Adam Blackler, Matthew Unangst, Michelle Moyd, “German Imperial Projects”
6 February 2023, 15:00 CST
ZOOM
Chaired by Chad S.A. Gibbs (College of Charleston)
Comment by Michelle Moyd (Michigan State University)
Sponsored by:
Mosse Lectures
George L. Mosse Program in History
College of Charleston Zucker/Goldberg Center for Holocaust Studies
Center for German & European Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of History
Adam Blackler, An Imperial Homeland: Forging German Identity in Southwest Africa (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2022).
“At the turn of the twentieth century, depictions of the colonized world were prevalent throughout the German metropole. Tobacco advertisements catered to the erotic gaze of imperial enthusiasts with images of Ovaherero girls, and youth magazines allowed children to escape into ‘exotic domains’ where their imaginations could wander freely. While racist beliefs framed such narratives, the abundance of colonial imaginaries nevertheless compelled German citizens and settlers to contemplate the world beyond Europe as a part of their daily lives.”
Matthew Unangst, Colonial Geography: Race and Space in German East Africa, 1884-1905 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022).
“Colonial Geography charts changes in conceptions of the relationship between people and landscapes in mainland Tanzania during the German colonial period. In German minds, colonial development would depend on the relationship between East Africans and the landscape. Colonial Geography argues that the most important element in German imperialism was not its violence but its attempts to apply racial thinking to the mastery and control of space.”
Adam A. Blackler is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Wyoming. His first book, entitled An Imperial Homeland: Forging German Identity in Southwest Africa, appeared in September 2022 in the Pennsylvania State University Press’s series “Germans Beyond Europe” sponsored by the Max Kade Research Institute. Among Dr. Blackler’s other recent publications include a co-edited anthology, entitled After the Imperialist Imagination: Two Decades of Research on Global Germany and Its Legacies and a chapter in the multi-volume collection, A Cultural History of Genocide. In Spring 2022, he was the recipient of the University of Wyoming’s Extraordinary Merit in Research Award. Dr. Blackler is presently researching a book project that explores the vibrant topography of Berlin’s parks, market squares, streets, and municipal districts before and during the Weimar Republic.
Matthew Unangst is an Assistant Professor of History at SUNY Oneonta. In addition to the book we’re discussing today, he has published articles in the Journal of Global History, the Journal of Historical Geography, Central European History, and the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History. His new project analyzes the ways that Tanzania, West Germany, and East Germany managed the historiography of German East Africa for geopolitical goals from the 1960s through the 1980s.
Michelle Moyd is Associate Professor of History at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan. She is the author of Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa, published by the Ohio University Press in 2014. Her published work has also appeared in International Labour and Working-Class History and Radical History Review. She is currently working on Africa, Africans, and the First World War, which is under contract with Cambridge University Press.
Chad S.A. Gibbs serves as Director of the Zucker/Goldberg Center for Holocaust Studies and assistant professor of Jewish Studies. He is a historian of the Holocaust, antisemitism, modern Germany, and war and society. Chad’s current project focuses on gender, geography, and social networks in Jewish resistance at Treblinka. Chad has held fellowships from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Yale University Fortunoff Video Archive, the George L. Mosse Program in History, and the USC Shoah Foundation, where he remains an Affiliated Researcher. His extensive work in oral histories at several archives contributes teaching and scholarly interests in the collection and analysis of survivor testimonies as well as the generational transmission of knowledge and trauma.
