After the Imperialist Imagination: Two Decades of Research on Global Germany and Its Legacies(3 Transnational Cultures)

«After the Imperialist Imagination underscores that imperialism’s hold on Germans’ sense of the global is not yet exhausted, but places greater weight on contestations than its predecessor. I commend the volume for making a noteworthy contribution to a thriving constellation of fields.» (Katrin Sieg, German Studies Review, 45.3, October 2022, pp. 611–613) The precursor to this book, Sara Friedrichsmeyer, Sara Lennox, and Susanne Zantop’s now classic volume The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and Its Legacy, initiated an explosion of research on all aspects of relations between Germany and the rest of the world. This scholarship emerged from numerous disciplinary fields, encompassing history, literary studies, and anthropology and utilized a diverse set of methodologies, such as environmentalism, transnationalism, and postcolonial theory. The present collection analyzes scholarship on global Germany since 1998, assessing its impact on German historiography and diaspora studies. It introduces emerging and ongoing research that demonstrates the remarkable breadth of the field today and how scholarly constitutions of German imperialism have expanded beyond the scope of the formal colonial era. In addition, this volume stretches our understanding of German entanglements to the wider world, locating Germans in places that most scholars do not traditionally associate with German imperialism. It reveals that Germany’s colonial presence overseas forged consequential links to landscapes, traditions, and communities beyond Europe that continue to modify the cultural boundaries of Germanness into the present day.

Table of Contents:
Contents: Sara Pugach/David Pizzo/Adam A. Blackler: Introduction: The Imperialist Imagination 20 Years On: The Historiographical Shift toward a Global Germany – Forming the Empire – Adam A. Blackler: The Language of Empire: Aspiring German Colonists and the Heimat Ideal in Imperial Germany – Lisa M. Todd: Studying Sexual and Racial «Mixture»: Eugen Fischer and the Rehoboth Basters of German Southwest Africa, 1908 – Matthew Unangst: Emin Pasha and Fracturing Imperialist Imaginaries in the Late 1880s – World War I and Interwar Connections – Michelle R. Moyd: Visualizing Women’s War Work: Photographs and Labor in a German Colonial War Memoir – Paul Glen Grant: Forgiving the Missionaries: African Moral Imagination and Postcolonial Germans – Ute Ritz-Deutch: German Scientists in South America: Correspondences between Robert Lehmann-Nitsche, Hermann von Ihering, and Max Uhle – The Third Reich and the World – David Pizzo: A History of Nazi Germany as Global History – Alan Rosenfeld : P/pacific Propaganda: The Nazi Appropriation of Aloha in Klaus Mehnert’s The XXth Century – Valerie Weinstein: From the «Olympic Ideal» and German-Japanese «Sports Friendship» to Militarization and Gendered Nationalism: The Shifting Ends of The Holy Goal – Into the Cold War – Sara Pugach: The Global GDR – Nicholas Ostrum: «Which Germany Do You Come From?»: Contending German Legacies and Trade in Postcolonial Libya – Brittany Lehman : West German Involvement in North African Decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s – Jennifer Ruth Hosek: Christa Wolf in Cuba, or a Case Study in Transnational Collaboration – Unified Germany Worldwide – Jeffrey Jurgens: Recasting Empire: The «Refugee Crisis» in Germany, Europe, and Beyond – Priscilla Layne: The Collective Responsibility of Colonialism: Postcolonial Fantasies in Christof Hamann’s Usambara(2007) – Vanessa D. Plumly: Post-Wall Germany, the «Post»-Imperialist Imagination, and the Shock-Factor of Crumbling Façades: Exploring the Intersections of North/South and East/West Encounters.

About the Author :
Sara Pugach is Professor in the Department of History at California State University, Los Angeles. David Pizzo is Professor in the Department of History at Murray State University. Adam A. Blackler is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Wyoming.