The Art of Link-Making in Global Labor History: Subaltern, Feminist and East European Interventions

Dr. Adrian Grama, Postdoc at the Graduate School in Regenburg, and Dr. Susan Zimmermann, Professor at Central European University Budapest, together have published the article "The Art of Link-Making in Global Labor History: Subaltern, Feminist and East European Interventions" in the international journal "European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire."

Grama and Zimmermann observe a striking mismatch between global and Eastern European labour history. The introductory article to the dossier "Labour Histories Revisited" reflects on the historiographical developments of this field of study and pleads for an inclusive global perspective.

Abstract

Benefiting from the "global" and "trans-national" turns in the larger historiography, labour historians in the last two decades have greatly expanded their geographical scope, developed new methodologies, refashioned categories of analysis, and largely abandoned teleological assumptions. In this context, the history of labour in Eastern Europe still constitutes one of the least-globalized research topics in the field, even though the region attracted an array of excellent labour historians both before and after the collapse of state socialism in 1989-91. This introduction to the Dossier on labour history and Eastern Europe reflects on the reasons for the apparent mismatch between Eastern European labour history and the new global labour history. It does so by situating this large question within a discussion of some more or less successful examples of how scholarship on a particular theme in labour history has contributed or attempted to contribute to the conceptual and empirical enlargement of labour history in recent decades. Focusing on particular aspects of the debates on class analysis, the peasant question, the history of gender, and the history of labour under state socialism, the authors address key questions in the international development of the history of labour. These questions, the authors argue, are at the core of the contributions on Eastern Europe assembled in the Dossier. Situating the four historiographical studies contained in the Dossier in this larger context, the introduction discusses the varied reception of scholarship on aspects of the history of labour emerging in and from different contexts and asks how this scholarship has contributed or might contribute to the development of a more inclusive global labour history.

Adrian Grama, Susan Zimmermann: The Art of Link-Making in Global Labor History: Subaltern, Feminist and East European Interventions. In: European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire 25 (1), 2018, pp. 1-20.