1 Between Empirical Messiness and Theoretical Ambition: Introducing Interdisciplinary Conversations on Actors and Practices of Space-Making Under the Global Condition

1 Moscow

It was the last sunny September days in Moscow. Instead of strolling along the banks of the river or watching passengers go by in the cafés at Gorky Park, I adjourned to the chilly halls of the library of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Africa Institute to collect material for my book investigating a transregional history of Soviet African studies during the Cold War. This time I was chasing dissertations from Soviet Africanists – a group consisting not only of Soviet scholars but also of students from the Arab world, as well as from all parts of the African continent. As I am interested particularly in the encounters of Soviet and African scholars and how these had impacted on the formation of ideas of Africa, of development, of socialism in the Soviet Union, I was enthusiastic to find numerous unpublished manuscripts by African experts, which they had written in Russian, in the Soviet Union, yielding the benefits of their “home-grown” expertise about their countries of origin, partly comparing these experiences with Soviet trajectories. These dissertations had been hidden for – I assumed – at least two decades in the stacks of this library. Tanja,1 the librarian, was of utmost kindness, being excited about the interest of a German researcher to come and work at her place, which had certainly seen busier days. She obligingly responded to all my requests, pulling out the partly mouldering and disintegrated manuscripts from hidden shelfs in the large room. I assisted her, reading out the names of the authors to help her find the titles. The manuscripts of Soviet scholars such as Gavrilov, Potekhin, Filatova, and the like were easily found. But when the list of – to her obscure – foreign names grew longer, such as Afana (see Figure 1 ), Bakondolo, Paul-Bonné, and Traoré, she halted and disdainfully muttered: “Eto ne nash” (this is not one of ours).

Figure 1: Cover of Osendé Afana’s dissertation summary “The economy of Cocoa production in Western Africa”, submitted to the Africa Institute Moscow in 1961 (© Steffi Marung, September 2017).

Now I was bewildered. At this institute (see Figures 2 to 4) – which was engaged with research about Africa since the late 1950s and served as a meeting place for African and Soviet activists and academics, the latter proudly emphasizing to be the better Africanists, as they said to have no colonial or neo-colonial agendas – I had not expected to find somebody who would not be as curious as I was about this forgotten world of internationalism in the Soviet Union.

Figure 2: Fresco in the Africa Institute Moscow (© Steffi Marung, April 2015).

Figure 3: Main hall of the Africa Institute Moscow (© Steffi Marung, September 2017).

Figure 4: Portrait of Patrice Lumumba at the wall in the main hall of the Africa Institute in Moscow (© Steffi Marung, September 2017).

Tanja instead preferred to show me around the institute, leading me to its main conference hall. She introduced me to the rich history of the building, dating back to the investments of an Armenian merchant family in the eighteenth century who came to Moscow to be closer to the economic and political centre of the Tsarist Empire.

After the revolution, the first Soviet court confiscated the palace to hold its meetings there. After the Second World War, the Polish embassy moved in, which had to leave again in the early 1980s as the institute’s new director – Anatoly Gromyko, son of the then Soviet foreign minister Andrey – convinced his father to help him improve the institute’s position in the heart of Moscow. While I was fascinated about this history, I was even more taken back by the arrangement of the room, with pictures of the institute’s three directors along one wall, facing the other wall with portraits of African activists and politicians such as Patrice Lumumba, Amílcar Cabral, and Jean Ping – a part of the interior that Tanja obviously ignored or would not make sense of.

The actors in this vignette come together in different layers of time and space: the Russian librarian and the German researcher; the Soviet scholars, ministers, and judges; the African academics and activists; the Armenian merchants; and the Polish diplomats. They had all left their traces in this peculiar place, which in effect became a locality at which different spatial orders and spatial formats materialized and intersected: the Tsarist Empire, the Soviet Union, the decolonizing world, the Cold War, and the multipolar fragility of the twenty-first century. These actors, which diachronically or synchronically crossed their paths at this place, had very different stakes, imaginations, desires, and positions within and regarding these spatial orders and spatial formats. At the same time, they made use and were part of a variety of techniques and infrastructures: not only the library, the Academy of Sciences, the judiciary system, carefully curated architecture, but also international organizations, diplomacy, and cultural policy. They thereby appropriated this place – the palace on Spiridonovka Street, next to the famous Tverskaya street – renarrating its history, selectively remembering its past, and reshaping its position and infrastructures, thus not only locating it in Moscow’s (and hence: Russia’s) commercial and cultural centre, but also relating it to competing spatial formats. The unuttered – yet productive – misunderstanding between the German researcher and the Russian librarian appears then as one little chapter in a longer history of space-making under the global condition in the heart of Moscow.

2 Space-Making Under the Global Condition

That space and space-making are not outside of or opposite to “globalization” but rather crucial lenses through which to study it as well as a major dynamic without which any nuanced understanding of the patterns and challenges of global connections would not be possible is something that we can take as a starting point. Such an approach would not only be shared among the scholars at the Collaborative Research Centre 1199 at Leipzig University, in which this volume was conceived and pursued, but also be increasingly agreed upon by scholars in different disciplines of the humanities and social sciences.

While anthropologists and sociologists since the 1980s have discussed “practices of space”,2 theorized the “site of the social”,3 and particularly emphasized that an “anthropological theory of space and place needs to be process-oriented, person-based, and allow for agency and new possibilities”,4 such spatial turns5 have profoundly profited from the conceptual repertoire and empirical richness of geographical research, which had taken up inspiration from cultural studies.6

These efforts were introduced into investigations of conditions of globality only after the Cold War’s ending, being in the early 2000s prominently promoted by historians who were themselves inspired by conceptual and methodological innovations in cultural history and cultural studies, as well as anthropology and human geography and who developed a profound critical stance towards older perspectives of world or universal history.7 Still, debates among this later generation of global historians are far from solved, most importantly about how to relate the different scales of global history, how to reflect on spatialities of the global8 in a historical perspective, and how to temper the obsession with (“good”) connectivity and taking seriously the globalizing impacts of disconnections, tensions, and ruptures.9 In some cases, to address the many challenges of global history and “to put its feet on the ground”, its productive combination with microhistory has been offered as a solution.10

This proposal demonstrates that one challenge of conceptualizing and empirically investigating the spatiality of globalization processes concerns discussions around scale, while another is the role of actors and their practices. Both are interlinked, as proposals for a “micro-spatial history”11 demonstrate, which promote a profound actor-centred perspective to understand scale as an effect of social practice, not as a predefined level of analysis. This, of course, resonates with earlier discussions among human geographers.12 As a crucial spatial reference, scale had attracted the attention of historians interested in transnational connections more than ten years ago,13 and here again, the focus on transnational agency, on different kinds of actors, and on their practices of connecting, communicating,...