Awards

• Short-listed for Hamburg Book of the Year 2023 (Germany)
• Short-listed for Leipzig Book Fair Prize 2023 (Germany)

Overview

The white German graphic novelist Birgit Weyhe teaches at a US college through an academic exchange programme. At a conference of American Germanists in the Midwest, she is accused of cultural expropriation. Is she exploiting her privileges as a white writer when she tells stories about Black people? She meets Priscilla Layne, an African American professor of German studies with Caribbean roots. Growing up, Priscilla is labelled an 'Oreo': too white for her Black classmates, and too Black for the white kids. Rebelling against everything and everyone all at once, she joins the skinhead movement and becomes a rude girl, discovering a community where she feels valued. Music, clothes, hair, food, class, race, gender, education - her life and identity are a complex composite. But how should Birgit Weyhe tell a life story like Priscilla's? What mistakes does she need to avoid? The act of storytelling itself becomes its own narrative layer in this unique graphic biography.

Full Product Details

9783863914028

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Reviews

'Not just for fans of graphic novels, but for anyone who has ever felt different.' Priscilla Layne ‘Birgit Weyhe develops a rhythm of empathy in her comic. She tells the story of Crystal and her immigrant family like a rap. Six pictures per page, that’s the beat.’ Die Zeit

Author Information

Birgit Weyhe was born in Munich in 1969. She spent her childhood in Uganda and Kenya and studied literature and history in Konstanz and Hamburg. Going on to study illustration, she has since worked as an illustrator and comic artist in Hamburg. Her graphic novels have been nominated for awards in Germany, France and Japan, and Madgermanes received the 2015 Comic Book Prize of the Berthold Leibinger Foundation and the 2016 Max and Moritz Prize for best German comic. In 2022 she was awarded Hamburg's prestigious Lessing Grant and was honoured as best German-language comic artist. Rude Girl was shortlisted for the Hamburg Book of the Year award and was the first comic ever to be nominated for the Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair, in 2023. Priscilla Layne was born in Evanston, IL in 1981 and spent her childhood and early adulthood in Chicago. She studied comparative literature at the University of Chicago and received her PhD in German from the University of California at Berkeley. She is now Professor of German and Adjunct Associate Professor of African Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her book, White Rebels in Black: German Appropriation of Black Popular Culture, was published in 2018 by the University of Michigan Press. She has also published essays on Turkish German culture, translation, punk and film. She recently translated Olivia Wenzel's debut novel, 1000 Coils of Fear, from German into English. And she is currently finishing a manuscript on Afro German Afrofuturism and acritical guide to Rainer Maria Fassbinder's film The Marriage of Maria Braun.

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