Resources |

This is a work in progress. It is by no means meant to be comprehensive and more material will be added over time. If you’d like to contribute resources or have other suggestions, please get in touch.

Before Covid-19, we had planned an eight-part lecture series at the University of Oxford. Below is a selection of the programme. We are so grateful to our contributors, who would have been with us in Oxford, to still have taken the time to share their experiences and expertise with us.

Keynote by Sarah Colvin: “Practices of possibility. Wayward aesthetics in Olivia Wenzel’s 1000 Serpentinen Angst and Sharon Dodua Otoo’s Adas Raum“ as part of the Sichtbarkeiten conference that took place in Oxford in June 2021.

Reading of Ellbogen by Fatma Aydemir as well as a short conversation about her work as a part of the cultural programme of Sichtbarkeiten.

Virtual roundtable with Claudius Sittig, Leila Mukhida, and Lizzie Stewart

Lecture by Anne Potjans: “‘Borderless and Brazen:’ Black German Feminist Literature since the 1980s”

Vina Yun’s “Homestories” & Reading in June 2020

Lecture by Barry Murnane on “Colonial Discourses in Austria”

Sichtbarkeiten Conference

The conference Sichtbarkeiten opened 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 and sexuality, contributing to the vision of other possible communities that acknowledge the diversity of its members. Focusing on how the literary text represents transgressive, fluid, transnational, minor, migrant, queer, diverse forms of identity, the three panels of the conference covered a variety of texts and authors, including Sharon Dodua Otoo, Sasha Marianna Salzmann, Fatma Aydemir and Olivia Wenzel.

These recordings include Sarah Colvin’s keynote speech “Practices of possibility. Wayward aesthetics in Olivia Wenzel’s 1000 Serpentinen Angst and Sharon Dodua Otoo’s Adas Raum.“ The second recording shows reading of Ellbogen by Fatma Aydemir as well as a short conversation about her work as a part of the cultural programme of Sichtbarkeiten.

The conference took place on the 1^st of July 2021 at the University of Oxford and was organized by graduate students in the German department Laura Sturtz and Selma Rezgui.

SARAH COLVIN is the Schröder Professor of German and a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. In 2020-21 she is a Senior Fellow at the Humboldt Centre, University of Bayreuth. Her primary research and teaching interests are in the areas of narrative theory and practice, including narrative and ethical approaches to literature; anti-racism and critical race theory; prisoner narratives; gender and writing. She is a steering committee member for the National Criminal Justice Arts Alliance.

FATMA AYDEMIR is the author of the upcoming novel Dschinns and an editor of the critical acclaimed anthology Eure Heimat ist unser Albtraum (2017) published in reaction to the inauguration of the so-called German Heimatministerium’, rendering visible the multifacted realities of those who do not comply with foreclosing definitions of what it means to be ‘German’. Fatma Aydemir is also the author of the award-winning novel Ellbogen (2017)and a journalist for the German newspaper taz.

Virtual Roundtable with Claudius Sittig, Leila Mukhida, and Lizzie Stewart

For this virtual roundtable, Miriam Schwarz interviews Claudius Sittig, Privatdozent at Universität Rostock, and Veronika Schuchter interviews Leila Mukhida, Lecturer in Modern German Studies at the University of Cambridge, and Lizzie Stewart, Lecturer in Modern Languages at King’s College London.

The three panellists talk about their research, what first got them interested in decolonial discourses within German studies, and their teaching.

You can download a PDF of the sources mentioned by Leila and Lizzie here.

Lecture by Anne Potjans: “‘Borderless and Brazen:’ Black German Feminist Literature since the 1980s”

Anne Potjans teaches American literature and culture at the department of English and American Studies at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where she also currently works on her Ph.D. project on anger and abjection in Black Feminist Literature. Furthermore, she has worked on diasporic connections between African American and Black German Feminist autobiographical writing in the post-World War II era. Her research interests are in Black Studies, Critical Race Theory, Gender Studies, Queer Theory, Queer of Color Critique, and Disability Studies.

Addendum: “After completing this talk I noticed a phrasing that might be misleading: There are two instances in the talk where I say “queer and/or Black women” and “Black and/or queer women,” when I should have said, “Black women, of whom many also identify as queer.” Anne Potjans, June 2020

Vina Yun’s “Homestories”

Vina Yun, born 1974, Viennese with Asian roots, woman of Colour, second generation immigrant from Korea with her home-base in Rudolfsheim-Fünfhaus. She works as a journalist and an author, and deals in particular with the topics of feminism in theory and in practice, critical race theory, queer politics and popular culture. She has been active as an editor for alternative media projects such as, MALMOE, an.schläge, dieStandard.at, and migrazine.at. Additionally she has earned her keep at various festivals in the arts and cultural field. Apart from dealing with text, she plays old fashioned Disco as a DJ and is enthusiastic of comics, cat content and binge watching. In 2017 she published “Homestories”, a comic about the history of Korean migration to Austria and what it means to grow up as the second generation of Korean migrants in Vienna in the 1970s and 1980s.