Panel 12: Mobility in a Post-Bandung World: from Anticolonial Solidarity to Postcolonial Exchanges (EN)

Chair: Daniela Spina (CHAM-NOVA FCSH), Elisa Scaraggi (IHC-NOVA FCSH) & Noemi Alfieri (CHAM-NOVA FCSH)

15 April, 5:10 pm | Room A002

What is Home? Migration and Coping Strategies in Birgit Weyhe's Graphic Novel Madgermanes

Kata Murányi (Department of Political Science and International Studies, University of Pécs)

Examining the aesthetic and political dimensions of the city through the medium of comics raises a number of questions: from the relationship to street art to the identity-forming power of urban space and popular culture. Birgit Weyhe's graphic novel Madgermanes (2016) deals with a specific historical situation: following the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the GDR, facing a labor shortage, invited guest workers from socialist countries such as Vietnam, Cuba, and Angola. After 1979, more than 16,000 workers arrived from Mozambique over a decade. The graphic novel shows the difficulties of the integration of three fictional characters, their experiences of searching for a home, and how they coped with culture shock. Weyhe's work largely presents the complexity of migration situations through the urban and popular culture of the 1980s, thus enabling its connection to the Afropolitan literary canon. The presentation focuses on how the comic book depicts representations of migration, locality, everyday life, and urban space in the context of interculturality and media culture experiences.

Keywords: GDR; Mozambique; colonization; graphic novel; migration

Bandung in Paris: Afro-Asian Solidarities and the Diasporic Geographies of PAI (Parti Africain de l’Indépendance), 1957-1964

Federico Ferretti (Studiorum Università di Bologna)

Extending works in transnational geographies of decolonisation and global history, this paper analyses the Parisian activities of PAI (Parti Africain de l’Indépendance) until 1964. Founded in 1957, PAI was one of the most radical (explicitly socialist) groups fighting for the independence of AOF and AEF colonies, which often took the form of transnational and diasporic federations. In France, the African student union FEANF (Fédération des Etudiants d’Afrique Noire en France) organised thousands of students and progressed toward increasing political radicalisation following key events that the protagonists identify with the French defeat of Dien Bien Phu (1954), the beginning of the Algerian War (1954) and the Bandung Conference (1955). In association with FEANF and other radical African groups such as Cameroon UPC (clandestine since 1955), PAI opposed both the “balkanisation” of former colonial territories across colonial boundaries, and neo-colonialism understood as the persistence of capitalist relations of production led by the “North”. For these reasons, PAI was outlawed in newly “independent” Senegal, where most of its activists lived, in 1960. Based on preliminary work in Parisian archives, on available public recollections of the protagonists and on PAI periodical press, this paper also avails of French police sources. Although highly biased by their own nature, police surveillance records allow appreciating the mobility of people and ideas in diasporic contexts, as well as transnational networks and alliances such as the ‘Anticolonial committees’ that gathered dozens of African, Asian and metropolitan groups in France between the 1940s and the 1960s, being likewise watched by colonial authorities. On these grounds, this paper argues for divorcing anticolonialism from nationalism, with which it is commonly associated, as well as from the various particularisms that hindered decolonial projects, such as ethnic and religious hatred, often fostered by the (neo)colonisers, including Cold War actors. Early opposition to “balkanisation” confirms how the colonial model of the nation-state, together with various exclusionary models of “community”, were and still are instrumental to perpetuate coloniality, in the “Souths” and beyond.

Keywords: diaspora; transnationalism; anti-colonialism; internationalism; solidarity