Tabea Scharrer

Seed-Funding from the British Academy, in cooperation with Maria Ikoniadou, Polina Manolova and Aleksandra Lewicki

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This interdisciplinary project focussed on the context of postsocialist East Germany, to uncover if and how shared notions of peripherality can form the basis of migrant solidarities. As a ‘diaspora space’ (Brah, 1996) East Germany is marked by entangled genealogies of arrival and displacement that are simultaneously speaking to (post)socialist, (post)colonial and transitional axes of historical alignment.

 

Dominant Cold War frameworks depict a global order marked by clear-cut political and ideological lines of separation. To displace the rigidity of such binary narratives, researchers have started retrieving forgotten interconnections and solidarities at the crossroads of former socialist Europe and post-colonial African countries (Babiracki & Jersild, 2016; Valiavicharska, 2017), e.g. the forging of ‘global feminism’ agendas (Ghodsee, 2019), or the exchange between cultural producers from Africa, Asia and Latin America (Djagalov and Salaskina, 2016). Historically, such interrelations were often complicated by the ambiguities foregrounded in official discourses around race and minority politics, as well as everyday ideologies of neo-colonialism (Lumumba-Kasongo, 2011), racism and xenophobia (Poutrus 2014). Cross-continental mobilities of East and South European and African workers, students, migrants and political refugees and their intercultural interactions, are an important, albeit little explored, part of these multi-polar axes of ‘uneasy’ solidarity.

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To extend the methodological scope of the study of postsocialist-postcolonial encounters (Manolova, Lottholz, Kušić 2019), we propose a focus on migrant solidarities that grounds them firmly in the context of ‘urban sociabilities’ (Glick Schiller and Caglar, 2016). By tracing moments of meaningful encounter and interaction, emerging during processes of migrant settling and incorporation, we ask what are the everyday materialities, practices and visual cultures through which migrants negotiate the past, in the present. Furthermore, we are interested in unearthing forms of solidarity, forming during the Cold War period in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) to discern their legacies in East German diasporic spaces today.