From 'New Man' to Superman: The politics of work and socialism, from Maputo to Karl-Marx-Stadt, c. 1982

Monday, 9 May, 2016 - 15:00

Presented by : 

Eric
Allina

This paper examines the history of Mozambican workers in East Germany in the later 1970s and 1980s, focusing on young Mozambican men and women who, in a variety of ways, ran afoul of the state-to-state agreement that governed their lives in the GDR. Rather than the troublemakers their minders dubbed them or examples of internationalist ‘failure’ that subsequent scholarship suggests, the paper argues that their trajectories reflect the friction generated at the intersection of work, socialism and youth.

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