57 – South Asian and African Actors in Divided Berlin: Trajectories, Networks and (Dis-)Entanglements
This panel seeks to explore the trajectories of networks built in the divided Cold War city(ies) of Berlin by its South Asian visitors/tourists and residents alike. The aim is to examine how the divided city became a spatial resource for South Asians to actively build networks with the cities’ local residents as well as to craft transnational ties. Of particular interest are actors from other postcolonial contexts in Africa. Present in the two cities for various reasons as journalists, academics, diplomats, students, activists, traders/shopkeepers, writers, artists, filmmakers etc., actors arrived in West and East Berlin through differently organized trajectories. Whereas traversing to the other side of the Wall was discouraged, and largely problematic for their East German cohabitants, Asian and African actors were often able to cross the border bringing back music, books, newspapers, coffee, cigarettes, spices etc. Objects were kept, but also traded, sold on and exchanged locally. How were actors from African and South Asian nations embedded in and, in turn, how did they shape the ‘global’ Cold War locally? What was the scope and extent of South-South entanglements in the divided city and how were they crafted through material, symbolic and everyday practices during the Cold War? By focusing on networks, organizations, unions, cultural events and technologies, papers should examine how Cold War scenarios were utilized by South Asian and African diaspora to navigate geopolitical situations and simultaneously craft local agendas. Invited are papers which delve into how actors utilized the city and each other as a resource for personal mobility and how their presence informed the making of political, social and infrastructural spaces in their neighbourhoods in the two Berlins? Entanglements are not approached as a set of romanticized solidarity networks but rather also as historically informed interconnections, which do not always obliterate discourses of otherness.
