post submitted by Prof Hyslop
SOAN Professor Jon Hyslop has a chapter in a new book, 1916 in Global Context: An Anti-Imperial Moment, edited by colleagues from the University of Galway in Ireland. The book deals with the transnational impact of the Dublin Easter Rising. The photo below shows editor Róisín Healy presenting a copy of the book to the President of Ireland, Michael Higgins (who happens to be a sociologist). Hyslop’s chapter, “Johannesburg’s Green Flag: The Contemporaneity of the Easter Rising and the 1922 Rand Rebellion,” looks at links between Ireland and southern Africa. He argues that there are two major modes in which the study of global history has been pursued: a long tradition of comparison and a more recent trend toward the exploration of connections. However, there may be a third mode of analytical linkage between events, which one might name as the study of contemporaneity. This consists in the identification of ways in which spatially separated events are the products of a shared global conjuncture of social forces, political cultures and institutions. Distinct events manifest common characteristics which are part of a much wider, structural global pattern. And in turn, these commonalities enable participants in events in different parts of the world to recognize, or creatively misrecognize, each other as representing similar political projects. In the social and military conflicts which battered both societies between the 1890s and the 1920s, Ireland and South Africa were significant reference points on each others’ mental political maps.
Editor Róisín Healy presenting a copy of *1916 in Global Context* to the President of Ireland, Michael Higgins.