Lisa Hoppel

Contact

Website

Lisa Hoppel studied History (BA) and Global History and Global Studies (MA) at the University of Vienna. To extend and deepen her present research interests she is additionally pursuing her second degree in International Development (MA). Since August 2020 Lisa Hoppel is a recipient of a DOC Fellowship of the Austrian Academy of Science at the Department of Economic and Social History at the University of Vienna.

Research interests: African Liberation Movements, Pan-Africanism, Cold War and South-South Relations, Global Inequality, Critical Theories of Culture and Society, Transnational History of Ideas, Global History

Current research project: Afro-Asianism Meets Pan-Africanism. Between National Liberation, Development Aspirations and International Transformation (1950s-1960s) (Working Title) 
When the entanglement of Cold War dynamics, decolonization and development processes drastically increased in the 1950s, hubs of anticolonial and anti-imperial activism shifted southwards. The following decades present an era of intensive political, social and cultural interaction across the Global South. Various Afro-Asian platforms established in the 1950s and 1960s enabled anticolonial activists to exchange ideas and visions of the postcolonial future and a more equitable political, economic and social (international) order.
Against this background, new concepts of space, identity, culture and society were formulated, leading to alternative political experiments, which challenged dominant perceptions of the nation and the world. With the aim of establishing continental unity in Africa in order to prevent (neo-)colonial and imperialist interventions, pan-Africanism produced such political alternatives. Different and sometimes even rival pan-African concepts envisioned all-encompassing independence beyond the establishment of political sovereignty in individual countries. These ideas were often accompanied by the formulation of alternative development paths, based on different notions of “self-reliance”, “African Socialism” and regional integration.
It is the aim of the dissertation to analyse the formation of pan-African concepts of independence, society and development through the lenses of Afro-Asian networks in the 1950s and 1960s. In doing so, I pursue the theory that notions of postcolonial statehood not bound to the idea of the nation-state analogous to the European model were also accompanied by alternatives to predominant models of development. In the centre of the analysis will be African anticolonial activists, who were active in two Afro-Asian institutions and informed pan-African initiatives. Based on a large corpus of primary sources from European and African archives it is the objective to detect concrete actors, their actions and considerations in order to illustrate the plurality of interactions, discourses and practices in the so-called “Bandung Era”.

Publications:

  • In preparation/under review: Die beiden Afrikanischen Konferenzen in Accra 1958: Ghana und Algerien zwischen Annäherung und Differenz. In preparation for Stichproben. Wiener Zeitschrift für Kritische Afrikastudien.
  • 2019: Internationalistischer Nationalismus. Lehren aus dem panafrikanischen Befreiungskampf (Wien 2019: Promedia).
  • 2016: „Feuer und Schwert im Sudan“. Die Erfolgsgeschichte eines Buches im Spiegel eines gesellschaftlichen Wandels. In: •Medien & Zeit. Kommunikation in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart, 31(3) (2016), 53-63.
  • Diotima Bertel, Julia Himmelsbach, Christina Krakovsky, Barbara Metzler, Andreas Riedl, Lara Möller(Hg.), Junge Perspektiven auf Partizipation in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Beiträge zur ersten under.docs-Fachtagung zu Kommunikation (Wien 2016: danzig & unfried), 167-185.