Motherhood-one of the most important and yet mundane social institutions-is central to understanding the rise and decline of Third World internationalism. This article focuses on Francisca Casparina Fanggidaej (1925-2013), a left-wing Indonesian activist in the Afro-Asian solidarity movements that developed out of the Bandung Conference. She is also a mother of seven who endured decades of forced separation from her family. Based on a close reading of Fanggidaej's diaries, personal letters, and oral history interviews with her family and friends, I discuss the politics of maternal absence in Indonesia and China-two of the leading countries in the Afro-Asian movements. I explore how these two countries shaped the public and self-perceptions of nonresidential mothers through their welfare provisions and reproductive policies. Against this backdrop, I examine how a transnational figure like Fanggidaej navigated motherhood within frameworks of revolutionary anticolonialism in Indonesia, state socialism in China, and the global rise of capitalist neoliberalism, which ultimately displaced the Third World internationalist vision once championed by both nations. I argue that the fall of Third World internationalism signaled not only a missed opportunity to reconfigure global geopolitics but also a lost chance to redefine motherhood-not as the individualized enterprise of the birth mother alone but as a communal effort involving a diverse assemblage of caretakers including both kin and non-kin, men and women.
Red tile roofs are the icon of the Chinese coastal city, Qingdao, favored by German colonizers, Japanese invaders, and, most importantly, millions of Chinese who have resided in and built the city. This essay argues that, rather than treating them merely as cultural symbols, the red roofs, along with the cityscape they adorn, are a material artifact that blends both natural and cultural elements. They form a type of nature's archive, recording the entangled environmental and cultural past of the city. We can learn to read and interpret these archives by analyzing our shared biological roots, the clay, the fuels, the tile-making process, the material sediments stored in the roofs, and the disposal process at the end of the tiles' lifespan. By approaching the red roofs this way, they are no longer simply a German colonial heritage imposed on this Chinese city. On the contrary, we come to recognize a more complex history of the city, shaped by both external natural materials and our own inner desires and practical needs.
Colonial historians have analyzed how human population censuses were instrumental for state-making and ethnic categorization, and how they can be used for demographical reconstruction. By contrast, they have thus far ignored the significance and analytical potential of livestock censuses. This essay teases out their potential for historical analysis by focusing on cattle censuses in French colonial Madagascar (1896-1960). It argues that colonial authorities went to great lengths to count cattle, deemed a key economic resource of the island, and showcase their numerical evolution in statistics, graphs, and maps. Due to context- and species-specific limitations of the data, historians cannot easily use these censuses to reconstruct cattle demography. Yet, they offer a fruitful lens to analyze cattle policies and knowledge regimes under colonial rule. Censuses were both an instrument of knowledge, used to monitor the evolution of the herds and reconceive policies, and an instrument of extraction, on which the annual cattle head tax was based. In both cases, cattle censuses were also sites of contestation. Tax extraction warranted strategies of dissimulation from the part of cattle owners, making knowledge even more unstable and causing epistemological anxieties within the colonial administration.
Whales are participants in history. While they do not create written archives, whales capture in their bodies the specific details of their individual lives as well as the societies in which they have lived. Fortunately, the long history of whaling has left behind an underappreciated, globe-spanning archive of whale history in the form of biological artifacts, like bones, teeth, baleen, and ear wax plugs. Through a survey of some of the latest research into paleobiology, this paper highlights how historians can use the information bound up in these natural archives to recount the journeys, diets, companions, and emotional states of whale societies across years, decades, and centuries. In doing so, historians can expand our spectrum of analysis to include non-human animals in their own right; to see how certain creatures shaped human history, but to also consider whale histories of the world.
Combining an expansive view of family with a limited source base, this essay for History Unclassified examines a small collection of materials originating from the family members of the author's mother-in-law: objects that they made and left behind, pictures that they sent into the world to call loved ones home, and papers that established or masked identities and granted passage or prevented movement. Transnational in scope and microhistorical in scale, it reveals the multistage, multigenerational, and gendered migrations of an ordinary Chinese American family over extended periods of separation and reunion in the second half of the twentieth century.
