Port cities storytelling: Drawing on materials of neglect

Journal article

Odessa, Hong Kong, Casablanca(s), and the ports of the Niger Delta: this transdisciplinary article unfolds through four distinct vignettes, exploring how global historians across the disciplines may engage anew in the storytelling of colonial ports, by attuning themselves to the minor and anecdotal in materials of neglect. Our work of minoring stems from our collaboration as part of the network, Colonial Ports and Global History (CPAGH), co-founded by an anthropologist, historians, and musicologists. With shared interests in performance, temporality, and materiality, our vignettes highlight the ways in which identified materials of neglect may serve to articulate minor experiences and agencies—and a transdisciplinary mode of port cities storytelling in the plural that ventures in another direction from the sweeping coverage of global history. Together, these vignettes reflect our converging disciplinary orientations towards minor episodes and overlooked actors within colonial ports, advancing, variously yet in tandem, a major–minor continuum of people, things, and practices in transdisciplinary writing

Authors: Liao, Y; Binter, JTS; Durand, OI; Lopes, HFS

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Journal: Journal of Global History
• Pages: 1-19
• Publication date: 2026-04-20
• DOI: 10.1017/s1740022826100448
• EISSN: 1740-0236
• ISSN: 1740-0228
• Language: English
• Keywords: Port (circuit theory); Minor (academic); Storytelling; Plural; Colonialism; Neglect