Alexander van Wickeren

• Activist Witnessing: South African Musicians in Western Europe during Apartheid, 1960s-1990s
  Activist witnesses, who publicly mobilise artistic forms to contest violence, shape our present. We know that this new cultural significance of witnessing emerged after the Second World War, encompassing testimonies of colonial violence from early on. This project investigates how the mnemonic activism of Black South African musicians against crisis-ridden apartheid contributed to this new culture. From the 1960s through to the end of the regime, Black musicians from popular and underground scenes made apartheid violence audible and visible, particularly crisis events such as the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960 and the Soweto Uprising of 1976. Western European publics played a key role in this regard. Based on a sample of twenty musicians, the project explores the musicians’ Western European engagement with particular attention to processes of commodification, the violent responses to public testimony, and the musicians’ role in shaping left-alternative urban spaces. Doing so, the project links research on witnessing in new ways to debates on memory activism. Methodologically, the study focuses on archival research, partly also on oral history. In addition, it develops a participatory framework that enables research on witnesses who can no longer be included as co-researchers.

Book

• Wissensräume im Wandel. Eine Geschichte der deutsch-französischen Tabakforschung (1780-1870)
  Alexander van Wickeren, 2020, Publisher: Böhlau Verlag
  
  Wissensräume im Wandel

Selected volume

• Tobacco in Global Perspective, 1780-1960: Trade, Knowledge, and Labour
  Alexander van Wickeren, Jean Stubbs und William G. Clarence-Smith, 2024, Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan (Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies)
  
  Tobacco in Global Perspective

Book chapter

• Introduction: Tobacco’s Second Globalisation (peer reviewed)
  Alexander van Wickeren, Jean Stubbs, and William G. Clarence-Smith, 2024, Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan (Reihe: Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies)
  
  Tobacco’s Second Globalisation
• Regional Knowledge in the Empire: Tobacco Cultivation during the Napoleonic Era (peer-reviewed)
  Alexander van Wickeren, 2023, Publisher: Routledge (Empire and the Making of the Modern World, 1650-2000)
  
  Regional Knowledge in the Empire
• The Transformation of an Ecological Policy. Acclimatization of Cuban Tobacco Varieties and Public Scandalization in the French Empire, c. 1860-1880 (peer-reviewed)
  Alexander van Wickeren, 2020, Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
  
  Transformation of an Ecological Policy.
• Territorializing Atlantic Knowledge: The French State Tobacco Monopoly and the Globalization of the Havana Cigar around Mid-19th Century
  Alexander van Wickeren, 2019, Publisher: De Guyter
  
  Territorializing Atlantic Knowledge
• Die Zirkulation staatsrelevanten Wissens (savoir d'État) über den Tabakanbau in Baden und im Elsass um 1800
  Alexander van Wickeren, 2012
  
  Zirkulation staatsrelevanten Wissens
• Towards a Culture of Smoking: Consumption during Tobacco’s Second Globalization, 1780–1960 (in preparation)
  Alexander van Wickeren
  
• Bourbonising the French Empire? Humboldt, Bonpland and the Global Commercialisation of Tobacco Cultivation in the early 19th Century (in preparation, peer-reviewed)
  Alexander van Wickeren
  

Special Issue / Journal

• Spaces – Objects – Knowledge. An Integrative Perspective on Recent Turns in Historical Research
  Pascal Schillings und Alexander van Wickeren, 2015
  
  Spaces – Objects – Knowledge

Journal article

• Cigarette Crisis: Globalisation, Right-wing Politics and Governmental Downplay in the early Weimar Republic (in peer review)
  Alexander van Wickeren
  
• Towards a Material and Spatial History of Knowledge Production. An Introduction
  Pascal Schillings und Alexander van Wickeren, 2015
  
  Material and Spatial History of Knowledge Production

• Diversifying Perspectives: Dimensions of Postcolonial Memory
  9 December 2024
  Diversifying Perspectives
• Mit der Öffentlichkeit erinnern: Für eine kooperative Kulturwissenschaft
  8 November 2023
  Mit der Öffentlichkeit erinnern
• Rethinking Tobacco History: Commodities, Empire and Agency in Global Perspective, 1780-1960
  2 to 4 Dezember 2021
  Rethinking Tobacco History
• The Production of Imperial Space. Empire and Circulations (18th-20th Centuries)
  23 to 24 November 2017
  The Production of Imperial Space

• Career Cluster Participatory Memory: Critical Perspectives & Practices, TH Köln
  
• British Academy Research Project Commodities of Empire
  
  Commodities of Empire

• Offermann-Hergarten Prize 2021
  
  Offermann-Hergarten-Preis