Ismay Milford
Biographic Data
| ID | 270740 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ismay Milford |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ismay |
| FAMILY NAME | Milford |
| SIGNATURE | MILFORD I |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Edinburgh |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5761-2348 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 13 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 14 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2016 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
On the Unreachability of Anti-colonial Internationalism
Communication Theology, the Decolonization of Information, and the Africanization of Journalism, 1960–1990
This article charts the intellectual development and application of communication theology, centering two church-led communication training programs in Nyegezi (Tanzania) and Nairobi (Kenya), from their founding amid East African decolonization in the 1960s through to the challenges of Africanization in the 1970s–1980s. This has implications for two growing bodies of scholarship. First, speaking to histories of Christian thought—particularly on e…
Violence and the self-fashioning of liberation
An author cannot know the events that their book will be read alongside.In October 2023, when I was three chapters into Spear and Landau had compellingly set out the conditions in which ANC "took up the spear" after half a century of pursuing nonviolent methods, Hamas carried out violent attacks in Israel.I was not necessarily preoccupied with historical parallels or lessons from the past.Instead, the high stakes of the narratives built around vi…
Listening
Journal Article Listening: Radio and its Unintended Publics Get access Ismay Milford Ismay Milford Freie Universität Berlin, Germany Email: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 129, Issue 2, June 2024, Pages 572–577, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae170 Published: 13 June 2024
African Activists in a Decolonising World: The Making of an Anticolonial Culture, 1952–1966
As wars of liberation in Africa and Asia shook the post-war world, a cohort of activists from East and Central Africa, specifically the region encompassing present-day Malawi, Zambia, Uganda and mainland Tanzania, asked what role they could play in the global anticolonial landscape. Through the perspective of these activists, Ismay Milford presents a social and intellectual history of decolonisation and anticolonialism in the 1950s and 1960s. Dra…
African Activists in a Decolonising World: The Making of an Anticolonial Culture, 1952-1966
Working for the Wireless World: Radio Uganda Technicians and the Wo/manpower of 1970s Cosmopolitanism
This article argues that technicians’ working lives and workplaces are crucial to conceptualizing the inequalities that characterized the ‘wireless world’ of radio broadcasting during a period of demands for a new information order. Taking Uganda’s national broadcaster and the files it has preserved as a focus, I follow calls to move beyond the exceptionalism of 1970s Uganda to locate it in global histories of technology and work. Like many broad…
A New World in the Swiss Alps: Moral Re-Armament, Religious Internationalism and African Decolonisation
During the 1950s, as leaders across the African continent organised campaigns for political independence from European colonial powers, the international spiritual movement Moral Re-Armament (MRA) invited African trade unionists and politicians to its headquarters – a renovated hotel building in Caux, Switzerland. In light of recent recognition of MRA’s global reach and Cold War entanglements, this article uses the account of a visit to Caux by U…
Roundtable: The Archives of Global History in a Time of International Immobility
These books often historicize structures that facilitate or constrain global connections, mobility and interactions, and they often present narratives that are less Eurocentric than those they write against.2 But they rarely raise the question of who gets to be a global historian. After all, the use of multiple archives across national borders has always relied on the possession of a strong passport and the funding of a wealthy institution. When …
African Internationalisms and the Erstwhile Trajectories of Kenyan Community Development: Joseph Murumbi’s 1950s
This article sheds new light on the relationship between internationalism, decolonisation and ideas about development through a reassessment of an overlooked period in the life of Joseph Murumbi (1911–90), cultural collector and Kenya’s second vice-president. It follows Murumbi’s engagement with three internationalist spaces during the 1950s: in the Afro-Asian worlds of India and Egypt he honed his vision for community development and the practic…
Another World? East Africa, Decolonisation, and the Global History of the Mid-Twentieth Century
This article proposes that there is a gap in our current understanding of the globalising and deglobalising dynamics of mid-twentieth-century East Africa, one that might be addressed by consolidating and taking forward recent developments in the historiography of decolonisation. Recent work by international historians has recovered the connected world of the 1940s to 1960s: the era of new postcolonial states, the ‘Bandung moment’, pan-African coo…
Federation, Partnership, and the Chronologies of Space in 1950s East and Central Africa
This article assesses the relationship between the imposed Central African Federation (1953–63) and the ways in which East and Central African thinkers and leaders conveyed and pursued the possibilities of decolonization. Existing literature on federalism in twentieth-century Africa fails to place regional projects in dialogue, studying in isolation East Africa and Central Africa, ‘utopian’ and oppressive regionalisms. But such clear dividing lin…
Zoom In, Zoom Out, Change Lens: New directions in the historiography of decolonisation
Zoom In, Zoom Out, Change Lens:New directions in the historiography of decolonisation Ismay Milford Europe after Empire: Decolonization, society and culture. By Elizabeth Buettner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Cultures of decolonisation: Transnational productions and practices, 1945–70. Edited by Ruth Craggs and Claire Wintle. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016. Britain, France and the decolonization of Africa: Future i…
Colonial Metropolis. The Urban Grounds of Anti-Imperialism and Feminism in Interwar Paris
Colonial Metropolis. The Urban Grounds of Anti-Imperialism and Feminism in Interwar Paris." European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire, 23(1-2), pp. 319–320
Another World? East Africa, Decolonisation, and the Global History of the Mid-Twentieth Century
This article proposes that there is a gap in our current understanding of the globalising and deglobalising dynamics of mid-twentieth-century East Africa, one that might be addressed by consolidating and taking forward recent developments in the historiography of decolonisation. Recent work by international historians has recovered the connected world of the 1940s to 1960s: the era of new postcolonial states, the ‘Bandung moment’, pan-African coo…
Federation, Partnership, and the Chronologies of Space in 1950s East and Central Africa
This article assesses the relationship between the imposed Central African Federation (1953–63) and the ways in which East and Central African thinkers and leaders conveyed and pursued the possibilities of decolonization. Existing literature on federalism in twentieth-century Africa fails to place regional projects in dialogue, studying in isolation East Africa and Central Africa, ‘utopian’ and oppressive regionalisms. But such clear dividing lin…
African Internationalisms and the Erstwhile Trajectories of Kenyan Community Development: Joseph Murumbi’s 1950s
This article sheds new light on the relationship between internationalism, decolonisation and ideas about development through a reassessment of an overlooked period in the life of Joseph Murumbi (1911–90), cultural collector and Kenya’s second vice-president. It follows Murumbi’s engagement with three internationalist spaces during the 1950s: in the Afro-Asian worlds of India and Egypt he honed his vision for community development and the practic…
Working for the Wireless World: Radio Uganda Technicians and the Wo/manpower of 1970s Cosmopolitanism
This article argues that technicians’ working lives and workplaces are crucial to conceptualizing the inequalities that characterized the ‘wireless world’ of radio broadcasting during a period of demands for a new information order. Taking Uganda’s national broadcaster and the files it has preserved as a focus, I follow calls to move beyond the exceptionalism of 1970s Uganda to locate it in global histories of technology and work. Like many broad…
A New World in the Swiss Alps: Moral Re-Armament, Religious Internationalism and African Decolonisation
During the 1950s, as leaders across the African continent organised campaigns for political independence from European colonial powers, the international spiritual movement Moral Re-Armament (MRA) invited African trade unionists and politicians to its headquarters – a renovated hotel building in Caux, Switzerland. In light of recent recognition of MRA’s global reach and Cold War entanglements, this article uses the account of a visit to Caux by U…
Colonial Metropolis. The Urban Grounds of Anti-Imperialism and Feminism in Interwar Paris
Colonial Metropolis. The Urban Grounds of Anti-Imperialism and Feminism in Interwar Paris." European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire, 23(1-2), pp. 319–320
Zoom In, Zoom Out, Change Lens: New directions in the historiography of decolonisation
Zoom In, Zoom Out, Change Lens:New directions in the historiography of decolonisation Ismay Milford Europe after Empire: Decolonization, society and culture. By Elizabeth Buettner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Cultures of decolonisation: Transnational productions and practices, 1945–70. Edited by Ruth Craggs and Claire Wintle. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016. Britain, France and the decolonization of Africa: Future i…
Federation, Partnership, and the Chronologies of Space in 1950s East and Central Africa
This article assesses the relationship between the imposed Central African Federation (1953–63) and the ways in which East and Central African thinkers and leaders conveyed and pursued the possibilities of decolonization. Existing literature on federalism in twentieth-century Africa fails to place regional projects in dialogue, studying in isolation East Africa and Central Africa, ‘utopian’ and oppressive regionalisms. But such clear dividing lin…
African Internationalisms and the Erstwhile Trajectories of Kenyan Community Development: Joseph Murumbi’s 1950s
This article sheds new light on the relationship between internationalism, decolonisation and ideas about development through a reassessment of an overlooked period in the life of Joseph Murumbi (1911–90), cultural collector and Kenya’s second vice-president. It follows Murumbi’s engagement with three internationalist spaces during the 1950s: in the Afro-Asian worlds of India and Egypt he honed his vision for community development and the practic…
Another World? East Africa, Decolonisation, and the Global History of the Mid-Twentieth Century
This article proposes that there is a gap in our current understanding of the globalising and deglobalising dynamics of mid-twentieth-century East Africa, one that might be addressed by consolidating and taking forward recent developments in the historiography of decolonisation. Recent work by international historians has recovered the connected world of the 1940s to 1960s: the era of new postcolonial states, the ‘Bandung moment’, pan-African coo…
A New World in the Swiss Alps: Moral Re-Armament, Religious Internationalism and African Decolonisation
During the 1950s, as leaders across the African continent organised campaigns for political independence from European colonial powers, the international spiritual movement Moral Re-Armament (MRA) invited African trade unionists and politicians to its headquarters – a renovated hotel building in Caux, Switzerland. In light of recent recognition of MRA’s global reach and Cold War entanglements, this article uses the account of a visit to Caux by U…
Roundtable: The Archives of Global History in a Time of International Immobility
These books often historicize structures that facilitate or constrain global connections, mobility and interactions, and they often present narratives that are less Eurocentric than those they write against.2 But they rarely raise the question of who gets to be a global historian. After all, the use of multiple archives across national borders has always relied on the possession of a strong passport and the funding of a wealthy institution. When …
African Activists in a Decolonising World: The Making of an Anticolonial Culture, 1952–1966
As wars of liberation in Africa and Asia shook the post-war world, a cohort of activists from East and Central Africa, specifically the region encompassing present-day Malawi, Zambia, Uganda and mainland Tanzania, asked what role they could play in the global anticolonial landscape. Through the perspective of these activists, Ismay Milford presents a social and intellectual history of decolonisation and anticolonialism in the 1950s and 1960s. Dra…
African Activists in a Decolonising World: The Making of an Anticolonial Culture, 1952-1966
Working for the Wireless World: Radio Uganda Technicians and the Wo/manpower of 1970s Cosmopolitanism
This article argues that technicians’ working lives and workplaces are crucial to conceptualizing the inequalities that characterized the ‘wireless world’ of radio broadcasting during a period of demands for a new information order. Taking Uganda’s national broadcaster and the files it has preserved as a focus, I follow calls to move beyond the exceptionalism of 1970s Uganda to locate it in global histories of technology and work. Like many broad…
Violence and the self-fashioning of liberation
An author cannot know the events that their book will be read alongside.In October 2023, when I was three chapters into Spear and Landau had compellingly set out the conditions in which ANC "took up the spear" after half a century of pursuing nonviolent methods, Hamas carried out violent attacks in Israel.I was not necessarily preoccupied with historical parallels or lessons from the past.Instead, the high stakes of the narratives built around vi…
Listening
Journal Article Listening: Radio and its Unintended Publics Get access Ismay Milford Ismay Milford Freie Universität Berlin, Germany Email: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 129, Issue 2, June 2024, Pages 572–577, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae170 Published: 13 June 2024
On the Unreachability of Anti-colonial Internationalism
Communication Theology, the Decolonization of Information, and the Africanization of Journalism, 1960–1990
This article charts the intellectual development and application of communication theology, centering two church-led communication training programs in Nyegezi (Tanzania) and Nairobi (Kenya), from their founding amid East African decolonization in the 1960s through to the challenges of Africanization in the 1970s–1980s. This has implications for two growing bodies of scholarship. First, speaking to histories of Christian thought—particularly on e…
Political science (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Sociology (8 works) · Decolonization (7 works) · Politics (7 works) · African history and culture studies (6 works) · History (6 works) · Law (6 works) · African studies and sociopolitical issues (4 works) · Colonialism (4 works)