Upcoming
SICHTBARKEITEN
A conference at the University of Oxford organised by Laura Sturtz und Selma Rezgui.
Thursday 1st July. 11:00-21:00.Online.
All-Day Event with talks from FATMA AYDEMIR and SARAH COLVIN.
Download a pdf of the programme here
Please register via Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/sichtbarkeiten-tickets-160414896273
Sichtbarkeiten aims to open up the space for discussions about the current rise of contemporary German literature which renders visible the diversity and fluidity of German identities, literary quest(ion)s of belonging, and presents a challenge to fixed frames of nationality, ethnicity, language or sexuality.
What are the implications of the tension between visibility and invisibility? What ambivalences can be found in works of contemporary German literature? How does this work make visible the plural and hybrid identities that make up German society today? How can we establish a framework for the discussion of these literatures which does not rely on their otherness, does not treat them as novel or exotic from a white German perspective? What role does literature play in rendering visible the plurality of existence and identities in and beyond the national framework? How does a certain text or author represent transgressive, fluid, transnational, minor, migrant, queer, diverse forms of identity? In what way does the literary text contribute to the vision of other possible communities that acknowledge the diversity of its members?
With a day of papers, readings, and discussions, we hope to address these questions and more.
Lecture by Mahret Ifeoma Kupka: ‘Life doesn’t frighten us anymore. Decolonizing the Museum’
Tuesday 27th April, 2021, 16:00, Online Event
Register here
In 2020, Mahret Ifeoma Kupka curated the exhibition ‘Life doesn’t frighten me – Michelle Elie wears Comme des Garçons’ at the Museum Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt, Germany. Against the backdrop of the worldwide Black Lives Matter protests the exhibition focussing on a Black fashion collector, style icon and Japanese label Comme des Garçons enthusiast turned out to be a political show on questions of representation and diversity not only in museum spaces. In her lecture Mahret Ifeoma Kupka will talk about the exhibitions background and theoretical context, gaps in knowledge about racism and colonialism in Germany, but also about caring and self-love as activism and why institutions in Germany in particular have a lot of work to catch up on.
Dr. Mahret Ifeoma Kupka is an art scholar, freelance writer and, since 2013, curator of fashion, body and the performative at the Museum Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt/Main, Germany. In her exhibitions, lectures, publications, and interdisciplinary projects, she addresses the issues of racism, memory culture, representation, and the decolonization of art and cultural practices in Europe and on the African continent. She is a member of the advisory board of the Initiative of Black people in Germany (ISD) and spokesperson of the Neue Deutsche Museumsmacher*innen (a network of BIPoC museum practitioners in Germany). She studied Economics in Heidelberg as well as Aesthetics/Media Theory, Philosophy, Curatorial Practice and Exhibition Design at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design, where in 2015 she received her doctorate with a dissertation on “Modeblogs und der Mythos der Revolutionierung der Mode”.
This event is kindly supported by the DAAD and will be chaired by Barry Murnane and Veronika Schuchter.
In Conversation with Tiffany N. Florvil
Thursday 10 March 2021, 5:00pm Online Event
Register here
Tiffany N. Florvil will be in conversation with Veronika Schuchter (OeAD-Lektorin, University of Oxford) and Miriam Schwarz (PhD Candidate, University of Cambridge) to talk about her exciting new book “Mobilizing Black Germany: Afro-German Women and the Making of a Transnational Movement” (2020).
This event kindly supported by TORCH.
Tiffany N. Florvil is an Associate Professor of 20th-century European Women’s and Gender History at the University of New Mexico. She specializes in the histories of post-1945 Europe, the African/Black diaspora, social movements, Black internationalism, as well as gender and sexuality. She has published pieces in the Journal of Civil and Human Rights and The German Quarterly. Florvil has also coedited the volume, Rethinking Black German Studies: Approaches, Interventions and Histories, as well as published chapters in Gendering Post-1945 German History, To Turn this Whole World Over, and Gendering Knowledge in Africa and the African Diaspora. Her recent manuscript, Mobilizing Black Germany: Afro-German Women and the Making of a Transnational Movement, with the University of Illinois Press, offers the first full-length study of the history of the Black German movement of the 1980s to the 2000s. She is a Board Member of the International Federation for Research in Women’s History (IFRWH) as well as on the Advisory Board for the Black German Heritage and Research Association, the Editorial Board for Central European History, and the Executive Board for the Journal of Civil and Human Rights. She is also an editor of the “Imagining Black Europe” book series at Peter Lang Press.