Termine

This will be a talk about, and not about albinism. It is about albinism because it will focus on albinism, and not, as it addresses the consumption and manipulation of albinism as a body primarily subject to the whims of its consumers. Albinism as a representable body is perhaps one of the few bodies left still pushed to silence in the face of aggression.

That all cinema depictions of albinism are linked to psychopathy and aberration shows an odd presentation of the predominantly film-making self. If the screen albino is the epitome of whiteness, alabaster skin, blond hair, fair eyes, then why the aversion. For the black population, the albino represents an internal traitor. Here is a person that carries marks of the Caucasian, but is not. The possibility that the albino acts as a cipher, allowing internalised rage to displace itself against the albino, allowing the real target of racialised feelings to go unquestioned remains.

Using Afronauts as a starting point, Of Space Travel and Children of the Moon will interrogate demarcations of albinism as a trope, popular perceptions, and the place of selves made into familiar bodies by the collective imagination.

In cooperation with the Iwalewahaus, the Chair of English Studies and Anglophone Literatures - Prof. Dr. Susan Arndt and the Institute of African Studies, University of Bayreuth.