Rude Girl

Beschreibung

The white German graphic novelist Birgit Weyhe teaches at a US college through an academic exchange program. 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, only to discover 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.

Autor*in

Birgit Weyhe
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.

Themen in »Rude Girl«

critical race theory translation graphic novel cultural appropriation graphic biography storytelling identity society identity politics minority mixed postcolonial postmigrant postmigration

Stimmen zu »Rude Girl«

“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 “Full of violence, pain, suffering and rebellion and a long way from what you’d expect of an academic career.” taz “Alongside the stark visual force that Rude Girl develops, what marks it out is its montage construction: in a second narrative layer, Weyhe presents the US professor Priscilla Layne with sections of her own drawn biography. The result is a productive and extremely open dialogue between two cooperating narrators: on cultural appropriation, race and gender. An essential contribution to our current identity debates.” Jury statement, Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair
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