[Commlist] CfP Queer Eye: Black German Visions

*Call for Papers*

*45th Annual Conference of the Coalition of Women in German Conference*

*October 15-18, 2020 (Sewanee, TN, Sewanee-University of the South) *

*/Queer Eye: Black German Visions/*

*Panel Co-Coordinators:*

Tiffany Florvil, University of New Mexico

Vanessa Plumly, Lawrence University

Kevina King, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

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.

We 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 all organizers 
by February 15, 2020: Tiffany Florvil ((tflorvil /at/ unm.edu) 
<mailto:(tflorvil /at/ unm.edu)>), Vanessa Plumly ((plumlyv /at/ lawrence.edu) 
<mailto:(plumlyv /at/ lawrence.edu)>), and Kevina King ((kevina /at/ german.umass.edu) 
<mailto:(kevina /at/ german.umass.edu)>).

Panel participants must be WiG members at the time of the conference.

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