Join us on March 3 at 1:00 pm Pacific Time for the virtual Ziegler Lecture Series, featuring Dr. Michelle Moyd, Associate Professor of History at Michigan State University.
View the recording here:
Title: “Jambo, Ihr Jungmannen und Jungmädchen: Reclaiming Lost Colonies for German Youth in the Magazine Jambo, 1924-1943″
Abstract: Between 1924 and 1943, the colonial advocacy organization Deutsches Kolonialgesellschaft (DKG) published Jambo, a monthly magazine for youth. The magazine was part of the DKG’s wider effort to educate German reading publics on the perceived importance of keeping German colonial memories alive after the First World War, when German defeat resulted in its being stripped Germany of its colonies. Jambo included short fiction, poems, essays, and graphic representations of Africa and Germany’s colonial past on the continent. Much of the magazine’s content referenced military activities and big game hunting, perpetuating stereotypical racist depictions of African peoples and environments. This lecture will reflect on Jambo’s place within the wider politics and violence of this period in order to show the persistence of colonial thought within German memory, as well as German imperial imaginations.
Bio: Michelle Moyd is Associate Professor of History at Michigan State University. She is the author of Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa (Ohio University Press, 2014). She is co-author, with Yuliya Komska and David J. Gramling, of Linguistic Disobedience: Restoring Power to Civic Language (Palgrave, 2019). She is currently at work on Africa, Africans, and the First World War, under contract with Cambridge University Press.
