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Abstract
In keeping with the tenets of socialist internationalism, the political culture of the German Democratic Republic strongly emphasized solidarity with the non-white world: children sent telegrams to Angela Davis in prison, workers made contributions from their wages to relief efforts in Vietnam and Angola, and the deaths of Patrice Lumumba, Ho Chi Minh, and Martin Luther King, Jr. inspired public memorials. Despite their prominence, however, scholars have rarely examined such displays in detail. Through a series of illuminating historical investigations, this volume deploys archival research, ethnography, and a variety of other interdisciplinary tools to explore the rhetoric and reality of East German internationalism.
Quinn Slobodian is Associate Professor of History at Wellesley College and the author of Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany.
“The chapters in the edited volume provide nuanced cases of East German idealism and the limitations of its practice, which belied a variety of racial prejudices and tensions… the interdisciplinary and extended geographic scope of this edited volume successfully furthers a number of interrelated fields relating to the role of the GDR and the socialist world in the Cold War, race and their continuing legacies.” · Journal of Contemporary History
“This is an important volume, providing a number of helpful interventions to a growing field. It ought to be commended for its unorthodox inclusion of primary sources, as well as its broad interdisciplinary approach, which reflects the multi-faceted nature of the topic it approaches.” · Slavonic and East European Review
“This is far and away the most creative book available in English on East German foreign relations. Quinn Slobodian has pulled together fresh contributions from many of the leading experts on the GDR’s interaction with the Global South.” · William Glenn Gray, Purdue University
“Comrades of Color is an important and original contribution to debates about the entangled histories of the Second and Third Worlds during the Cold War. Thought-provoking and carefully curated, the essays in this exciting collection will be indispensable for research and teaching on the history of socialist internationalism.” · Celia Donert, University of Liverpool
Table of Contents
| Section Title | Page | Action | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Contents | 5 | ||
| Figures | 7 | ||
| Introduction | 9 | ||
| Part I — Race Without Racism? | 29 | ||
| Chapter 1 — Socialist Chromatism: Race, Racism, and the Racial Rainbow in East Germany | 31 | ||
| Part II — Aid anders? | 49 | ||
| Chapter 2 — Through a Glass Darkly: East German Assistance to North Korea and Alternative Narratives of the Cold War | 51 | ||
| Chapter 3 — Between Fighters and Beggars: Socialist Philanthropy and the Imagery of Solidarity in East Germany | 81 | ||
| Chapter 4 — Socialist Modernization in Vietnam: The East German Approach, 1976–89 | 103 | ||
| Part III — Ambivalent Solidarities | 123 | ||
| William \"Bloke\" Modisane to Margaret Legum, 1966 | 125 | ||
| Chapter 5 — Bloke Modisane in East Germany | 129 | ||
| Chapter 6 — African Students and the Politics of Race and Gender in the German Democratic Republic | 139 | ||
| Chapter 7 — Ambivalence and Desire in the East German \"Free Angela Davis\" Campaign | 165 | ||
| Chapter 8 — True to the Politics of Frelimo? Teaching Socialism at the Schule der Freundschaft, 1981–90 | 196 | ||
| Part IV — Socialist Mirrors | 219 | ||
| The Black Façade of the Universities of German Revisionism | 221 | ||
| Chapter 9 — The Uses of Disorientation: Socialist Cosmopolitanism in an Unfinished DEFA-China Documentary | 227 | ||
| Chapter 10 — Imposed Dialogues: Joerg Forth and Tran Vu's GDR-Vietnamese Coproduction, Dschungelzeit (1988) | 251 | ||
| Part V — Internationalist Remains | 273 | ||
| Chapter 11 — Affective Solidarities and East German Reconstruction of Postwar Vietnam | 275 | ||
| Chapter 12 — La Idea de Carlos Marx: Tracing Germany in the Cuban Imaginary | 301 | ||
| Index | 326 |