Entangled Internationalism: The Missed Seminar

The Missed Seminar: Worldmaking after Internationalism is a Research Edition engendered by the project “Entangled Internationalism” that mobilizes a geopolitics of friendship between the pan-African feminist, Black photographer and anthropologist Eslanda Goode Robeson and world- renowned actor, social activist, and singer Paul Robeson from the US, on the one hand, and the Jewish German philosopher Franz Loeser and British teacher Diana Loeser in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) on the other. In 1963, the Robesons “‘sneaked’ to East Germany” (E. G. Robeson). The book is a study of their joint struggles fighting fascism, racism, and anti-Semitism. Archival materials document their encounters in the GDR in resonance with the collections of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden and the architecture of Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, along with new contributions from Steve McQueen, Katharina Warda, Tiffany Florvil, Matana Roberts, George E. Lewis, Kira Thurmann, and Kathleen Reinhardt.

Avery F. Gordon is a London-based writer, educator, and radio producer and Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Franz Loeser (1924–1990), the son of a Jewish German lawyer, fled to England as part of the Kindertransport in 1938, studied political science at the University of Minnesota, and in 1957 moved to the GDR, where he was appointed Professor of Marxist Ethics at Berlin’s Humboldt-Universität. Doreen Mende is director of the cross- collections Research Department at the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, associate professor at HEAD – Genève, and co-founder of the Harun Farocki Institut in Berlin. Eslanda Goode Robeson (1895–1965) was an American anthropologist, author, actress, civil rights activist, public speaker, writer, manager of the world-renowned singer and actor Paul Robeson, and the first Black woman to be hired at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital.