Women in German Conference (Web); Panel Co-Coordinators: Tiffany Florvil (Univ. of New Mexico); Vanessa Plumly (Lawrence Univ.); Kevina King (Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst)

Time: 15.-18.10.2020
Venue: Sewanee-University of the South, TN
Proposals by: 15.02.2020 (extended)

This panel explores the Black German tradition of queering and querying the gaze, knowledge, and ontologies, by examining past, present, and future visions of collective and individual identity. Thus, what we mean by queer eye could also be understood as a queer „I“. The queer eye attends to the multiple focal points of Black German Studies, especially its overlapping and intersecting lenses.

Black German ontologies and subjectivities return the critical gaze back onto the exclusionary, normative constructs that (re)produce and mark their non-being and non-belonging and undermine Black fungibility. But they equally envision Black Germans as capable of operating, producing, and being outside of such epistemological paradigms. As Fatima El-Tayeb’s European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe emphasizes the explicit need to queer national contexts, she points to Black German agents who complicate notions of belonging through queer time, space, performance, and self-making.

Moreover, in the context of the Black German women’s movement Peggy Piesche and Tiffany Florvil have highlighted the significance of queer positionalities within the community as well as its „queered“ publications from Farbe bekennen to afro look that incorporate various modes of story-telling and embody the spacetime (Wright) dimension of their archive, content, and meaning.

In their cultural productions, Black Germans continuously blur the boundaries of genre and form by producing aesthetics beyond the constraints of traditional Western norms of categorization and bending and twisting frames, molding them anew to better serve their complex narratives and lives.

Papers in this panel will therefore address the queerness and queering of Black German visions. By tackling literary, filmic, musical, theoretical, autobiographical, poetic, philosophical and/or dramatic forms of Black German aesthetic and political expression, the papers will demonstrate how diasporic agents produced new ways of seeing, knowing, feeling, and existing, instantiating and reimagining the Black German Diaspora in the process.

The organizers find this panel to be particularly relevant given the invitation extended to Sheri Hagen for WiG 2020 and her own body of work.

Please send inquiries and proposals of 200-300 words to both organizers by February 15, 2020: Tiffany Florvil (tflorvil@unm.edu), Vanessa Plumly (plumlyv@lawrence.edu), and Kevina King (kevina@german.umass.edu).

Source: H-Net Notifications