Centre for Translation Studies

Moderation: Dr. Bettina Burger and Dr. Hannah Pardey (HHU)

On 5 May 2025, Dean Atta will discuss the (in)visibility of Black LGBTQ+ authors in the contemporary publishing and translation industries. Moderated by Dr. Bettina Burger and Dr. Hannah Pardey, this event will feature a conversation about Atta's writing process, readings from his verse novel The Black Flamingo (2019), a discussion of its German translation and a Q&A with the audience. The event will be conducted in English.

Bio Note

Dean Atta is an award-winning Black British writer from London known for his heartfelt storytelling rooted in his Greek Cypriot and Jamaican heritage. He writes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction for all ages. For adult readers, his poetry collection, I Am Nobody's Nigger, was shortlisted for the Polari First Book Prize, and his memoir, Person Unlimited: An Ode to My Black Queer Body, received praise from Michael Rosen as "wonderfully original". His young adult verse novels are The Black Flamingo, Only on the Weekends, and I Can't Even Think Straight. The Black Flamingo won the Stonewall Book Award and was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal and Jhalak Prize. Malorie Blackman praised the book, saying, “I loved every word.” Dean has also contributed to middle-grade anthologies like Happy Here: 10 stories from Black British authors & illustrators and the Instant #1 New York Times Bestseller Black Boy Joy: 17 Stories Celebrating Black Boyhood. His picture book, Confetti, illustrated by Alea Marley, is a colourful celebration of love and life. Additionally, Dean is a screenwriter and executive producer of the animated short film "Two Black Boys in Paradise", which was selected for the BFI Flare: London LGBTIQ+ Film Festival and numerous others worldwide.

My talk examines Wayde Compton's The Outer Harbour (2015) as a short story cycle and explores how the work’s polyphonic, multimodal, and speculative characteristics highlight the heterogeneity of the contemporary African Canadian experience. First, I investigate how Compton’s stories can be described as ‘tales that touch’, based on the genre-specific tension between centrifugal and centripetal narrative forces (Lundén 2014) that shape the recurrence of characters, locations, and narrative techniques in the short story cycle. The cycle’s polyphonic form presents the African Canadian experience as both localized and particular and collective and interconnected by including ten stories all set in Vancouver but each being focalized through a different African Canadian character. While centrifugal forces attend readers to the diversity of African Canadian experience, interconnections between individual stories add a collective dimension to its portrayal of Afroperipheralism on the macro-level of the cycle. Compton’s striking use of multimodality, moreover, points to contestations in dealing with Vancouver’s settler colonial past and in projecting its future by imagining encounters between descendants of white anglophone settlers and (mixed-race) Asian, African and Indigenous as well as more-than-human characters. The paper examines how Compton’s cycle engages with the genre of speculative fiction to redress forgotten histories and to highlight the complex negotiations of belonging for Vancouver’s black communities and (their interrelationships with) other minoritized groups.

Moderation: Prof. Dr. Birgit Neumann (HHU)

Wir gratulieren Tasun Tidorchibe herzlich zur erfolgreichen Verteidigung seiner Dissertation "Revisiting formalism from a West African perspective: Konkomba folktales across generations and cultural contexts". Sein Projekt beschäftigt sich aus afrozentrischer Perspektive mit Form-​Inhalts-Beziehungen in (weitgehend westlichen) Strömungen des Formalismus am Beispiel populärer Erzählungen (folktales) der Konkomba in Nordghana. Über Translating Minor Forms macht sein Projekt zudem einen Korpus der Erzählungen, deren Übersetzungen, und weiteren Inhalten zugänglich. Mehr Informationen finden Sie hier.

Wir gratulieren Hypolite Kembeu herzlich zur erfolgreichen Verteidigung seiner Dissertation zum Thema: "Politisch korrekt übersetzen? Zum Einfluss von sozialhistorischen und -politischen Faktoren auf das Übersetzen von postkolonialen afrikanischen Literaturen ins Deutsche."
Mehr lesen