Notice Board

The Institute for Child and Youth Studies (I-CYS)
presents:

Girl Empire: Adolescent Women in the German Colonial Imaginary

A Talk by Dr. Maureen Gallagher

 Before WWI, Germany amassed colonial possessions in Sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia, and the South Pacific that totaled almost 3 million km2. Though dwarfed by the empires of France and Britain, this empire nonetheless influenced the visual, material, and popular culture of the German metropole through the popular press, advertising, toys and games, and public spectacles. The history of German colonialism is also one of violence, with the deaths of tens of thousands of natives through war, uprisings, and the first genocide of the twentieth century (in Namibia between 1904 and 1907). Most scholarship offers a masculine understanding of German imperialism by focusing on the male actors—colonial officials, soldiers, settlers, and missionaries—and occasionally on the adult women who accompanied them. However German youth—and in particular German girls—were central to the imagined future of the colonial project. With their youth, their innocence, their Germanness and their whiteness they were uniquely situated to ensure a future for white Germans in Africa through their role as future wives and mothers. At the same time, these traits made girls vulnerable to attacks by natives and authors use protecting white German girls as a justification for genocidal violence against the Herero and Nama peoples.

Wednesday, October 12, 2016
12:00 - 1:30 pm
Room W767

Dr. Maureen O. Gallagher holds an MA in Modern Languages from the University of Nebraska and a PhD in German Studies from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of German at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania where she teaches all levels of German language and literature as well as general education courses on fairy tales and girlhood studies. She is currently working on a book manuscript about the representation of German whiteness in reading material for young people from Wilhelmine Germany (1870-1918) based on her dissertation, winner of the 2016 Women in German dissertation prize.