On March 11, 2021, Biz Nijdam, José Alaniz (University of Washington), and Martha Kuhlman (Bryant University) discussed the recently published edited collection Comics of the New Europe in a virtual event hosted by the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia at New York University.
This edited collection offers insights into the comics cultures of a number of post-socialist countries including the former East Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, the former Yugoslavia, Hungary, Romania, and Ukraine. A new generation of cartoonists reexamine and reevaluate not only their respective comics traditions but also their own post-1989 identities and ways of representing their complicated national histories.
Editors and contributors Drs. Alaniz and Kuhlman, as well as contributor Dr. Nijdam gave highlights of their chapters on Ukrainian author Igor Baranko, Czech authors Vojtěch Mašek and Džian Baban, and German authors Susanne Buddenberg, Thomas Henseler, and Johann Ulrich respectively. Baranko’s work reimagines Ukrainian identity through a fictional recasting of Native American history; Mašek’s work satirizes both the socialist past and the post-socialist present with wit, irony, and a hint of Kafka; Buddenberg/Henseler’s work is a documentary project on stories of crossing the Berlin Wall.”
Featured image: Cover of Comics of the New Europe; Image credit: Martha Kuhlman (ed.)
