The international conference Imagining the Black Diaspora brought together authors, comic artists, a comic translator, and scholars from the fields of American Studies, African American Studies, Latin American Studies, and Media Studies to discuss the circulation and distribution, the cultural and political economies, the aesthetic diversity and the community-shaping effects of pictures and imagery in Black diasporic literature across the Americas. The conference focused on a wide array of literary practices – ranging from graphic neo-slave narratives and photographic authorial self-representation to depictions of Black youth in US American children’s literature – to investigate historic and current (dis-)positions of Black authorship, subaltern cultural resistance, racist stereotyping, and literary market competition.

You can download the comic (PDF) here.

The Artist: Panchulei (Francisca Cárcamo)

E-Mail: panchulei@gmail.com
Website: http://www.panchulei.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/panchulei
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/panchulei/?hl=de
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/panchulei.dibuja

Thursday, January 9, 2020

Venue: Literarisches Colloquium Berlin (LCB)
Am Sandwerder 5, 14109 Berlin

16.30 | Welcome & opening remarks

17.00 | Birgit Weyhe (Hamburg): Between Identities: The Graphic Novel Madgermanes – Contract Labor Migration from Mozambique to East Germany
Jutta Müller-Tamm (Berlin): Moderation

17.45 | André Diniz (Rio de Janeiro/Lisbon): Picture a Favela – The Representation of Social Apartheid in Brazilian Comics
Nina Schmidt (Berlin): Moderation

18.30 | Break

19.00 | Marcelo D’Salete (São Paulo): Angola Janga – Black Graphic Narratives in Brazil
Jasmin Wrobel (Berlin): Moderation

19:45 | Panel discussion with the authors and translator Lea Hübner (Berlin)
Dustin Breitenwischer & Jasmin Wrobel (Freie Universität Berlin): Moderation

followed by reception

Friday, January 10, 2020

Venue: Freie Universität Berlin, Lateinamerika-Institut, Room 201
Rüdesheimer Str. 54-56, 14197 Berlin

10:00 | Opening remarks

10:30 | Panel 1 (Chair: Susanne Klengel, Freie Universität Berlin)
Ana Merino (Iowa): Mexican Blackness and the Conflictive Representation of  Memín Pinguín
Jasmin Wrobel (Freie Universität Berlin): Literary Picture-Making and (Failed) Processes of Circulation: The Cases of Carolina Maria de Jesus and Paulo Lins’s City of God

12:30 | Lunch break

14:00 | Panel 2 (Chair: Anna Degler, Freie Universität Berlin)
Herman Bennett (CUNY): Fragments & Fabrication of Early-Modern Angola

15:00 | Short coffee break

15:15 | Panel 3 (Chair: Irmela Krüger-Fürhoff, FU Berlin)
Daniel Stein (Siegen): Diasporic Archives and Popular Culture: The Case of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Black Panther
Nina Mickwitz (London): Re-visioning: Transformative Imaginaries in  Contemporary US Comics by Black Women

17:15 | Coffee break

17:45 | Panel 4 (Chair: Martin Lüthe, Freie Universität Berlin)
Dustin Breitenwischer (Freie Universität Berlin): 'Poets, prophets and reformers are all picture-makers': Frederick Douglass’s Picture Theory
Robert Reid-Pharr (Harvard): Sullied Innocence: James Baldwin and the Problematic Black Child

followed by closing remarks