Borderlands: Performative Acts across Language, Culture and Media

This episode explores the legal and societal ‘borderlands’ experienced by transgender individuals, and specifically engages with transgender rights in the UK and the US. It draws on Jackie Kay’s novel Trumpet (1999), which was inspired by the story of the US-American jazz musician Billy Tipton who was discovered to be biologically female after his death. Research into the public discourse around gender identity and Transgender rights reveals how the legal framework and situation surrounding Transgender identities is accompanied by biased societal discourses. The episode highlights changes towards a more inclusive and diversified understanding of gender identity since the publication of Trumpet, but also argues that Trumpet is still a novel for today.

Author: Leonie Slak (HHU Düsseldorf, 2021).

-

Impressum:

This episode explores an event from recent British history, which laid bare systemic racism in governmental practices about citizenship: the “Windrush Scandal”. Taking inspiration from Jay Bernard’s poetry collection Surge (2017), which connects the Windrush Scandal to an earlier event showcasing racist attitudes in Britain’s government and institutions: the New Cross Fire, in which thirteen Black teenagers had died at a birthday party in 1981. The podcast teases out how the degree of governmental disregard displayed by both events illustrates the ways in which Black people are still combating experiences of exclusion and discrimination in the UK today, but also how these experiences have been repeated across historical contexts and epochs, as exemplified in the case of Walter Benjamin and his allegorical figure of the “Angel of History”.

Authors: Mandy Bartesch and Özlem Dagdelen (HHU Düsseldorf, 2021). 

-

Impressum:

This episode explores acts of writing back to experiences of marginalisations and violence shared by queer black individuals on both sides of the Atlantic. Barry Jenkins' film Moonlight and Jay Bernard's poetry collection Surge offer unique, and yet related, ways of writing /representing queer Black identity, this episode shows.

-

Impressum:

This episode centres on the challenges of adapting a narrative for the stage. It draws on the example of J.M. Coetzee’s novel Life and Times of Michal K (1983), which has been adapted for the stage by Lara Foot, the Baxter Theatre Cape Town and Schauspielhaus Düsseldorf in a collaboration with the South-African Handspring Puppet Company and premiered in 2021. The authors talk to Felicitas Zürcher, dramaturg of the production, about the specific difficulties of adapting Coetzee’s complex novel of K’s journey through a civil-war-ridden Cape region, and about the perks of puppet theatre. Eventually, the episode reveals how the history of the Handspring Puppet Company is intertwined in various ways with the history of South-Africa.

Authors: Leslie Fried & Kathrin Hettrich

HHU Düsseldorf 2021

-

Impressum: