Remembering African Labor Migration to the Second World

Marcia C. Schenck is professor of Global History at the University of Potsdam, Germany. Her research interests include global and African history, oral history, labor and education history, and migration history. Her peer-reviewed articles have appeared in Africa, African Economic History and Labor History, among others. She recently co-edited a volume about the varied relationship between East Germany and the African continent called Navigating Socialist Encounters: Moorings and (Dis)Entanglements between Africa and East Germany during the Cold War (De Gruyter, 2021). She is co-founder of the H-Net Refugees in African History network and the founder of the Global History Dialogues, which constitutes part of Princeton University’s Global History Lab.

• Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2: Between the Hammer, Machete, and Kalashnikov: Labor Migration from Angola and Mozambique to East Germany 1979-90.- Chapter 3: Socialist Workers and Socialist Consumers.- Chapter 4: The Social Life of Socialism: Intimacy and Racism.- Chapter 5: Return, Fall and Rise of the Madjerman:  The Afterlives of Socialist Migration.- Chapter 6: Temporality, Memory and Meaning: Eastalgia in Angola and Mozambique.- Chapter 7: Epilogue: Transnational Sojourners, Intimate Strangers, and Workers of the World.

“Marcia C. Schenck’s Remembering African Labor Migration to the Second World makes several highly productive interventions in scholarship on Mozambican and Angolan labor migration to the GDR, forging fruitful new links between (southern) African and German historiography through a complex transnational methodology. … In crisscrossing between various scales of social, historical, and geopolitical analysis, Schenck brings out tensions between what the state says citizens should be experiencing and what individuals actually do experience … .” (Juan-Jacques Aupiais, German Studies Review, Vol. 47 (3), October, 2024)