Fuego: La creación del fin del mundo
Guillermo Giucci
The idea of the world as a sphere was an old theoretical presupposition. Only with both the crossing of the Strait of Magellan and circumnavigation were the geographical areas unknown to the Europeans opened to global trade. Therefore, this world event would be inscribed in the annals of history as a marker of the beginning of modernity, the era of maritime colonization that forever altered the notion of radical isolation.
Beyond Blank Spaces
Five Tracks to Late Nineteenth-Century Beltana
Samia Khatun
From the 1860s, the colonial settlement of Beltana in the northern deserts of South Australia emerged as a transportation hub atop an existing, cosmopolitan center of Aboriginal trade. Viewing a colonial settlement on Kuyani land through a mobilities paradigm, this article examines intersecting settler and Aboriginal trajectories of movement through Beltana, illuminating their complex entanglements. Challenging the imperial myth of emptiness that shaped how Europeans saw the lands they invaded, this article renders visible the multiple imaginative geographies that existed at every colonial settlement. Examining mobility along Kuyani and Wangkangurru tracks alongside British mobilities, this article makes a methodological argument for writing multiaxial histories of settler colonialism.
The Mule Caravans of Western Yunnan
An Oral History of the Muleteers of Zhaozhou
Ma Jianxiong and Ma Cunzhao
Mule caravans established a network across physical, political, and ethnic boundaries that integrated Southwest China, Southeast Asia, and Tibet. This article is a first exploration of this little-known mobile network. Based mainly on oral history, it focuses on the mule caravans based in Zhaozhou in western Yunnan from the late Qing to the 1940s, when the first motor roads were constructed. The investigation assembles horse and mule technologies and trade organization in detail in order to reconstruct the role and standing of transporters and their networks in local society, in the regional setting, in a volatile political environment, and in the face of challenging natural conditions.
Pamela H. Smith
A research group at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science on “Itineraries of Materials, Recipes, Techniques, and Knowledge in the Early Modern World” held a series of workshops (2014–2015) on the movement of knowledge (materials, techniques, objects) across Eurasia, resulting in an edited volume. Participants articulated a framework of “entangled itineraries,” “material complexes,” and “nodes of convergence” by which historians might follow routes of knowledge-making extending over very long distances and/or great spans of time. The key concepts are (1) “material complex” denoting the constellation of substances, practices, techniques, beliefs, and values that accrete as knowledge around materials; (2) the “relational field,” the social, intellectual, economic, emotional domain formed by a “node of convergence”—often a hub of trade and exchange—within which a material complex crystalizes; and (3) “itineraries,” or the routes taken by materials through which they stabilize and/ or transform.
Ocean, Motion, Emotion
Mobilities and Mobilizations in the Pacific
Matt Matsuda
transformations taking place in the study of the seas. In the past generation, oceanic and maritime studies have been expanded by a score of interdisciplinary works with wide resonance: on trade, migration, cultural encounter, and exchange. 1 New
Historical Fragments’ Mobile Echo
Encountering the Current Refugee Crisis with Ai Weiwei
Susan E. Bell and Kathy Davis
teapot spouts, and an ancestral wooden temple from the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) used by a tea-trading family. Historically and politically, the exhibition engages Chinese stories from the third century BCE, empires in eighteenth-century Austria and China
Filmmaking at a Crossroads
Ulrike Ottinger’s Johanna d’Arc of Mongolia Goes off the Rails
Grace An
maps, grids, and trains. And we, in turn, discover the visual pleasures of the second part, trading the lushness of the costumes, works of art, furniture, and even culinary feasts inside the train for the open vistas of light, sky, and sand, and a
Alessandro Jedlowski
transformation of maritime trade worldwide, and questions the metaphoric meaning that this object has acquired over the past few years for mobile subjects such as the protagonists of this article. A detailed account and an analytical interpretation follow