What is a Global Historian’s Archive? (Lecture by Prof. Martin DUSINBERRE)

Zoom Webinar (Register here)

This lecture follows the Yamashiro-maru steamship across Asian and Pacific waters, innovatively reconstructing the lives of some of the thousands of male and female migrants who left Japan for work in Hawai’i, Southeast Asia and Australia in the late-nineteenth century. These stories bring together transpacific historiographies of settler colonialism, labour history and resource extraction in new ways. Drawing on an unconventional and deeply material archive, from gravestones to government files, paintings to song, and from digitized records to the very earth itself, the lecture addresses key questions of method and authorial positionality in the writing of global history. This investigation into archival practice asks, what is the global archive, where is it cited, and who are ‘we’ as we cite it? His presentation draws from his new book, Mooring the Global Archive: A Japanese Ship and its Migrant Histories (Cambridge University Press, 2023).

Lecturer:

Martin DUSINBERRE (Professor for Global History, University of Zurich)

Commentator:

Andrew GORDON (Tokyo College Professor; Professor, Harvard University)

Moderator:

SHIMAZU Naoko (Professor, Tokyo College, The University of Tokyo)