The James Weldon Johnson Lecture Series welcomes Dr. Simon Dickel, Professor of Gender and Diversity at The Folkwang University of the Arts.
Dr. Dickel will present Blackness and German Independent Cinema
The German political discourse about blackness differs from that in the U.S. in significant ways. Dr. Dickel will focus on the representational strategies of two German independent films, 1 Berlin Harlem (1974) and Auf den Zweiten Blick (2012). He will pay special attention to the films’ negotiations of race and sexuality and discuss how conceptualizations of blackness have changed throughout the four decades that lie between their productions. He will also emphasize the emergence of the Black German Movement that started in the 1980s as one important factor for these changes.
Dr. Simon Dickel is a Visiting Scholar at UCF. From 2009 to 2016, he was Juniorprofessor for Ethnic and Postcolonial Studies at the English Department at Ruhr-University Bochum/Germany. He is the author of Black/Gay: The Harlem Renaissance, the Protest Era, and Constructions of Black Gay Identity in the 1980s and 90s (2011), co-editor of After the Storm: The Cultural Politics of Hurricane Katrina (2015), and co-editor of Queer Cinema (2018). His fields of research include Critical Race Theory, Queer Theory, and Disability Studies. In his current research project, he addresses Phenomenology and social difference. During his residency at UCF, his research will be focused on the African American writer Vincent O. Carter.
.
Read More