• 1 Francesca Trivellato, “Is There a Future for Italian Microhistory in the Age of Global History?”, C (...)
• 2 Patrick O’Brien, “Historical Traditions and Modern Imperatives for the Restoration of Global Histor (...)
• 3 Christopher A. Bayly, Sven Beckert, Matthew Connelly, Isabel Hofmeyr, Wendy Kozol and Patricia Seed(...)
• 4 Dominic Sachsenmaier, Global Perspectives on Global History: Theories and Approaches in a Connected (...)
• 5 Tonio Andrade, “A Chinese Farmer, Two African Boys, and a Warlord: Toward a Global Microhistory”, J (...)
• 6 Bernhard Struck, Kate Ferris and Jacques Revel, “Introduction: Space and Scale in Transnational His (...)

1At first glance, global history and life history might seem worlds apart.1 A considerable amount of global history publications focus on the macro-scale and on the longue durée – or, more recently, Big or Deep history. However, the micro scale with its focus on the local and the immediate has much to contribute to the study of interconnections and exchanges, comparisons or global causalities that fuel global history writing.2 In particular, much can be gained from joining global history understood as a ‘way of seeing’ or a ‘perspective’ with a methodological approach in the form of a particular set of microhistories, namely life history writing of non-elite actors.3 Dominic Sachsenmaier coined the term ‘glocal’ to underline the impact the global has on the local and vice versa, which underscores the interplay between these two forces that can be found in the remotest places.4 Tonio Andrade demonstrates this interaction in his article and calls upon historians to “adopt micro-historical and biographical approaches to help populate our models and theories with real people, to write what one might call global microhistory”5. Intrigued, we pursued the question of scale for our own PhD projects. We seek to combine the macro with the micro through embedding individual and collective global mobile lives in the changing geopolitical, social, and economic contexts of their times; the global, regional, national, and local, all impact the lives of the individuals we study and our historical actors in turn shape and observe history from below over the period of their lives. The challenge is to trace changes over time chronologically (life course), as well as vertically and synchronically, along the aforementioned contexts and levels of inquiry. We are not the first to engage microhistory in global history; a growing number of scholars have called attention to this interconnection.6 Yet, we hope that we can illustrate here some benefits and pitfalls of joining micro, meso, and macro scales through life history writing about globally mobile lives of non-elite actors in the twentieth century.

• 7 Dominic Sachsenmaier, Global Perspectives on Global History: Theories and Approaches in a Connected (...)
• 8 For more on the Global History Collaborative, a consortium of universities in the U.S., France, Ger (...)
• 9 Our special thanks goes to all the participants of the summer school and in particular to Jeremy Ad (...)

2Global historians have repeatedly called for teamwork in global history.7 This conversation is the product of a collaboration that started in Tokyo and Sapporo in September 2015 during a summer school on Scales in Global History.8 During the enlightening discussions across academic cultures, languages and disciplines at the summer school, the idea for this special issue formed. The following conversation reflects the ongoing discussions about global history among the upcoming generation of historians from three continents during the creation of this special issue, and our own thoughts on the intersection of micro-history and global history with mobility of non-elite actors.9 In light of the ongoing intense discussions about the heuristic value of global history, one in which we perceive not least a generational divide, we feel that the voice of a generation that has been socialized into being historians alongside their exposure to global history in the classroom, through conferences and international exchanges, is of value.

• 10 We would like to express our heartfelt thanks to Gabriela Goldin from the École des Hautes Études e (...)

3Originally from South Korea and Germany, we have been educated in the Korean and Japanese academies, and in U.S. and British institutions.10 Jiyoon Kim’s background is in Cultural Studies and Media Studies and Marcia C. Schenck studied International Relations, African Studies and History. Together we embarked upon this experiment and interrogated how the study of “global mobile lives”, in the form of collective biography, life history and travel writing, can contribute to world history. We discussed secondary sources, with which we engaged in our individual projects. This thought experiment led us to reflect upon what role twentieth-century global mobile non-elite actors played in global history, and how our own positionality influenced our telling of the stories. We thought it productive to model our conversation after the American Historical Review Conversations. Our hope is that this speaks to the readers more directly and lets them participate in the outcome of our global conversation which the two of us conducted in Tokyo, Princeton, Berlin and Seoul.

• 11 Ulrike Freitag and Achim von Oppen, Translocality: The Study of Globalising Processes from a Southe (...)

5This project tells a history of international socialist migrations during the Cold War. Without the global context fostering collaborations between socialist nations at the time, this particular labor and training migration program would be hard to imagine. Moreover, I tend to employ the categories of transnational and translocal history to further delineate the qualities of the international aspects of my project. It is also transnational because the Angolan and Mozambican worker-trainees went to East Germany on bilateral government contracts. Therefore, the migrants physically transcended national borders within the parameters negotiated by the sending and receiving countries’ governments. On the level of the individual workers, their day-to-day experience was one of translocality.11 Their lives took place in particular cities, workplaces, affective networks and material contexts, smaller than the sending and receiving country and yet simultaneously deeply impacted by the global socialist world beyond. Here, Sachsenmaier’s concept of the ‘glocal’ mentioned above, can help us think through how the migrants experienced the social and material aspects of their new lives in East Germany and their return back home.

• 12 Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times, Cambri (...)
• 13 Adam McKeown, “Africa and Global Patterns of Migration”, Journal of World History, 15, 2, 2004, p.  (...)

6The Cold War sets the global geopolitical backdrop during the 1945 to 1990 era and introduced two alternative modernities onto the global stage. Needless to say, both communism and capitalism have lengthier trajectories, but the intensity of the competition among the cold warriors on a global scale was unprecedented during this time period. We still do not know enough about how the Cold War was experienced in the global South, outside the theaters of war; Odd Arne Westad aptly reminds us that “the most important aspects of the Cold War were not Europe-centered, but connected to political and social developments in the Third World”12. My case study could be read within this context framing the labor migration program as an economic, political, educational, and ideological expression of the Cold War. At the same time, I understand my project neither as about war nor as about the competition between East and West, but rather about South-East economic and political relations and for that reason I prefer using terms such as the ‘socialist world’ or in the ‘Cold War era’. However, it is important to highlight that the Cold War context enabled new migrations from Africa to the so-called ‘Second World’ – migrations delinked from slavery or colonial links that previously determined much of the large-scale emigration movements from Africa.13

• 14 Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times, Cambri (...)
• 15 Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961, Berkeley, Uni (...)

8My project is related to global history because it narrates the inner dynamics and contradictions of a policy originating within a nation-state concurrently influenced by and entangled with changing international contexts. South Korea is an important place geopolitically because it faced a special Cold War reality with conflicts both inside and outside its territory due to its complicated relationship with North Korea. The history of the Korean Cold War, wherein the North/South conflict complicated the situation beyond international Cold War politics, helps to draw a multi-faceted, and possibly a more balanced, picture about the “Global Cold War” as Westad proposed.14 The 1980s can be considered a rupture, marking the end of the Cold War, the beginning of the recent globalization flow, and increasing transnational mobility. I argue that we should see these three processes as interconnected rather than separate. In the comparative/contrasting framework of a socialist and capitalist world, my cases may be understood as stories on tourism and mobility in a capitalist society. As a matter of fact, my project aims to discuss the memory that does not always fit into and is not fully explained by geopolitical oppositions. The East-West divide is an inextricable backdrop, but not a flawless conceptual tool to understand the East Asian political and economic landscape. Developing countries in Asia were often governed by authoritarian military regimes that can hardly be understood as liberal democracies, despite their designation as such. To understand the South Korean context, we can draw on the literature of the cultural politics of leisure and tourism using a historical approach that shares in common the issue of the state’s managing or mobilizing human mobility and tourism in different countries and regimes.15 This literature draws more attention to the post-WWII era from 1945 to the late 1970s within the context of Cold War politics or that of postwar nation building. One of my project’s contributions is to discuss the continuity that bridges the Cold War and post-Cold War eras and the story of increasing internationalization.

• 18 Bernhard Struck, Kate Ferris and Jacques Revel, “Introduction: Space and Scale in Transnational His (...)
• 19 Jeremy Adelman, “What is Global History now? Historians cheered Globalism with Work about Cosmopoli (...)
• 20 The questions historians pose are linked to the times in which they live. Ranke and other founders (...)

9Marcia C. Schenck: I understand global history following Bernhard Struck, Kate Ferris and Jacques Revel, as an “umbrella perspective that encompasses a number of well-established tools and perspectives such as historical comparisons, (cultural) transfers, connections, circulations, entangled or shared history as well as a modern form of international history”18. Depending upon when a historian writes and their area of specialization, global history is also referred to as world, transnational, comparative or universal history. The commonality between these approaches boils down to the fact that historians engaged in these kinds of projects no longer see the nation as a sine qua non container for their story; having lost its privileged position, the nation remains a possible framework among many. Global history as a way of seeing, either concentrates on the idea that the world is interdependent and has been interconnected to various degrees since its inception, focuses on comparisons, traces divergences and disintegration, or elaborates on structures to trace global causation. Historiography today can neither get away with an Eurocentric or ethnocentric meta-narrative or case studies, nor with an uncritical celebration of interconnections.19 Understanding global history as a perspective rather than a specific methodology allows historians to remain open to various ways of telling global stories.20

• 21 Natalie Zemon Davis, “Decentering History: Local Stories and Cultural Crossings in a Global World”, (...)

10It is important to step back from the global history hype and ask with Natalie Zemon Davis: “Is ‘global history’ the only form suitable for recounting the past in a globalized world?”21 It is not. It is one fundamentally important approach, not least because it emerges from and leads back to our common humanity. If we seek to write history from Africa and other parts of the world rather than about them, and if we are interested in challenging periodization founded on, and meta-narratives about, Western hegemony, looking at several places at once comparatively or focusing on connections and hybridization or disintegration and the power of place is imperative.

• 22 During the forum “The Potential of Global History” (September 9th, 2015) held during the Tokyo Summ (...)

11Jiyoon Kim: I agree with Marcia C. Schenck on the definition, historicity, timeliness, and potential pitfalls of global history. However, I propose to go further, maintaining that global history can also be a method. As a “possibility”, global history seems to be a knowledge production practice to reconsider existing history and historical research. With the viewpoint of global history and doing global historical research, we can come to understand a more elaborated picture, or another picture, that can deepen our interpretation on a given topic, time and space.22

• 23 Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History, Berkeley, University of Cali (...)
• 24 Ji-hyung Cho, “Reconceptualizing History and the Future of Global History”, The Korean Historical R (...)
• 25 Jürgen Osterhammel, “Globalizations”, in Jerry H. Bentley (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of World Hist (...)

12In addition to a way of seeing, I would like to put more emphasis on the meaning of global history as a way of questioning, which also connects to historicizing and contextualizing contemporary globalization where my original inquiry began. My understanding of global history is influenced by three different schools; the first being the strong research tradition of historicization in Japanese academia, the second being works on the history of globalization and questioning its contemporaneousness,23 and the third being the Korean historians’ endeavor to articulate a global historical perspective as an alternative way of thinking beyond the dominant national history in particular with respect to the reflexive understanding of modernity and Cold War complexity in the modern history of Korea.24 In its connection of globalization with global history, as Osterhammel puts it, “ ‘global history’ is a more general and more inclusive concept than ‘the history of globalization.’ Not all global history is history of globalization, whereas the history of globalization inscribes itself by necessity into global history”25.

• 26 A well-known male backpacker moved to the United States and opened his own photo studio in New Jers (...)
• 27 Although the main research material of this group tour was the travel essay collection, I conducted (...)

13Jiyoon Kim: The backpackers and group tour participants indicate different types of mobility albeit both are tourism broadly speaking. In each group, different individuals’ life trajectories vary. For example, a few backpackers actually expanded their transnational lives across different countries and continents by choosing to continue traveling as a professional travel writer or by choosing diasporic life, emigrating to the United States and Tanzania.26 Group tour participants returned after the short-term trip, but some chose to work as international businessmen or decided to go abroad to study for degrees on a long-term basis.27 Thus while it is difficult to generalize them as overall “global mobile lives”, what is clear is the fact that the exceptional experience of overseas traveling in their twenties affected these people’s lives. It also influenced the South Korean people who were curious about an, albeit limited, opportunity for a second-hand “global experience” to break through the restrictions of living in a relatively closed society.

• 28 Simon Cooke, “Inner Journeys: Travel Writing as Life Writing”, in Carl Thompson (ed.), The Routledg (...)
• 29 Carl Thompson, Travel Writing, New York, Routledge, 2011, p. 2.
• 30 Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes:Travel Writing and Transculturation, an influential historical wo (...)
• 31 This is also relevant to the research of travel writing in the field of Korean studies. In particul (...)

14I examine travel writing from a historical perspective based on the travel essay books written by the backpackers and the five volumes of an essay collection published by the Support and Planning Team of the Overseas Study Trip in the Korean Research Foundation, Ministry of Education. Here, travel writing can be understood in two ways: travel writing as life writing and travel writing as a witness account. Firstly, travel writing involves “a dimension of ‘life writing’ (with its form of autobiographical and/or biographical writing)”. In this sense, travel writing can “bring to the question of ‘how our lives become stories’ a range of distinct life-writing possibilities and challenges”.28 Secondly, travel writing is a window to grasp how the actors view the self, the others, and the world at a given time and place. In relation to this, another feature of travel writing should be underlined, that is, travel writing as “a genre especially reflective of, and responsive to, the modern condition”.29 Travel is necessarily facilitated and accompanied by the development of infrastructure and the conditions of mobility aforementioned. Thus, it was amplified by and is hardly separable from the macro backdrops such as European imperial expansion and global capitalism. Travel writing can never be neutral observation but is indeed a powerful mediator that reflects and constructs the subjectivity of the era.30 Due to this contextual importance, numerous historical works based on travel writing have engaged in the history of colonialism and post-colonialism, imperialism, women’s history, global capitalism, and other particular historical moments.31 Taking into account that global history as an academic term is relatively new, historical works on travel writing might not always have positioned themselves as subcategories of global history or transnational history, but they were already a part of global history, as long as transnational, cross-cultural, translocal, cross-continental, mobile actors were always the main performers and narrators of the texts.

• 32 He greatly enjoyed a domestic trip around the country in 1977 with a 22-23 year-old “German friend” (...)
• 33 Soyang is a word that included the meanings of courtesy, knowledge, manner, and culture. When one s (...)

15I would like to share the experience of a 22-year-old university student, Park, who first used the term “backpacker” (Paenangjok, which literally means ‘backpack tribe’) in the title of his travel book. He embarked on his overseas travel project in 1981, before the liberalization policy for overseas travel was officially implemented in 1983, although the expectation toward “liberalizing” policy was already noticeable in South Korean society. One day, he found a news article about the amendment of the passport law by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs entitled “Permission of visiting relatives up to cousins”. Before that, would-be travelers were only allowed to visit parents, children, or siblings. He immediately remembered his cousin who was living in France, probably as a student. Park had been traveling around South Korea by himself since he was 14 years old, but his dream was always to travel to “foreign countries across the ocean”.32 However, in reality, it was a time-consuming and challenging process consisting of many steps: getting an invitation letter; gathering manifold documents from a ward office and Military Manpower Administration; attending a mandatory education program called soyangkyoyuk33 at the South Korean Anti-communist League; then going through the background check at the police; and eventually obtaining a passport. When the officer finally stamped the seal on Park’s passport upon departure, he “felt a jolt as if his heart stopped”. He could get a visa stamp only for France, Japan and Taiwan as stop-over destinations, but due to his budget constraint, his first goal was Japan. From Japan, after gaining know-how on the road, he managed to move through Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao, Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore for 92 days in total. During the journey, he encountered many different “others” including Japanese drivers, backpackers from Australia, Canada, and Europe, “hippies”, Malaysians, Singaporean university students, and a Zainichi Korean man from the pro-North Korean General Association of Korean Residents in Japan (Chongryon/ Chosen Soren).

• 34 “The Achievement of the Communist-bloc Trip for College Students and Professors”, Munkyo Haengchŏng(...)

17Among the major differences between the backpackers and participants of the organized trips were the short-term trip’s final purpose and destination. As stated in one of the government documents, the background and purpose of the official trips was “1) to cultivate future human resources as the preparation for the era of internationalization and opening and 2) to revise the incorrect knowledge about communism by exposing them to firsthand experience, to compare with liberal democratic regimes, and thus to remedy the negative perspective onto our regime and thereby contribute to stabilize the university through a solid view of the state and patriotism”34. The upsurge of student activism and democratization in the 1980s as well as the changing international post-Cold War atmosphere was the major background for the government-initiated study trips. The selected students were sent to transforming socialist countries to learn ‘the reality of socialism’ in the face of opening and reform. The politicized purpose of the trip reflected the South Korean regime’s concern about the presumably left-leaning counterculture of South Korean youth.

• 35 The information presented here is drawn from various interviews and conversations conducted by Marc (...)
• 36 The illiteracy rate dropped from 93 % in 1974 to 70 % in 1980 with the greatest gain by men between (...)

18Marcia C. Schenck: Let me introduce you to a former Mozambican worker in East Germany, Juma Madeira. The unfolding of his life story is framed by the temporal and local specificities that Juma encountered and that shaped the options among which he was able to choose. Juma was born in Nampula in the district of Memba in the North of Mozambique, on April 5, 1963.35 At the time, Mozambique was a Portuguese colony. A year before Juma’s birth, the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO), the current governing party of Mozambique, was founded and organized in exile in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, about 900km to the North from Juma’s place of birth. When Juma was one year old, the Colonial War started in Mozambique, which was to last until independence. Between 1969-1974, Juma completed the fourth grade at a Catholic missionary primary school in Mutauanha called, in line with the Portuguese civilizing mission, Paz e Amor (Peace and Love). When the country formally became independent on June 25, 1975, Juma was attending fifth grade at the Industrial school in Nampula city where, after some interruption, he graduated from eighth grade in 1980. The Mozambican civil war erupted in 1977, while Juma was in secondary school. The same year FRELIMO constituted itself as a Marxist-Leninist vanguard party. Juma’s parents were non-practicing Muslim farmers, engaged in subsistence agriculture. He remembers his upbringing as rural, working the fields, sleeping on mats on the floor with his three siblings. He walked to his primary school. In order to continue his education in secondary school however, he moved to Nampula city where he lived with his aunt, a housewife, and uncle, a tailor. Juma was well educated for a peasant boy from the North. Between 1979 and 1981, he taught an alphabetization course for adults as part of the planned National Literacy Campaigns aimed at workers and cadres of the party, army, cooperatives, and communal villages.36 Growing up in the North of Mozambique during the decolonization struggle, and participating as a teenager in the building of a post-colonial socialist nation, Juma experienced these tectonic shifts as local historical developments with national significance. Yet, decolonization and the spread of socialism were global phenomena, at the time of Juma’s youth precisely. The global possibilities conditioned the national and local possibilities and therefore Juma’s lived experience.

• 37 Hauke Dorsch, “Rites of Passage Overseas?: On the Sojourn of Mozambican Students and Scholars in Cu (...)
• 38 Marcia C. Schenck, “From Luanda and Maputo to Berlin: Uncovering Angolan and Mozambican Migrants' M (...)
• 39 Marcia C. Schenck, Socialist Solidarities and Their Afterlives: Histories and Memories of Angolan a (...)
• 40 Joao Paulo Borges Coelho, “Politics and Contemporary History in Mozambique: A Set of Epistemologica (...)

19In 1981, Juma signed up to work and train in East Germany. He did not know what future was ahead of him, when he boarded the plane to Berlin Schönefeld. After six months of language training, Juma began working at the VEB Motorradwerk Zschopau, a factory producing motorbikes, close to today’s Chemnitz. In addition to his work, he underwent training for milling and lathe machines, earning his diploma as a skilled laborer in November 1986. He served a total of two contracts and worked for eight years at the motorcycle factory where he was housed with Mozambicans hailing from Ruvuma to Maputo. Juma’s stay in Germany encompassed his youth from eighteen to twenty-seven and allowed him to miss the worst of the ongoing war at home. In his own words, he left a young boy “who had never drunk alcohol, smoked or made love to a woman” and returned an adult, a trained skilled laborer with nine years of work’s experience, a Mozambican partner and a child. Juma is part of a generation of young Mozambicans who received their professional education abroad. The young independent country neither had the skilled professionals nor the capacities for schooling or to train the much needed specialists. Hence, thousands of Mozambicans went to school, studied, trained, and worked not only, but predominantly, in the socialist world from Cuba to the Soviet Union.37 Juma mentions his migration as a rite of passage, a theme already familiar from earlier regional labor migrations, and one familiar to the majority of Angolan and Mozambican migrants to East Germany.38 Equally important, the awareness of the diverse Mozambican nation for Juma and his colleagues became, to a certain degree, lived experience only through their participation in the work and training program. It exposed them to several stops in preparation camps in Mozambique, becoming familiar with the capital of Maputo, and being allocated to ethnically, religiously and linguistically diverse groups of Mozambicans in East Germany. Their common experience of being Othered and labeled as Mozambicans in turn contributed to their self-awareness of being Mozambicans first, and Makonde, Shona, Makua, Tsonga or Shangaan second.39 While international socialist solidarities created the possibilities for this migration, they played a significant role also in the national histories of young independent countries such as Angola and Mozambique. This retelling of national history through global connections expands the current reading of the liberation script in Mozambique.40

• 41 Marcia C. Schenck., “Ostalgie in Mosambik: Erinnerungen ehemaliger mosambikanischer Vertragsarbeite (...)

20For many Mozambican workers, the fall of the inner-German wall in November 1989 continues to have a bitter aftertaste. On the one hand, they expressed happiness for the Germans they knew and about their own ability to go shopping in the former West, but for many a worker it meant the end of their stay in Europe. The labor and training migration program was abolished in 1990 and living conditions became increasingly challenging amid rising racism and economic and legal insecurity. Juma, however, experienced relatively little of this chaos. He and his wife Graciel, whom he met as a Mozambican colleague at the motorbike factory, made the decision to return jointly for family reasons, imagining a golden future in Mozambique. The bitter awakening came a few months after their return. Like the vast majority of returned workers, neither Juma nor his wife found work in the area for which they had been trained. They moved back to the North of Mozambique and Juma worked as a driver and security guard. Graciel worked as a bar woman in a soda shop for eight years. The family made extra income selling self-made food in front of their house and by using their phone as public phone. In 1999, the family moved back to Maputo. Juma worked a variety of impermanent jobs until, at forty, he gave up looking for employment in 2003 and became a full-time activist for the Madjerman (as the former Mozambican workers in East Germany became known after their return to Mozambique) cause. First as vice-president, later as treasurer he served ATMA, the largest and most durable organization of returned workers. He has been an active member of Mozambique’s second largest opposition party from 2010 onwards. Juma is quite frequently in virtual contact with Germany, where he still has extended family and friends. Like many of his colleagues, Juma spends much of his time longing for a return to his youth in East Germany.41 Juma and Graciel were able to spend part of their youth in East Germany through state-led migration programs connecting “brother states” in a socialist world; subsequently, the post-socialist world has confined them physically to Mozambique, subject to a disintegration process which assigned Mozambique a marginal role in the capitalist world and highlights the fragility of Juma’s and Graciel’s economically precarious lives in the informal sector, unable to capitalize on the skills and experiences gained abroad.

• 42 Tracing life histories also allows us to question existing assumptions about meso and macro develop (...)

21I share Juma’s life history to illustrate how much the stage of Juma’s life has been set by external geopolitical developments: colonialism, independence, socialism, the hot Cold War, the civil war, the global conjuncture after the disintegration of the global communist project, and the reformulation of Mozambique as a market economy and a democracy. He would never have migrated to East Germany had it not been for a global political context that enabled such movement and a national security, education and job market situation that pushed Juma to look for opportunities elsewhere. His life can be more fully understood against the backdrop of the times, places and networks which shaped it and that it shaped in return.42 How far to zoom out is a choice each historian must make.

• 45 The temporal scale mainly includes two levels; the “long 1980s” as a transitional moment, extending (...)

23Although the oppositions that he implied are between individual/society, or individuality/collectivity, or life/abstract concepts, I think this also connects to our approach to micro and macro. Likewise, if we approach the “individual as field” from the beginning and take into account the already relational and complex nature of a subject, the juxtaposition or opposition of micro and macro, to me, appears a less urgent issue. My units of analysis are overseas travel through microscopic lens on the specific experience of individuals as well as on the relevant social discourses and changing everyday landscapes of that time. In this sense, I can say two fields of microhistory, that of everyday material life as a background of the locale, i.e. South Korea, and of mobile experiences of travelers as human practices are combined. The former is to illustrate global awareness, global consciousness, global imagination that increasingly penetrated into daily lives and landscapes during the 1980s. An individual is not considered as distinctive and unique but more as part of a group of shared experiences. In this context, the South Korean government, functions as a meso level unit, which intervened procedurally and mediated the individual’s experience of ‘the global’. Global mobile actors are deemed embodied subjects that are closely attached to and affected by their social and historical contexts, both national and global. The travelers are both observers of a given time and place while they visited different destinations and also performers who actively mediated the outer world to their home society by interpreting their experience in their own ways but often in socially constructed manners.45

• 46 Linda Colley, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History, New York, Pantheon Books, 20 (...)
• 47 Joseph Calder Miller, “Historical Appreciation of the Biographical Turn”, in Lisa A. Lindsay and Jo (...)

24Marcia C. Schenck: Linda Colley categorically states “there can and should be no Olympian version of world history, and there is always a human and individual dimension”46. Joseph Miller, writing about the recent biographical turn in the Black Atlantic, reminds us that it is important to center the human dimension: “If the social scientists, quantifiers, and particularly economists have left the people out of the story, it is our job – as historians – to put them in”47. This motivates my interest in a bottom up history, starting with the lived experience of the workers, a revisionist move against the background of a historiography from above that has focused on the political context and economic motivations of relations between Mozambique and Angola and East Germany respectively. In that regard, I, too, read microhistory and the global scale not as juxtaposition or contradiction but rather as one method to adopt to write global history.

• 48 Joseph Calder Miller, “Historical Appreciation of the Biographical Turn”, in Lisa A. Lindsay and Jo (...)
• 49 Linda Colley, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History, New York, Pantheon Books, 20 (...)

25While I engage with the geo-political background to the East German foreign worker program on a macro-level, the emphasis lies on learning about the program and the global connections through the workers’ lives on a micro level. My work lies at the interface between the global perspective and attention to the detail of microstoria or history of the every day through a life-history-centered approach. Some historians feel that this confluence of methodologies (global/micro/biography/life history) is not yet conceptualised sufficiently.48 However, there is a noticeable turn in global history that seeks to follow individuals across different contexts; Linda Colley’s The ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh (2007), Tonio Andrade’s A Chinese Farmer, Two African Boys, and a Warlord (2010), Lisa A. Lindsay and John Wood Sweet’s Biography and the Black Atlantic (2014), Emma Rothschild’s The Inner Lives of Empire, and Miles Ogborn’s Global Lives (2008), are but a few prominent examples.49 It seems to me that they illustrate the value of the small scale for pluralizing history, restoring hidden narratives and reintroducing various voices to the historical record.

• 50 Lois W. Banner, “AHR Roundtable: Biography as History”, American Historical Review, 114, 3, 2009, p (...)
• 51 Lois W. Banner, “AHR Roundtable: Biography as History”, American Historical Review, 114, 3, 2009, p (...)
• 52 We have been talking about biography, where the tension between individual and context is even more (...)
• 53 Cited in Hans Erich Bödeker, Beatrix Borchard and Willem Frijhoff (eds), Biographie schreiben, Gött (...)

26As Lois W. Banner reminds us: “A life deeply lived, like any complex historical narrative, moves across space, time, and areas of human involvement both capriciously and predictably, validating certain accepted historical constructions while challenging others”50. Therefore, biography, like history “interweaves historical categories and methodologies, reflects current political and theoretical concerns, and raises complex issues of truth and proof”51. One of the advantages of focusing on the workers’ lives is that it allows breaking down the separation between the social, the personal, the political and the economic. I need to provide the reader with the context to understand the experiences and decisions of the historical actors. Of course the fundamental challenge remains how to connect the ‘cases’ and the ‘context’, and whether and how to draw ‘macro’ conclusions from ‘micro’ cases. The advantage of following the workers through the many transitions and upheavals of the time is that it gives the reader orientation and a coherent narrative.52 One difficulty lies in doing justice to the plethora of voices without drowning the reader in incomprehensible noise. Another difficulty is the art of choosing what to omit and the reverse, how to create a narrative from scarce sources or as Virginia Woolf aptly asks: “How can one make a life out of six cardboard boxes full of tailors’ bills, lovers’ letters and old picture postcards?”53. Finally, how do we deal with absences and silences in a biography? Narrating life histories allows the reader to understand complexity, emotionally and intellectually and thereby counterbalances generalizing and deterministic tendencies. Every history benefits from a clear narrative but this is especially important when faced with the manifold possibilities of telling world history. Life history evokes a feeling of the commonality of humanity as can global history, they thereby share a political project.

• 55 Natalie Zemon Davis, “Decentering History: Local Stories and Cultural Crossings in a Global World”, (...)

27Marcia C. Schenck: I would have not been able to pursue the lives of the workers in Angola, Mozambique, Portugal and Germany without the appropriate financial resources and language abilities. Engaging in multi-site, complex research also takes more time: time to organize fieldwork in different settings, to engage with diverging archival cultures and relationships to historical research across societies, to build different networks, and to collect data across cultural, language and climatic zones. Doing fieldwork in diverse locations is crucially important, because, as Natalie Zemon Davis reminds us, the global historian is a decentering historian: “The decentering historian does not tell the story of the past only from the vantage point of a single part of the world or of powerful elites, but rather widens his or her scope, socially and geographically, and introduces plural voices into the account”55. To those privileged enough to be able to conduct multi-sited research, it opens up the possibility to write a more balanced narrative, de-center entrenched viewpoints, integrate hitherto unheard voices into the historical record and is worth the effort. The fieldwork experience is necessarily shaped by the kind of archives to be consulted.

• 56 Paul Thompson, The Voice of the Past: Oral History, in Robert Perks and Alistair Thompson (eds), Th (...)
• 57 https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication-series/critical-oral-history-conference-series-0, accessed (...)

30I would like to specifically focus our attention on a resource underused for global history projects thus far, namely oral history. Oral history is democratic in nature and allows us to shift the focus from the institutions that leave archival traces to the actors that participated in creating history. In Paul Thompson’s words: “Oral history [...] can be a means for transforming both the content and purpose of history. […] it can give back to the people who made and experienced history, through their own words, a central place”56. When the call is made in global history to return to the study of primary sources, we should think about oral history and its endless possibilities. Thus far, we have not used the potential for collaboration between oral historians across the globe sufficiently. The Wilson Center’s Critical Oral History Conference Series is one explicitly multisited oral history project which involves former “diplomatic and intelligence officials from around the world” to provide insights into alternative histories of the Cold War.57 I hope that we will see more of these projects in the future, especially around migration.

• 58 https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication-series/critical-oral-history-conference-series-0, accessed (...)

32Because their experiences were noteworthy, these travelers, especially the backpackers, appeared and were invited in mainstream media, such as daily newspapers, television news broadcast, the radio, and travel magazines. Thus, the research is not limited to delivering their mediated voices, but also includes an interpretation from a distance through archiving the social memory of overseas travel during the 1980s. This practice of doing historical research reminds me of the act of ‘gleaning’, a gleaning of the traces about the travel in general as well as from the travelers. Quoting Sato again who proposed life history as a tool to overcome the confrontation aforementioned: “then, the interview as a field note, and the tape-recording as a life history becomes the field that can be shared for analysis by other people as a database of an ‘individual’. Of course, data criticism is needed including self-reflexivity on the practice of tape-recording itself”58.

• 59 Gordon Mathews, Ghetto at the Center of the World: Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong, Chicago, Universi (...)
• 60 Miles Ogborn, Global Lives: Britain and the World, 1550-1800, Cambridge-UK, Cambridge-MA, Cambridge (...)
• 61 Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History, Berkeley, University of Cali (...)

34Jiyoon Kim: While we were working on this writing project, I often thought of Gordon Mathews’ anthropological investigation on contemporary globalization, Ghetto at the Center of the World Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong.59 He calls the mansion ‘a world center of low-end globalization’ where he met many diverse human figures from different national, occupational, ethnic, and class backgrounds such as traders, owners and managers, temporary workers, asylum seekers, domestic helpers, sex workers, heroin addicts, and tourists. In addition to the human interaction, he also observed the flow of goods and laws. The book resembles Global Lives, not only because of its collective biological approach, but also because of its illustration and emphasis on “the role of the actions – what we call the ‘agency’ – of all people involved in these global processes”60. Anthropological works like Mathews’ may be valued as a future historical source. Both capture global mobile lives of a given time and space and historical moments in their respective linkage to the macro-context, i.e. globalization in different times. It is at the intersection of past and present that the truly challenging questions motivating historical inquiry are born. As Frederick Cooper reminds us: “Behind the globalization fad is an important quest for understanding the interconnectedness of different parts of the world, for explaining new mechanisms shaping the movement of capital, people, and culture, and for exploring institutions capable of regulating such transnational movement. What is missing in discussions of globalization today is the historical depth of interconnections and a focus on just what the structures and limits of the connecting mechanisms are”61.

• 62 Heonik Kwon, The Other Cold War, New York, Columbia University Press, 2010, p. 11.

35When we deal with the history of the twentieth century, doing historical research is hardly detached from the issue of interpretation and its political ramifications. Indeed, when we trace the research tradition of microhistory and biographical approach in Japanese and Korean scholarship, we see that oral history and life history have developed and piled up based on the lived experiences of conflict, violence, and oppression and their respective historical incidents: the Second World War, Okinawa, minorities, and natural disaster in Japan; in Korea, the colonized past, the Korean War, women’s history, military dictatorship and protests, among others. And these historical as well as anthropological works are closely connected to the archival project. The historiography of the “1980s” in South Korea cannot be an apolitical issue because of the domestic turmoil and unsolved issues of state violence and its investigation. This is why historiographies of that era have been highly concentrated on people’s history, workers’ and students’ movements, and the history of the democratization movement. I do not consider the travelers in my project as marginal or oppressed. In the context of global history and Cold War history, I will quote Kwon from his book The Other Cold War: “how societies come to terms with the remains of the Cold War’s mass violence and death is vital for their political futures. In this sense, ‘the decomposition of the Cold War’ has a more literal meaning, which is to relocate the human casualties of the bipolar conflicts (and the actions concerning their decomposing bodies and troubled memories) from the invisible margins to a vital center in the history of the global Cold War”62. Paying attention to human lives and voices, including global mobile lives, is therefore both historically and ethnographically useful. I think global historians must strive for a balanced and fair perspective on human lives.

• 63 Terence O. Ranger, “Toward a Usable African Past”, in C. H. Fyfe (ed.), African Studies since 1945: (...)

36Marcia C. Schenck: As Jiyoon Kim has aptly demonstrated, the relationship between history and present is a politically charged one, especially in recent Cold War history in Africa, Latin America and Asia. I would like to refocus on the question of Terence Ranger’s ‘usable past.’ His book Towards a Usable African Past was published in 1976 – a time when the African past was explored in an emancipatory setting to strengthen a sense of nationhood and value for recently independent states outside colonial influences.63 The past had a direct role to play in forming the African present. This approach has never been mainstream in the ivory towers across the West. Historical analyses rarely engage in policy recommendations. When historical comparisons appear in the press, they tame the epistemological chaos of the present and are looked at as an organizing system. Yet a crucial value of historical thinking is the awareness of contingency and complexity, something that can expand our imagination for the present and the future. In this way, I welcome global history to help us think critically about the present and the future. We, as next generation of historians, have the opportunity to push the field of global history to explicitly engage with the structural persistence of exclusion, inequality, and precarity; to take collaboration seriously, especially across geographic areas rarely in conversation to augment the language and cultural skills to tackle an issue; and to invest in inclusion of scholars from countries in Africa and Asia that have so far rarely been represented in collaborative projects and the international academy.