The Social Media Aesthetics of Mobility: Reinhard Kleist’s The Olympic Dream and Comics on Refugee Experience
WCGS warmly welcomes Dr. Elizabeth Nijdam of the University of British Columbia on Tuesday, November 12, 2019. Dr. Nijdam will discuss Reinhard Kleist's graphic novel An Olympic Dream: The Story of Samia Yusuf Omar and how it integrates the technologies of refugee life in order to disrupt media representation of migrants and the - often fatal - experience of migration. This talk is hosted by the course GER 308 German through Comics taught by Sara Marsh. To compliment this talk Sara has also organized a poster exhibition "Legends and Dreams: Reinhard Kleist’s Graphic Narrative." Click here for information about the exhibition.
This is a free event and open to all, hope to see you there!
Want to learn more about Kleist's graphic novel?
Check out this CBC interview with the author
Read Dr. Nijdam's full abstract
Event Details
When: Tuesday, November 12, 2019 at 3:00pm
Where: PAS 1241
Parking:
Full Abstract: In the last decade, comics and graphic novels on migration have become an essential forum for representing refugee experience. This emergent genre of graphic narration not only offers the representation of migrant hardships from the subjective perspective of refugees, artists, and volunteers working in the community, comics on the refugee crisis also develop empathy and awareness for the plight of migrants internationally by giving a voice to countless nameless – and often faceless – migrants, whose images circulate widely in the media. Moreover, comic artists working on refugee and migrant subjects are inventing new visual languages to express these individuals’ perilous journeys from war-torn regions of the Middle East, Africa, and Asia to European soil, incorporating the very media technology essential for migration – and its representation – into the comics form. This presentation examines how Reinhard Kleist’s The Olympic Dream: The Story of Samia Yusuf Omar (2015) integrates the technologies of refugee life – the news industry and photojournalism that reports on it and the social media platforms essential to it – into the fabric of his narration to intervene in discourses on the media representation of migrants and the – often fatal – experience of migration.