Migration and Space in the Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and Nationalism in the Global South

Abstract

This presentation examines Paris’s role as a hub for the global spread of anti-colonial ideas. It draws particular attention to the everyday concerns of colonial migrants in the metropole as the background for the development of their ideas; thus grounding the early intellectual history of liberation movements in Paris’s social history, and combining urban history with global history. This presentation argues that mutual aid associations, and other institutions typical in immigrant societies, turned into important vehicles for the early spread of anti-colonial nationalism. Exchanges between ethnic communities equally played a role, in that they highlighted global disparities and encouraged mutual learning curves. In line with the overall seminar series, this presentation poses two further questions about the relationship between migration and space. Firstly, how did the urban space in Paris shape the protagonists’ experiences? Secondly, how did the political ideas that developed in this context relate to the territorial spaces of future nation states?

Biographical Note

Prof. Dr. Michael Goebel (Free University of Berlin, Germany)
Michael Goebel has been a professor of global and Latin American history at the FU Berlin since June 2015. In July 2014, he received his habilitation in modern history. After training as an historian of Latin America in Germany and the United Kingdom, he worked at U College London (UK), the European University Institute (Italy), and Harvard U (USA). As his latest publication shows, Michael Goebel has gradually become more interested in other world regions; trying to merge his major research interests of migration history and the global history of nationalism in his book, Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism (Cambridge UP, 2015).