Cliocast #25: Martin Dusinberre - Mooring the Global Archive

cliocast

Martin Dusinberre’s «Mooring the Global Archive» is an intervention into debates on how global history could be written and what a global archive could look like. Published in 2023, this engaging book takes the reader on board a steamship, the Yamashiro-maru, to follow its passages and landfalls across the Asian and Pacific waters at the end of the 19th century. Dusinberre tries to reconstruct the lives and experienced realities of some of its passengers: male and female migrants who left their native Japan to work in Hawai’i, Singapore or Australia. In this sense, the book is a plea for global history as histories of migrants, labour and exploitation. Dusinberre makes use of a range of source material – from a portrait, maps, a ship model, a translated transcript to a piece of coal and a headstone – to address questions of heuristics, methodology and the positionality of a historian’s perspective. Isabelle Schürch (Bern) talks with Martin Dusinberre (Zürich) about the fact that «this has been a messy book in the making» (p. 37). They reflect on the traps, pitfalls and shortcomings historians face when they do not constantly reflect their own positionality in their research. Taking a lunch break from archival work on Hawai'i as one starting point, Martin Dusinberre gives insights into why he thinks we need a more open, transparent, and candid way to talk and write about our own research contingencies, experiences and failures.