Category: Activities

30 Nov. 2021, 9:30-11:00 — Blandijn, first floor, Faculteitszaal

Talk by Alicia Lambert, Université catholique de Louvain

The last two decades have been marked by a revival of (de)colonial issues in Belgian public, political, and artistic debates, including in the comics field. Based on recent research on the potentialities of comics – or art, in general – to destabilize colonial ideologies and stereotypes (Gardner, McKinney, Wanzo, Macé, Rosello), this PhD project examines comics and graphic novels, published during this period (2000-2021), that generate a critical and reflexive distance towards the Belgian colonial imaginary.
This presentation focuses on Barly Baruti and Christophe Cassiau-Haurie’s Le Singe Jaune (2018) and Jean-Philippe Stassen’s graphic documentary “I Comb Jesus” (2009-2010). It explores the artistic and narrative techniques (pastiche, parody, generic hybridization, temporal superpositions, tabular composition, text-image tensions…) that allow the artists to draw back, to reveal, and to subvert various images inherited from Belgium’s colonial past (monuments, archives), including Franco-Belgian comics associated with Belgium’s ex-colonies (Tintin in the Congo) as well as their generic paradigms and traditional tropes (exoticism, adventure, ligne claire…). The analysis will demonstrate how artworks, plots, characters, and styles that have traditionally spread colonial ideologies are here subverted from their initial functions (colonial propaganda, entertainment) to be given new ones (attraction/identification tools, reflexive anti-stereotypes), thereby challenging readers’ expectations and allowing them to discover other perspectives on Belgium’s colonial past, or to unveil the mechanisms under its propaganda as well as their legacies in postcolonial times.

Bio

Alicia Lambert is a PhD student at the Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium). She holds a BA degree (UNamur) and an MA degree (UCLouvain) in Modern Languages and Literatures (English-Dutch). Her PhD project examines the ways in which Belgian colonial imagery is redrawn, unveiled and subverted in the works of artists such as Barly Baruti, Asimba Bathy, Serge Diantantu, Anton Kannemeyer, Nicolas Pitz, Olivier Schrauwen, Jean-Philippe Stassen and Thibau Vande Voorde.

17 Nov. 2021, 9:00-12:00 — Blandijn, third floor, Camelot meeting room

Talk and discussion by Prof Kees Ribbens (NIOD/Erasmus University Rotterdam)

Bio

Kees Ribbens is a senior researcher at NIOD, where he has worked since 2006. He is also an endowed professor of ‘Popular historical culture of Global Conflicts and Mass Violence’ at Erasmus University Rotterdam. His interest is in how memories of war, genocide and mass violence in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are represented in words and images. More generally, he looks at how individuals, groups and societies relate to these histories. He is fascinated by the ways in which the Second World War is given meaning, represented and appropriated, each time anew, across various communities.

Déballage des bandes dessinées d’enfance de Norbert Moutier

Bio

For the ZomerWijs in de Wijk intiative of the Onderwijscentrum Gent we organized a small workshop comics reading and making for children between 8 and 12.
After a short reading of Matthew Forsythe’s Pokko heeft een trommel adapted for Kamishibai-format storytelling, we talked with them about comics and visual storytelling and invited them to make their own little fanzines, using the format templates from L’Articho, cutting-and-pasting comics, rewriting texts, drawing their own stories.

October 2020

PhD student Eva Van de Wiele introduced fifteen-year-old pupils of Sint-Lievenscollege to the wonders of (Italian) comics.

Watch this video for a brief recap of the three workshops.

This folder gives an overview of the three workshops, the primary bibliographical sources used and the reponsible persons.

_{Picture of the overview of the three workshops}

Data-set of our chapter:

• The glossary (Dutch) we handed out to the pupils after workshop 1 drew laregly from Jan Baetens, Pascal Lefèvre’s, Strips anders lezen, Amsterdam, Sherpa, 1993.
• The reading list

• To evaluate the workshops:
  • we ended the third workshop with a Kahoot;
  • we presented the teachers with the following questionnaire. Their answers can be found here.

We would like to thank the Embassy of Italy in Belgium, Società Dante Alighieri Gent, Cecilia Valagussa, the SInt-Lievenscollege and its teachers Laurent Florizoone and Lieven Van den Weghe for the fruitful collaboration.

Our digital symposium Sugar and Spice, and the Not So Nice: Comics Picturing Girlhood  was launched on 22 April 2021 with a profound and personal keynote by Mel Gibson. Using herself as a case study she reflected on being a reader, a librarian, a scholar and an individual who, in a variety of fields, has represented non-standard notions of ‘girl’. In workshops for librarians, teachers and scholars, Gibson uses comics for object elicitation, allowing her to encourage others to reconsider themselves as child comics readers and the complex ideologies knotted up in this experience. Gibson’s work provokes the notion of the individual as a role model, a unique and precise representation with particular qualities, interests and passions. Using restorative nostalgia entails not just reflecting back on, but also resisting, shame and embarrassment, forgiving and accepting ourselves as the child readers we were. Gibson shows a respect for the powerful and evocative materiality of comics and offers a compassionate model for identity. Whilst speaking personally about comics reading, Gibson engaged with discourses of hierarchy, child development and affect, interrogating the simple truth that what we read is part of making us who we are.

Image courtesy by Dragana Radanović.