Abstract
The introduction to Remembering African Labor Migration to the Second World: Socialist Mobilities between Angola, Mozambique, and East Germany situates the labor migrations from Mozambique and Angola to East Germany from the late 1970s until the early 1990s in their contemporary global socialist world. It discusses the book’s contributions to the study of African and East German relations and relations between the Second and the Third Worlds. Further, it speaks to the book’s methodology of studying these migrations through the memories of the workers in a transnational framework. Lastly, it discusses the making and analysis of oral life history interviews. What emerges is the significance of dualities and ambiguities for a book based on a narrative of inherent contradictions in the human experience. State vs. the individual, working vs. consuming, integration vs. exclusion, loss vs. gain, the past in the past vs. the past in the present and future. All these dualities exist together in this story of African migration to the Eastern Bloc.KeywordsLife historySocialist worldSocialist mobilitiesGlobalizationsSocialist cosmopolitansTransnational labor migration
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