CONFERENCE PROGRAM
DOWNLOAD PROGRAM
Transnational Perspectives on Black Germany
WEDNESDAY
7:00 PM
Film Screening at Bell Light Box, (350 King Street West): At Second Glance (2012) with film director Sheri Hagen in attendance.
Sheri Hagen was born in Lagos, Nigeria and grew up in Hamburg. She studied at the Stage School of Dance and Drama, as well as in the Studio Theater an der Wien. Besides numerous works in film, she has performed in diverse theater productions. At Second Glance is Sheri Hagen’s debut feature film that was accomplished as her own production in 2012.
THURSDAY
9:30 – 11:00 AM
Framing Oral Histories in Scholarship, Arts, and Activism
Silvia Wojczewski, University of Lausanne, Afro-german, Afro-pean-, Afro-politan –The Relation Between Travel and the Practice and Narration of Diasporic Selves
Daniel Williams, St. Catherine University, Constructing Black German Identities Through Local, National, and Global Blackness: Germany from a North American Perspective
Jessica Lauren Elizabeth Taylor, Artist, filmmaker and community organizer, Archiving as Resistance: Documenting Ancestral Narratives of the Diaspora
11:15 – 12:15
Intersectional Canadian Life Narratives
Michèle Newton, My Better Together Journey, Freelance writer and creator of “Our Mosaic Lives,” a blog celebrating Black Canadian women.
Mark Morrison-Reed, I Was Simply a Living Wonder: Reflection on my life in Switzerland, Unitarian Universalist minister and historian of the African American experience within Unitarian Universalism.
12:15 – 1:30
Buffet Lunch for Registrants in Innis College Courtyard
1:30 – 3:00
Belonging and Resistance
Jamele Watkins, Stanford University, Afrolocken: Natural Hair in Germany
Folashade Ajayi, Humboldt University, Making Diversity Work and Fight–Black Political Organizing in Germany
Melba Boyd, Wayne State University, From Black Detroit to Green Bremen
3:00-3:30
COFFEE BREAK
3:30-5:00
KEYNOTE: FATIMA EL- TAYEB
Beyond the Black Paradigm? Afro-diasporic Strategies in the Age of Neo-Nationalism
Fatima El-Tayeb is professor of Literature and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego. Her work deconstructs structural racism in “colorblind” Europe and centers strategies of resistance among racialized communities, especially those that politicize culture through an intersectional, queer practice. She is the author of three books and numerous articles on the interactions of race, gender, sexuality, religion and nation. She is active in Black feminist, migrant, and queer of color organizations in Europe and the US.
5:00
DINNER ON YOUR OWN
7:30 PM
DANCE PERFORMANCE
Layla Zami/Oxana Chi: I Step on Air
The performance I Step on Air was originally conceived by Oxana Chi in 2012 as a commissioned work for Humboldt University. It carries into the future the life and legacy of May Ayim (1960-1996), who was an internationally celebrated Afro-German poet, performer, linguist, scholar, and feminist activist, also known in Europe as “the Afro-German Audre Lorde.” In this dance-music-word-performance, the audience is invited to reflect upon May Ayim’s afterlife, and to commemorate and celebrate her performative talent, lifelong community engagement and struggle for liberation and solidarity.
FRIDAY
9:30 – 11:00 AM
Cinema, Archives, Authorship
BethAnne Dorn, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill/Duke University, “Poor Otomo:” Frieder Schlaich’s Otomo and the Persistence of the Colonial Gaze
Alexa Mendez, University of Pennsylvania, Afro-Germans in Grass Skirts: The Exploitation of Blackness in Nazi German Cinema.
Imke Brust, Haverford College, Transnational Dimensions of Heimat and National Images of Hybridity in Mo Asumang’s Roots Germania
11:15 – 12:30
Life Lines: Transatlantic Adoption
Screening of Liebe und Wut (Love and Rage, dir. Jule Ritter, 2015, 52 min.)
followed by Skype discussion with Diane Truly and Andreas Nakic
The German documentary is based on the life and reunion story of Andreas Nakic, adopted in Colorado and raised in Germany. Diane Truly is Andy’s mother.
12:30 – 1:45
BUFFET LUNCH FOR REGISTRANTS IN INNIS COURTYARD
1:45 – 3:15
Intertextuality, Mobility, and Global Blackness
Philipp Rohrbach, University of Vienna, Tabooed History: The Life Stories of Austrian Children of Black American Occupation Soldiers
Priscilla Layne, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, The Stakes of Representation and Fantasy in Black German Theater: Simone Dede Ayivi’s First Black Woman in Space
Sara Phillips Casteel, Carleton University, Broken Citizenship: Hans J. Massaquoi’s Survivor Memoir and Its Literary Influence
3:30 – 5:00
KEYNOTE: NOAH SOW
Activists // Academia: Visions and Challenges for Black German Studies 2.0
Noah Sow is Germany’s most prominent speaker and lecturer on the topics of Black German politics, arts and resistance. She is also a writer, artist, media personality, theorist and activist. Her writings have considerably influenced German popular media and academia, and her book Deutschland Schwarz Weiß has become a standard in discussion and education about racial equality in Germany.