Back to Africa speaking Slovak?: “Third World” students at the Preparatory Language Centre in the city of Senec during the 1960s
Back to Africa speaking Slovak?: “Third World” students at the Preparatory Language Centre in the city of Senec during the 1960s

Summary/Abstract: This study investigates select groups of “Third World” students who, came to Czechoslovakia to study during the 1960s, within the wave of revived Soviet internationalism. It analyses the scope, effects and various modes of response to the cultural exchange between representatives of the “Second World” with the “Third World”, whose interaction went beyond a purely political and state-controlled level. The “responses” were for the most part products of tensions stirred by Socialist imaginaries on both sides clashing with the lived realities of coexistence, as well as by disagreements in “varieties of Socialism” practiced by Czechs and Slovaks on the one side, and different groups of foreign students on the other. The cultural exchange implemented within the framework of the Soviet bloc higher educational programme for foreigners is explored through a comparative analysis of two perspectives – the teachers’ and the students’. Despite implied limits of the propagandistically advertised solidarity, this study argues that the Socialist regime indeed had a certain “appeal” for students coming from the “Third World”, especially those with a deprived social background. In this respect, the paper has an ambition to contribute to explorations of encounters across the nations and borders from Czechoslovakia’s standpoint.

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