DATE: April 20, 2023
TIME: 7:30pm – 9:00pm
LOCATION: The xʷθəθiqətəm or Place of Many Trees, 6476 NW Marine Drive, Vancouver
Join the Department of Central, Eastern & Northern European Studies on April 20 at 7:30 pm Pacific Time for the Ziegler Lecture Series, featuring Priscilla Layne of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and comic artist Birgit Weyhe.
Abstract
In 2018, Birgit Weyhe joined a room of German comics scholars at a GSA panel on diversity and inclusion in German-language comics to bear witness to a presentation by Dr. Brett Sterling that openly criticized her graphic novel Madgermanes (2016) for its representation of Blackness and cultural appropriation. While this commentary was far from welcome, it marked the start of the author’s journey in revaluating her power and privilege as a comics artist. Soon thereafter, Weyhe met Dr. Priscilla Layne, an Associate Professor of German Studies and UNC-Chapel Hill with Caribbean roots. Over the course of the next few years, Weyhe and Layne collaborated on the graphic novel Rude Girl (2022), which explore Layne’s life growing up in Chicago, experience of racism, and path to German studies, all the while interrogating what it means for a White artist to represent Black lives.
This event will take the form of a conversation with the co-creators of Rude Girl, discussing Layne and Weyhe’s collaboration and the role of comics in intersectional explorations of Black identity.
Speakers
Priscilla Layne is Associate Professor of German and Adjunct Associate Professor of African Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her book, White Rebels in Black: German Appropriation of Black Popular Culture, was published in 2018 by the University of Michigan Press. She has also published essays on Turkish German culture, translation, punk and film. She recently translated Olivia Wenzel’s debut novel, 1000 Serpentinen Angst, which will be out in June. And she is currently finishing a manuscript on Afro German Afrofuturism and a critical guide to Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun.
Birgit Weyhe was born in Munich in 1969. She spent her childhood in East Africa and studied literature and history in Konstanz and Hamburg (MA). After graduating from art school (HAW), Birgit Weyhe has been working as a comic artist in Hamburg. Her graphic novels have been nominated for several prizes in Germany, France and Japan, and her album Madgermanes received the Bertholt Leibinger Stiftung Comic Book Prize in 2015 and the Max und Moritz Prize in 2016 the Max-und-Moritz-Preis as best German-language comic. In 2022 she was awarded the Lessing Scholarship of the City of Hamburg.
This hybrid event is co-sponsored by the International Comic Arts Forum, UBC Centre for Migration Studies, UBC Public Humanities Hub, and the Consulate General of the Federal Republic of Germany – Vancouver.
