The CEU Yugo-Region Research Group (YURG) would like to invite you to the presentation of a project 'A Socialist Workplace In Postcolonial Africa: A Connected History Of The Yugoslav Workforce In Zambia' with Dr. Goran Musić (PI) and Immanuel R. Harisch.
The project is hosted at the Research Platform for the Study of Transformations and Eastern Europe, University of Vienna
For more information, please see the project's website:https://www.yuworkzambia.net/
''This project advances knowledge about Yugoslavia’s ‘socialist globalization’ and the Yugoslav working class through the example of two Yugoslav companies in Zambia, one of Yugoslavia’s main African partners. The first case study is Belgrade engineering giant Energoprojekt, which constructed Zambia’s flagship postcolonial infrastructural projects, such as hydroelectric plants, roads, and government buildings. The second case study focuses on the network of repair shops set up across Zambia by the Yugoslav truck and bus manufacturer FAP (Fabrika automobila Priboj). Both enterprises employed Yugoslav and Zambian workers. Methodologically, the study is grounded in a combination of archival research and oral history in former Yugoslavia and Zambia.
The research seeks to reveal the effects of the operations in the Global South on Yugoslav workers’ relationship to the self-management system and its values, as well as how Zambian actors perceived their connections with Yugoslavia. It examines labour relations on the ground and highlights how daily life and work enacted an intimate, embodied, and spatial politics of race. The study thus breaks new ground in labour history, development history, and critical race studies by connecting two domains that social history still separates, postcolonial Africa and state socialist Europe.''