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Marcia C. Schenck, "Remembering African Labor Migration to the Second World: Socialist Mobilities between Angola, Mozambique, and East Germany" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)
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Hello everyone, and welcome back to the New Books Network in African Studies, a podcast channel in the New Books Network. I'm Eliza Prosperedi, the host of the channel and today's Conversation. Today we're speaking with Marcia C. Schenk about her new book, Remembering African Labor Migration to the Second World Socialist Mobilities between Angola, Mozambique and East Germany. The book originally came out in English in 2023 and has recently been released in both the German and the Portuguese editions, which we'll talk about later on. Marcia, welcome to the podcast.
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B
A pleasure to be here and thanks so much for the invitation.
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C
Well, it's really a delight to talk to you. We've known each other a long time and it's nice to be able to share this moment. Let's start by having you introduce yourself to us.
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B
Yes, so my name is Marcia Schenk and I'm currently the professor of Global History at Potsdam University, which is just outside of Berlin. And global history is of course a big word, so some listeners might be asking, what does that actually mean? Well, to me it's a lot about perspectives. So I'm thinking about telling histories that connect stories beyond the framework of the nation state and also looks beyond stories from Europe. And we'll, I think, elaborate in a little bit what that means concretely for this book. In general, I work on three different fields. So the one is histories of migration, labor migration and education migration. The second is histories of refuge seeking. And the third one is thinking about access to history, different community initiatives, for instance. And here I'm just going to name drop the book the Right to Research as an example of the things. I'm also thinking about.
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C
Something that I know a little bit about, given our previous collaboration in the Global History Lab. But beyond that, let's focus here on your wonderful book. Tell us about the genesis of this project in a very interesting way and probably quite uniquely among historians. It seems that this project literally almost tapped you on the shoulder.
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B
Absolutely. It literally started while taking a stroll through Maputo. So in 2011, I found myself on PhD PhD research while I was already at Princeton doing the PhD in African history. And I was in Mozambique at the time doing research on the transition from slavery to forced labor, really delving into a completely different research project when I just walked through the city and I literally ran into a former labor migrant. And we started talking and he introduced me to the park of the Germans, which is a park that exists until this day in Maputo, close to the Labor Ministry, where where former returned labor migrants from Mozambique to East Germany come and unite and also have still weekly demonstrations. And I just got really interested in learning more about the story because I myself have grown up in what is West Germany, so a city called Wuppertal. I was born in 86, so it's not like I have a memory of the divided Germany. To me, it was always a unified Germany in my personal memory. But yet I had never learned anything in school or elsewhere about labor migrations from the socialist world to East Germany. And so now I know, of course, that migrants came from Poland, from at the time Czechoslovakia, but also from further afield, Angola, Mozambique, Cuba, North Korea, to name just a few examples. And this was a world that really got opened up by this initial conversation on an afternoon in Maputo in 2011.
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C
Well, this book is really anchored in the stories of these migrants, worker trainees who move from Southern Africa to East Germany and back, which is an important intervention here. And in order to set the scene, I wanted to ask you to open our conversation, as you do in your book, by recounting the story of one of these migrants. His name is Juma yes, exactly.
- [05:40]
B
So I start setting the scene in the book with a prologue which essentially retells Juma Madera's life history in an effort to situate the reader in a specific life history before we go into a broad array of different snippets from different interviews. In total of about 260 interviews that I did for the book. And so, yeah, to delve into Juma's history, Juma himself was born in northern Mozambique, in the district of MEMBA, in 1963. So that is actually one year after free Limo, the front of the Liberation of Mozambique, was founded, which is the governing party until today in Mozambique. And the war of independence started when Juma was just one year old. So it definitely shaped his childhood until Mozambique got independent on June 25, 1975. So the thing is that you can kind of like interweave the national and geopolitical events with these life histories. And you see this childhood which was really marked by growing up during the war of independence, by seeking independence, by gaining independence. Then all the while, Juma actually has the privilege to receive quite a lot of education. So he finishes primary school at a mission school, a Catholic mission school, and then he moves into a bigger city called Nampula to live with his relatives to be able to attend secondary school. And in that, it's also quite a typical story in that those Mozambicans who are able to further their education at the time often have to leave their relatives or have to leave their sort of core families to live with relatives in bigger cities. So he receives quite a lot of education. He works in literacy campaigns around Mozambique, and he graduates in 1980. So the civil war starts in Mozambique in 1977, and Juma is also looking for opportunities, what he can do after school. And he actually ends up being recruited or learning about the opportunity to go to Germany as a worker while still being in school. So then he signs up, he goes to Germany, he arrives in Berlin, in Schoenfeld, at the airport in 1981. And he ends up staying for two different contracts, so two four year contract periods. He is actually working at the same company in Chopau, at the Czopow, which is people's owned enterprise producing motorbikes. And it's located close to what's today called Chemnitz, and at the time was called Karlmarkstedt. So there he receives first language lessons, about six months of intensive German training, so that he's then able to both work and actually also do his training. Because Juma is supposed to be Returning as a skilled laborer. Like laborers at the time in general were supposed to be returning as skilled laborers. So he does receive his skilled laborer certificate. He is trained in milling. And then he decides to actually stay in Germany. And he signs up for a second. For a second contract and continues working there. When we read the company documents, he is a good worker. So he gets the grade of good in all of his different certificates. But he's not excelling the production quota. And that's because he's also actually very interested in life outside of work. So when I did the interviews with him, he spent a lot of time telling me about the travels that he did, Moving back and forth, visiting other relatives, but also friends in different cities in East Germany. Germany also actually having been able to move across the border with female friends. He had at the time talking a lot about going to discos, enjoying his life. And here we have to remember, this is a young person, right? He leaves Mozambique when he's 18. He returns when he's 27 years old. So he's sharing that nostalgia of life in discos, thinking about fashion, what to dress, all of these kinds of things. But he also, during the time that he's in Germany, actually meets his wife, Graciel, and they actually end up having their first child, Juma Jr. In 1988 in Germany. The labor program as such actually didn't allow female workers to become mothers in East Germany itself. So they would either be deported back or have to stop their pregnancy, terminate their pregnancy. So they had to very much decide between reproduction and production in this case. But towards the end of the labor program, that regulation was eased. And it was possible to also have children. Like it would have been possible for East German women to combine having children and working in factories at the time. So Juma junior Is born in Germany. The company gives them a flat. They live as a family. But then reunification happens independently. Graciel also has thought about wanting to be closer to her own family with the children. And so the couple decides to move back. Both because during reunification, racism is actually on the rise in East Germany. And it becomes really dangerous to live life as a black person. Many, many people decide to return during that time period, but also for family reasons, for personal reasons, Wanting to seek a better future in Mozambique and wanting to return with their skills back to Mozambique. However, after the return, they do not find work in the areas for which they've been trained, for which they received their certificates of skilled laborers in East Germany. Rather, they have to make do. So Juma, for instance, Works as driver, as security guard. Graciel works as a service worker in an informal soda shop. And so they make do right in the north of Mozambique in 1992. Then in Mozambique, the civil war, the 16 year war ends. And the economy, as you can imagine, is very much one of a war economy. So it's very difficult to find employment, formal employment. And so the family continues in informal employment. They moved back to Maputo in 1999, where then Juma becomes a part time activist for ATMA, which is the association for Mozambican Workers in East Germany. And he first becomes the vice president and then works as a treasurer. And that's then how our paths crossed. Because in 2014, when I returned for my fieldwork, I was basically referred by the then president to Juma, who was supposed to tell me the sort of official history of ATMA and the labor migration. And from there our friendship really developed. And Juma integrated me in a lot of events having anything to do with the German community, my Germans being the word for the returned workers from East Germany to Mozambique. And. Yes, and so that's basically why I decided to start the book with a life history that allows us to see both how the sort of national history is intertwined and shapes the options that people have, but also how global history, events, and here, for instance, the cold war and the links between the socialist countries even enable certain decisions. So, for instance, Juma, as an unskilled 18 year old person from Mozambique, would have not been able to migrate legally into the heart of Europe if it hadn't been for these ties between socialist nations at the time that had a state managed labor migration program that actually was specifically intended for this purpose. But then it was a return labor migration program. And I think that's something we'll be spending a little bit more time on.
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C
So thank you. We have this kind of an encapsulated story of Juma's life, a kind of overture onto the stories of these thousands of labor migrants whom your book is about. So just to kind of summarize, you're looking specifically at these worker trainees or these migrants who are going to East Germany in order to acquire these skills in manufacturing and production. So we're not talking about educational migrants or other types of migrants. And you are looking at two southern African Lusophone countries. So Mozambique, which signs an accord with east Germany in 1979 and makes up the majority of your, let's say, research investigations. So about 20,000 Mozambicans go to East Germany in this period. But you Also look at Angola, and Angola signs an agreement later, and many fewer Angolans go to east Germany, about 2,500. And so I just wanted to ask you about handling these two very different quantitatively and otherwise national migration narratives in this global history approach that you take.
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B
Yeah, thank you. So first, perhaps just very brief comment on numbers, because people always want to know how many people actually migrated. Right? So it's a natural interest, but it's actually not so easy to answer because in the East German archives, the contracts were counted, but many people, as we just heard, like Juma, actually signed up for several contracts. So then if we know that 21,000 contracts were signed, that doesn't necessarily mean that this was the amount of people. And then likewise in Angola and Mozambique, the ministries probably have numbers, but it wasn't possible for me to access archival documents held by the labor ministries in both countries. So in that sense, the archival documents that are available for the story are mostly from the East German archive. And here, of course, that's a very lucky coincidence for historians. The East German state ceased to exist and therefore we have pretty much complete access to whatever we can find from that time period. Versus, of course, in Angola and Mozambique. These labor migrations are part of an ongoing story with the same parties still in government that were at the time. And so the information is not as freely available as in the German context. I do not treat these two stories as comparative stories as such. Rather, and I was trying to get at this a little bit in my initial remark, there was a whole world of socialist inspired labor migration, state organized labor migrations at the time that saw people, for instance, from Cuba go to East Germany, but also go to Hungary, or from Vietnam go to East Germany, but also go to, at the time, Czechoslovakia. And so all of these migrations function to a certain extent with a similar pattern. So, meaning they were state organized workers were sent to different companies across these Eastern European countries to both help in the production and therefore bring the production quotas up, but also receive skills training. We know not that much yet. And I think we'll see much more research coming out in the coming years about these other contexts. But for the East German context, the stories that can be told on the basis of the East German archives have been researched quite well. I mean, not for all groups, but for instance, for Vietnamese groups, for the Polish contract workers, and also say, for the Mozambicans. But what happens in these contexts is because we have the German archive, we really only see people come out of nowhere. Then you have a description of them for four years and then they disappear into nowhere. And, and so one of the things that this life history approach can do that was very important to me is telling a history from below that gives us a full analysis of the whole labor migration embedded in a life history. So that means we know where people are coming from, why they migrate, what are the decision processes behind signing up, what the experience is like for them outside of the factory floor, and then also what. How do they remember this labor migration, what happens after? And so often when we think about labor migration or migration studies, we kind of only see a segment of the migration in a particular country. But we don't necessarily have the sort of global approach that brings different countries together into a single frame of analysis, which is exactly what this life history does. And so my book is then actually structured along the life histories of these workers. And I've decided to organize the book according to dualities because a lot of these life histories actually reveal dualities. And this is sort of from state organized migration, but individual decisions to sign up an individual way of negotiating these state sponsored migrations to coming to East Germany and then working on the factory floor, but also producing the very products you're, sorry, conceiving the very products you're producing to then also in your private life, very much live a life between exclusion and inclusion and then return with a lot of goods and money, but experience the loss of all of that in your effort to actually make a living or a life back in Mozambique or Angola. And then also to remember the past for what it says in the future. And I think again, we'll probably get into this. But the important point here is that these life histories are restructuring the book. And there's a sort of similar or shared experience between Angolan and Mozambican workers in their experience of migration in East Germany, even though in small details, they of course diverge. And the most important point of divergence is I think the memory landscape were in the Angolan context because you said there are not that many people sort of up to 2,500 roundabout. They kind of integrated back into Angolan society and there wasn't much heard of these workers afterwards, versus in the Mozambican case, they formed very active associations across the entire country in each of the provincial cities. In Maputu, they've been now for like more than 25 years, demonstrations. And they're really holding the government accountable for repaying part of the wages that got deducted within the framework of the.
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C
So this life histories approach that you have, I think it's real contribution is to not replicate this tendency of having African lives only show up in European archives and only be glimpsed from that perspective, which is very much a problem of the colonial archives. But for example, just looking from the East German archives to these migrant workers. So your approach, this dedication to interacting with, engaging, collecting all of these stories gives us really a broad perspective of who these people are and essentially kind of, I think, goes a long way towards neutralizing this tendency to just see African subjects from these limited colonial or archival vantage points. So I wanted to get into a little bit some of the interventions and contributions that your book makes. We've touched on a few, but I thought it would be worthwhile to bring up first this idea which you have touched on a little bit about thinking about the late Cold War, the period of the late 70s or mid to late 70s, the 80s, not as a period of kind of stagnation or destruction or demise, but as a period of possibility.
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B
Yes, thank you. I think you're bringing out a really important point there. Because often if we retell East German history, for instance, from that period, we kind of think about it as this gray period of very isolated history in which East Germany was basically disconnected, connected from much of the rest of the world, which of course is a complete exaggeration. And histories like these that actually look at migration allow us to kind of rewrite this part of, for instance, East German history through the eyes of Mozambiqueen and Angolen, laborers, visitors, migrants at the time, to see, first of all, in East Germany, that was actually quite international. So it brought together students from many different parts of the world, different countries across Africa, workers from different parts of the world, and also across Africa. And so they were shared social environments in which they mingled in East Germany. And they had their own networks also that through their eyes, East Germany was anything but just white. And we can also see, I think, sort of in a larger picture that if we look at alternative globalizations to bring a new keyword in here, that this was very much a period of possibilities rather than stagnations of possibilities. Why? Because, as I said, these movements for these laborers, but also for students, for instance, at the time was very much possible because socialist governments actually decided to enable this mobility. And so here we've got. Or this is the story we can say builds on research done, for instance, by Johanna Bockmann. She's talked about socialist globalization in her work as an opposite category to capitalist neocolonialism. And she looks at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, for instance, and the role of UNCTAD in negotiating the parameters of the new international economic order. But also, if we think of the work, for instance, of Oscar Sanchez Siboney, he's talked about red globalizations and highlighted the Soviet responses to trade initiatives from global south countries in the 1950s and 60s. So then we have already an awareness of a world that has these alternative networks that we might not see if we look from, say, Washington or if we look from Bonn, but we might see very much if we look from Maputo or we look from Luanda, or in that case also maybe from Moscow. And so what emerges from this literature then is that, for instance, for Europe, that socialist countries in Europe have not or shouldn't be painted as victims necessarily anymore as they used to be, but as actually producers or co producers of new and alternative forms of globalization. And I think here it is really important to bring in the African perspectives as well, because not only Eastern European countries have been producers of new and alternative globalizations, as for instance, the work of James Mark or Tobias Rubric has shown us. But of course, a lot is going on in say, for instance, Mozambique, Angola or Ethiopia, countries that specifically adopt the Marxist Leninist approach and actually go down the role or the pathway of socialism. And I think here the literature is also starting to bring in these perspectives. And my book would understand itself within that vein to actually write the African governments, but also the people who were concerned into these narratives to allow us to understand better this world of alternative socialist globalizations that were very much part of this second part of the Cold War. And so, for instance, the book Navigating Socialist Encounters, which I co edited together with my fabulous colleagues Eric Burton, Anne Dietrich and Emmanuel Harrisch, does exactly that. It's looking at different relationships or with different African countries with East Germany at the time of the second Cold War, looking at enabling moments, looking at connections, but then also realizing that, of course, with the fall of the global socialist movement and moment Disconnects become a really important focus of scholarship.
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C
So I mentioned before that one of the very intriguing choices that you made in looking at these migrations is to focus specifically on workers rather than students, who I think have really dominated the literature on African mobilities post independence. We, of course, have a pretty established literature on African migrations, usually forced during the colonial period. And so there was, I think, a pretty, you know, historical euphoria of historians to find these mobilities that were often these educational moves, sometimes athletes. And then now we're looking at workers in your book, and you mentioned these dualities that structure the kind of life cycle approach that you've taken in this book. And so I thought we could dive into one of the dualities that I think is really particular to the role of the worker, which is both the producer and the consumer. When I think casually about East Germany, I don't think about consumption. That's not the first thing that comes to mind. But these workers had a slightly different perspective. So maybe you can give us a particular example about the kinds of goods that workers were interested in consuming and how them participating in this industrial consumption was part of the identity formation experience. That really doesn't show up in the state archives.
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B
Yes, thank you. And I think, yeah, that's exactly it. I mean, if you look at the state archives, you don't also think of these workers as consumers. You think of them purely and simply as producers. And the state archives or the company archives are of course, really interested in finding out whether these. These workers as part of their collectives, are actually keeping to the production quota. Right. So that's the focus and the interest of the companies. But then when you do oral histories, what comes across very, very starkly. And also when you look at tin trunk archives and workers share photo albums, for instance, with you, you see how they decorated their rooms. And it comes across very starkly that consumption was actually a major part of the experience and also a major factor in wanting to sign up. Right. So amongst the reasons of signing up, we call it labor migration, which is really a shorthand that brings out of focus a lot of other motives for why people were signed up. Right. So, for instance, they were interested in receiving an education because it was a skilled labor program. They were definitely interested in consuming and amassing goods both for themselves, but also for their wider family networks. And they were also interested to see Europe or migrate for personal reasons, such as family reunification, for instance. But to return back to the aspect of consumption, I mean, it was both consumption for the Moment. So consumption, for instance, of clothes from the west that they would often get through students who were able to freely move across the Iron Curtain. It was, for instance, displaying Coca Cola tins and Fanta tins in the cupboards in their rooms. So it was really very much, on the one hand, consuming items that you could get from the west, but on the other hand, also very much posing with goods that were of interest to them. So, for instance, there's a lot of images which show workers with dolls. So these are sort of white baby dolls that they bring, for instance, to the photo studios with them. So it's really through these pictures you see sort of a production of a hip, youthful identity, of also displaying oneself with wealth and statues, products that tell a particular story to those who were left behind. So these pictures get sent back to Angola, gets sent back to Mozambique. And of course, they then also end up actually motivating more people to sign up because they see, oh, well, actually we can get all these goods when we go to East Germany. And at the time, it wasn't possible to send monetary remittances, so goods were sent back home. Bicycles, for instance, videos, TVs, radios, dishes, anything for daily consumption, but also things that the families could then sell onwards in order to make money. And so really, consumption was both to sort of make a daily life and celebrate youth, but also to maintain these networks at home to help families through remittances.
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C
Very interesting. It brings me also to another of these key dualities that structures your book, which is the remembering the past and its relationship to the future. I wanted to draw our attention to your term nostalgia, which has stuck with me since I first encountered it many, many years ago. And that's, I think, picking up on the story of maintaining these networks and then what happens to them upon return, and how memory is such an important and vital element of. Of the work that you do as you kind of come towards the end of the life cycle approach.
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B
Yes, thank you. I think this was one of the aspects that also surprised me the most. Because based on my preliminary readings of archival material, I would have expected much more of a victim narrative, or at least much more bringing out of negative aspects such as the experience with heightened racism, the experience of working often in jobs that did not end up, especially in the second part of the program from 86 to 1990, that did not actually end up delivering the promised skilled certificates, et cetera. And I was quite surprised to find a lot of positive reminiscences in this nostalgic vein. And of Course, you can explain some of it by the point of fact that this is nostalgia for youth, which you really find all over the world. That can be one line of explanation. Another line of explanation takes into account my own positionality, namely that I am a German interviewer and perhaps my interviewees want to tell me sort of more positive stories because they don't want to tell me so much about the racism. But then a third really interesting explanation, I think lies in understanding the role of memory in the present. And of course, when we do oral histories, we do talk about the past, but we really do so within the framework of the present. So we're really also talking about the present through the past. And when Mozambican laborers share with me quite nostalgic memories, or for instance, tell me about the pride that they had in maintaining a blue collar worker's identity, then that is implicitly also a strong criticism of the present, whereby they are no longer able to access that blue collar identity. They're no longer to access a factory job that pays a pension and allows plus for healthcare and provides within the company gates, vacations, but also provides, say, theater tickets, etc, like these East German companies were, because they were really catering towards a whole life world of workers. And so then they're implicitly very much also critiquing a present whereby they're on the informal market overall making do, I mean, some further dedication, and have also then entered the formal labor market. But many, many returned workers are on the informal labor market and they're criticizing a present that doesn't allow them to actually live the dream that they were once told they could live as sort of quote, unquote, socialist labor power or labor vanguard workers. And it's also a critique that upholds the demonstration fuels the demonstrations that are ongoing, which are motivated by the outstanding wages. So within the course of the labor programs, and this is very much a sort of continuum from some of the colonial migrations, for instance, of Mozambicans to South Africa. A part of the wages were withheld to be able to, or that they were supposed to be paid back upon the return of the worker. But that part didn't work. And it's a very complicated and long story that I can't get into here. But the point is that a lot of workers didn't receive or feel that they didn't receive what they were owed. And so they demonstrate to remind the government in Maputo about this until the very present. And so these nostalgic memories also serve to bind them as a group together. And to maintain this activism, this. This activism that comes from the group in order to fuel these demonstrations all these decades after a return in the 1990s.
- [35:43]
C
So as we kind of begin to close this conversation, your book is called Remembering. That's the key word, the gerund. And the title makes me think of the making of E.P. thompson, remembering. And he said making is because it's a process. And I imagine that's something similar to you for choosing that gerund, remembering in your title. So I wanted to ask you, kind of stepping back, what do you see as the kind of meaning of the project as a whole? And I know that's a very unfair question to ask an author because these projects colonize or capture so many years of our lives, but just stepping back, when you think about this word remembering, what work does it do for you as a historian?
- [36:32]
B
Yeah. Thank you. So I think for me, remembering, yeah, it's kind of impossible to bring it all into a complete total history of. Right. I mean, this will never happen. But remembering is also like re. Hyphen membering. So in that sense, it's like bringing different parts together that otherwise would be seen as distant. And so for me, that's very much kind of the global history aspect of this, that I'm bringing together an Angolan, a Mozambican, and an East German context in the framework of a socialist or alternative socialist globalizations. And so I think the memory to come back to the memory, the memory impacts vary across these different contexts because each of them hold their own memory scapes. So for, like a global history approach, I would say that the takeaway from this book, I would hope, is very much about the fact that these socialist globalization actually engendered migrations that impacted people's lives in ways in which they would not be replicable, or let's say, difficult word, replicable today. So if I am an unskilled Angolan or Mozambican today, I cannot simply come to Germany. And yes, and so this was due to a certain context, a certain moment in time whereby the socialist politics of all these different countries made this migration possible. For the East German context, I would say that it's really important to remember that East Germany was not white, to give visibility to histories of black people in East Germany and understanding the complexities of relations between inclusion and exclusion between lots of families who actually came out of the unions of labor, migration of labor migrants with East German women, and the rife racism, especially towards reunification, to really remember that complexity of that history and to not see Reunification also only as the celebration of unity between the German people, but also to say that actually it was a really tragic event in the life of these workers because many of them subsequently had to leave. And then for the Mozambican context, I would say that. I mean, as I said several times, these weekly demonstrations that hold the government accountable very much show that there's an ongoing afterlife of these migrations, that it's not something simply of the past, but that they actually, the Germans become sort of an ongoing political voice in a state that sees itself now as a multi party democracy, but hasn't perhaps always been very happy. And this has recently changed to facilitate demonstrations, et cetera. And Angola, I would say, similarly so, but on a much smaller scale. We had many, many fewer workers than in the Mozambique case. And therefore the public memory isn't so replete with memories about this time. But the workers there fit very nicely and kind of contribute to an image or landscape of memories that connect many students, for instance, from Angola to East Germany and other countries in the Eastern bloc, but also in the West. And so in that sense, in both countries, these labor migrations and their memories contribute to a memory scape about the past, the socialist past, because in both countries the same parties have stayed in government but shed their socialist past. And so in that sense, I would say across all these different contexts, then this story kind of complicates very neat narratives that the governments and presence are in office today would like to talk about or tell about the past.
- [40:19]
C
Well, that's very much our metiers to complicate the narratives. As I mentioned at the beginning, we're talking now, even though the book came out in 2023 on the occasion of its publication in English and English in German and in Portuguese. So tell me a little bit about what that experience is like to see your book in these two different formats.
- [40:43]
B
Yeah, so first of all, it was really important for me to actually make that happen, because in global history, we have a critique of the dominance of the Anglophone, which is the lingua franca of our discipline, I would say, especially if we work across continents or work across borders. And that's very important. However, this story really concerns people who speak Portuguese and German. And so in order to be able to actually bring this book sort of outside of academia and more into the societies in question, it was really important for me to have it accessible in these languages. And now it allows for different kinds of conversations. So actually, on the 30th of October, I will now have a presentation here in Potsdam, together with Birgit Weyer, who wrote a graphic novel about the experience of Muslim beacon laborers in East Germany. And we will be presenting at a local museum here called the Minute, both of our works to the general public. And so having these translations very much allows for conversations now outside of the university also, which I think is very important in these moments where migration discourses get instrumentalized, I think, across the globe, currently, politically, very much. And so to set these life histories and these rich histories against that is very important. And then, of course, to have the Portuguese translation is, of course, not only important for the labor migrants and their families, who very much are part of this book and without whom this book would never have come into shape, but also because it allows to reach the discourse. So I've just been invited, for instance, to Brazil and to Portugal to give talks about the book now. And all of this would not have been possible so much with just the English version. So in that sense, I think it's, to me personally, very important, if I am practicing global history, to be able to have products, so to speak, in different languages available to facilitate different conversations outside of our university. Ivory tower connections, which are also great, but only part of the story.
- [42:59]
C
Sure. And that's very much part of the mission of the New Books Network to facilitate this kind of circulation and conversations and take it out of the specialized seminar room. So as we close here, I wondered if you could talk to us about your exciting new project.
- [43:16]
B
Sure. I am currently finishing up a manuscript, actually, which is titled Displacement, Decolonization and Development the Making of an African Refugee Regime. And it's going to come out with Indiana University Press. I'm basically here looking at the Organization of African Unity, which is the predecessor organization of the AU and their refugee policies in the 1960s. So they have developed a convention, and they've also instituted an office that oversaw settlement and placement of students. And so my interest is very much to, say, in the 1960s, which was the time of the making of the international refugee regime, what role did Africa as a continent, and the Organization of African Unity, specifically as a host representing this complex continent, play in facilitating the making of an African answer to this international refugee regime? And how did the two actually interact together?
- [44:12]
C
That sounds fantastic. I hope that when the book comes out, you come back to the New Books Network to talk to us about it.
- [44:18]
B
I'd love to.
- [44:20]
C
Marcia, thank you so much for your time for talking about your wonderful book, and, well, I look forward to our next conversation.
- [44:28]
B
Thanks so much for having me.
- [44:43]
A
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