The Things They Carried (and Kept): Revisiting <i>Ostalgie</i> in the Global South

Abstract The rich body of literature on the cultural legacies East Germany has privileged white German perspectives material culture at expense non-white and non-European encounters with socialist things. In shifting spatial lens to global South, foreign students workers who lived for extended periods in Germany, I trouble implicit whiteness study GDR memory. Popular identification goods beyond borders newly decolonized countries that were beneficiaries GDR’s solidarity policies. Using example Vietnam, challenge formulations Ostalgie as a site memory production only, highlighting consumption products by racialized Others. examining objects Vietnamese migrants amassed transported back their subsequent use circulation through today, offer different take temporal relationship between people commodities, one assigns value agency imported contrast reunified where socialist-era deemed disposable obsolete, did not lose utility associations modernity. essay argues more inclusive exploration approach takes seriously alternative logics time, space, materiality informed circuits consumption, trade, meaning