Gellner Seminar
Professor Tom Lodge (University of Limerick) will give a lecture within the Gellner seminar organized by the Czech Association for Social Anthropology, the Czech Society of Sociology, in cooperation with the Institute of Ethnology of the Czech Academy of Sciences and CEFRES.
When: 14 May 2019, 4:30 pm
Where: Conference room of the Institute of Czech Literature, Na Florenci 3, Prague 1 – Ground floor, next to the CEFRES Library. Language: English
Abstract
Documented Encounters between South African and Czech communists were sporadic and accidental in the early history of both Communist parties. Many years later the pioneering South African trade unionist, Ray Alexander, recalled meeting Klement Gottwald at a clandestine training school in her native Latvia shortly before her migration to Cape Town in 1930. The Czech crisis of 1939 prompted the resignation of a senior personality in the South African party. Young South African Communists visited Prague just after the Second World War and were later active in the Communist-affiliated international student movement based in the Czech capital. The Czech government maintained a diplomatic presence in South Africa until 1962, the last communist administration to so and Czech officials were urged by South African communists to support trade sanctions. By the 1960s contact between the “fraternal” parties was more institutionalized. At this stage, the Czech army was beginning to supply training to Communist recruits in the insurgent force led by Nelson Mandela, Umkhonto we Sizwe. The South Africa Communist Party, in exile from 1965, held a key party meeting hosted by Czech communists in Prague that year. For the next two decades the South African Party would be locally represented in Prague on the editorial board of the World Marxist Review. The South African Communists were divided internally by the events of the Prague Spring though in public they professed their support for “normalization”. The lecture will explore the background to these contacts and encounters. The Czech “people’s democracy” of the 1950s was a key source of inspiration for the development of the South African notion of a “national democratic” revolution. Czech support for this programme in the 1960s and 1970s was both a source of confidence and fragility, though. The lecture will consider South African-Czech connections and linkages against the backdrop of the broader strategic concerns that informed and shaped Soviet and East European support for the South African liberatory politics.
Tom Lodge is a professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Limerick.
With a mother and father born respectively in Calcutta and Brno, Tom Lodge was educated in Nigeria, Borneo and Britain. He has a D. Phil from York in Southern African Studies and he is a member of the Royal Irish Academy. After working as a research assistant at the University of York’s Centre for Southern African Studies he began teaching in the Politics Department at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in 1978. He remained at Wits University until 2005, leading its politics department through the 1990’s. In 2005 he moved to the University of Limerick as Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies. He visits South Africa two or three times a year and is a board member of the Electoral Institute, a Johannesburg-based NGO. He has published extensively on South African political history. His books include Nelson Mandela: A Critical Life (Oxford University Press, 2005) and Sharpeville: An Apartheid Massacre and its Consequences (Oxford University Press, 2017). He has almost completed a book about the history of the South African Communist Party from its origins in the syndicalist politics of the white labour movement in South Africa in the 1900’s to its present-day development as a mass party. He is about to begin a book commissioned by Routledge entitled “Political Corruption in Africa”.

A lecture by Marcos Silber (University in Haifa) in the frame of the seminar on Modern Jewish History of the Institute of Contemporary History (AV ČR) and CEFRES in partnership with the Masaryk Institute (AV ČR).
Where: CEFRES library, Na Florenci 3, 110 00 Prague 1
When: from 5:30 pm to 7:00 pm
Language: English
Abstract
March 1968 was a short but important period in recent Polish history. That year, it seemed, almost the whole world was experiencing a cultural revolution provoked by the youth. Unlike most of the historical research on Poland in March 1968, which has tended to focus on political power struggles and rising antisemitism, this paper explores connections between post-war Polish-Jewish youth subculture, a group sidelined because of its ethnicity and age, and the anti-Jewish campaign of March 1968 which led to the emigration of thousands of Polish Jews.
The eighth session of IMS / CEFRES epistemological seminar of this year will be hosted by
Julien Wacquez (CEFRES / EHESS)
Is ‘Hard Science’ a Limit to the Concept of ‘Field’?
Where: CEFRES Library – Na Florenci 3, Prague 1
When: Wednesday 17 April 2019 from 4:30 pm to 6 pm
Language: English
Text:
- Bourdieu, Pierre & Wacquant, Loïc (1992), “The Logic of Fields,” in An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, Pierre Bourdieu & Loïc Wacquant, The University of Chicago Press, 1992, pp. 94-115
- Materials on Larry Niven’s Ringworld (1970) novel, by Julien Wacquez
The two faces of contemporary nationalism
Lecture by Alain Dieckhoff, Director of CERI (Center for International Studies, Sciences Po, Paris)
Where: Pražské kreativní centrum (Staroměstské náměstí 4/1, 110 00 Prague 1, Studio)
When: 12 April 2019, 10 am – 12 pm
Organizers: CEFRES, Faculty of Social Sciences (Charles University), French Institute in Prague
Language: English
Abstract
The idea of the “end of nationalism” has been shared by many after the end of the Cold War. However, it proved to be deeply wrong. Nationalism remains a strong historical either as separatism or as national-populism. And globalization is not, by essence, anti-nationalist, as proven by long-distance nationalism.
Moderated by Eliška Tomalová and Jérôme Heurtaux
The seventh session of IMS / CEFRES epistemological seminar of this year will be hosted by
Raluca Muresan (U. Paris-Sorbonne / associated at CEFRES)
Benedetta Zaccarello (CNRS / CEFRES)
Archives
Where: CEFRES Library – Na Florenci 3, Prague 1
When: Wednesday 3 April 2019 from 4:30 pm to 6 pm
Language: English
Texts
- Jacques Derrida and Eric Prenowitz: “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression”, Diacritics, 25-2 (1995), p. 9-11.
- Mbembe, A.: “The Power of the Archive and its Limits”, in: Refiguring the Archive, C. HAmilton, V. Harris, G. Reid (eds), 2002, p. 19-26. https://books.google.co.in/books?id=FZ8oBgAAQBAJ&lpg=PP1&hl=cs&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false
- Filippo de Vivo, Maria Pia Donato, « Scholarly Practices in the archives, 1500-1800 : Introduction », Storia della Storiografia, 68, 2/2015, p. 15-20.
A lecture by Joanna Nalewajko-Kulikov (Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History, Polish Academy of Sciences) in the frame of the seminar on Modern Jewish History of the Institute of Contemporary History (AV ČR) and CEFRES in partnership with the Masaryk Institute (AV ČR).
Where: CEFRES library, Na Florenci 3, 110 00 Prague 1
When: from 5:30 pm to 7:00 pm
Language: English
Abstract
In September 1939 a Polish-Jewish historian, teacher and social activist Emanuel Ringelblum (1900–1944) began taking notes on various aspects of wartime reality, an activity he continued until January 1943. It was the beginning of a wider documenting project, later known under the codename of “Oneg Shabbat” or the Underground Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto. They were unearthed after the war and are now held in the Jewish Historical Institute Archive in Warsaw. A small part is located in Hersh Wasser Collection, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York.
Ringelblum’s notes were published in the original language (Yiddish) in Warsaw in 1952 (Notitsn fun varshever geto), 1961–1963 (Ksovim fun geto) and in Tel Aviv in 1985 (reprint of the 1961–1963 edition including notes from the Hersh Wasser Collection). The Polish translation was prepared by Adam Rutkowski in the late 1950s, but was withdrawn from the printing house following the antisemitic campaign of 1968. It finally came out in 1983, edited by Artur Eisenbach, under the title Kronika getta warszawskiego.
In my lecture I would like to share some of my experiences from preparing a new, critical and completed edition (Pisma Emanuela Ringelbluma z getta, ed. Joanna Nalewajko-Kulikov, transl. Agata Kondrat [et al.], Warszawa 2018, series „Archiwum Ringelbluma. Konspiracyjne Archiwum Getta Warszawy”, vol. 29). I will show the differences between the new edition and the previous ones and will discuss problems that arise upon editing a source which reached us as an unfinished draft which was never intended to be published in this form.
Joanna Nalewajko-Kulikov is Associate Professor at the Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Her research focuses on the history of East European Jewry in the 19th and 20th century, history of Yiddish culture (especially Yiddish daily press) and Polish-Jewish relations. Her books include, among others, Obywatel Jidyszlandu. Rzecz o zydowskich komunistach w Polsce (2009; English translation forthcoming 2019) and Mowic we wlasnym imieniu. Prasa jidyszowa a tworzenie zydowskiej tozsamosci narodowej (2016). For the publishing series “Archiwum Ringelbluma” she edited memoirs of Tsvi Prylucki (2015) and Emanuel Ringelblum’s notes from the Warsaw ghetto (2018). She is currently working on a book-length project devoted to Yiddish press in interwar Poland.