How far can we really call colonial migration to and from Europe voluntary? When millions from the colonies were pulled into European armies and labor forces during the World Wars? When Africans and Asians went to Europe to fight or join fascist movements? When students and labor migrants arrived after 1945 under unequal terms? This conference sketches out indigenous agency by probing what ‘voluntariness’ means in subaltern (return) migration across and beyond colonial empires.
Between Choice and Command: Migration and Return Across and Beyond Colonial Empires, 1900-1960
This conference sketches out indigenous agency by probing what ‘voluntariness’ means in subaltern (return) migration across and beyond colonial empires.
Programme
Monday, December 1st, 9:00 am-7:00 pm, Senatssaal, University of Erfurt
9.00-9:30 am: Welcome and Introduction
Section 1: Chair: Silvan Niedermeier (Erfurt)
9:30-10:30 am: Anindita Bhattacharya (Maynooth): Imperial Anxieties, Post-war Provisions and Growing Discontent: A history of Indian veterans of the First World War
10:30-11:30 am: Baijayanti Roy (Frankfurt): Return, Repatriation or Flight? Destinies of Indian anti-colonialists in Nazi Germany and thereafter
12:00-1:00 pm: Ronald Hirte (Weimar/Buchenwald): Entangled Systems of Coercion: Deportees from Colonial Contexts in Buchenwald
Section 2: Chair: Gifty Nyame Tabiri (Erfurt)
2:00-3:00 pm: Elise Mazurié (Freiburg): Changing Categorisations from the Interwar through National Socialism to the Post-War: The reparation claim of a Moroccan soldier against the Federal Republic of Germany
3:00-4:00 pm: Gisela Ewe (Hamburg): Between Defiance and Alliance: Negotiating resistance, solidarity and political strategy in Hamburgs’s (post-)colonial context
4:00-5:00 pm: Nicola Camilleri (Maynooth): From Ethiopia to Italy and Back: a family history of Italian colonialism
5:30-7:00 pm Public Keynote Lecture:
Dónal Hassett (Maynooth): The Great War of Movement: Thinking Critically about mobility, displacement, coercion and consent in the French Empire's First World War
Tuesday, December 2nd, 9 – 12:30, Forschungsbau Weltbeziehungen, University of Erfurt
Section 3: Chair: Patrice Poutrus (Berlin)
9:00-10:00 am Lena Engel (Erfurt/Florence): Women's Mobility in Entangled Systems of Coercion: The trajectories of Taous Merouane between (post)colonial Algeria, France and Buchenwald concentration camp
10:00-11:00 am Mathilde von Bülow (St: Andrews): Algerian Migration to West and East Germany during the War of Independence
11:00-12:00 am: Jan Schubert (Florence): Labour Migrants' Agency towards Return Migration and Their Dealing with Deportability in the GDR: Oral History of Algerian Labour Migration to Socialist Germany
12-12:15 pm Final Discussion
Anmeldung und Registrierung: florian.wagner@uni-erfurt.de