Penny Von Eschen
Antifascism, DDR Anti-Colonial Solidarity, and African/Diasporic Writers in the DDR
Nested in a broad overview of DDR solidarity projects and aid to the decolonizing world, including Chilé, Vietnam, and Angola, the paper draws on the work of literary scholars to explore the ways in which socialist aesthetic theories of languages and literatures proved appealing to anticolonial writers. Drawing on examples of African writers published by the DDR’s Seven Seas Press and the work of African and African American writers and artists residing in the DDR, the paper further explores the ways in which Eastern Bloc and specifically DDR cultural networks and resources were enabling for African and African American writers and activists who explicitly linked antifascist and anticolonial projects.
Penny Von Eschen is Professor of History and William R Kenan, Jr Professor in American Studies at the University of Virginia. She works at the intersections of African American history, cultural history, the global cold war, and the study of the United States in global and transnational dimensions, with monographs such as Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (2004), Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (1997), and Paradoxes of Nostalgia: Cold War Triumphalism and Global Disorder Since 1989 (2022). She has written on Duke Ellington in Bagdhad (2007), and co-curated “Jam Sessions: American’s Jazz Ambassadors Embrace the World,” a photography exhibition on the jazz ambassador tours, with Meridian International Center, Washington D.C. She is currently working on a book exploring crises of authority in anti-colonial counter-publics in the years following the Second World War.