Birgit Weyhe's "Rude Girl" (2022): Comics, Blackness, and Transnational Dialogue
· 11.10.2023 · 17:21:52 ··· ··· Wednesday ·· 3 (3)
Goethe-Institut Montreal Recording of a hybrid panel discussion held at the Goethe-Institut Montreal on October 6 2023.
Participants
Birgit Weyhe, German Graphic Novelist
Priscilla Layne, Associate Professor, UNC-Chapel Hill
Moderator
Biz Nijdam, Assistant Professor, UBC
In 2018, Birgit Weyhe joined a room of German comics scholars at a GSA (German Studies Association) 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 Weyhe und Layne in Montreal Studies at 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 panel 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.
This event is co-sponsored by the German Studies Association's Comics Studies Network, the UBC Comic Studies Cluster, and the Department of Classics, Modern Languages, and Linguistics at Concordia University.
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