Event Why Are You So Angry? | PRIDE

In May 2024, Dr. Anne Potjans published her dissertation, Why Are You So Angry? Anger and Rage in Black Feminist Literature with Peter Lang publishing. Since then, the world has seen many disconcerting developments which have brought anger and rage felt by communities of color center stage. Most of the writing was informed by discourses around the heightened publicity of anti-Black state sanctioned violence in the summer of 2020.

After reading from the 4th chapter, “Tensed from Being Gentle, or Why You Always Fit the Description,” which mainly consists of a reading of Claudia Rankine’s lyrical essay Citizen (2014), Dr. Anne Potjans would like to explore in conversation with Wassan Ali, how the framework of Black feminist anger can be useful in this time of political upheaval, fear, and anxiety for the future. Part of our conversation will focus on the relationship between queerness and the specific gender norms around Black women, and how this feeds into the question of anger. 

Die Veranstaltung findet auf Englisch statt ohne Übersetzung.

Dr. Anne Potjans is a postdoctoral researcher in the ERC Consolidator grant project “Tales of the Diasporic Ordinary. Aesthetics, Affects, Archives” at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. She has taught in the American Studies program since 2015 and currently works on a project tentatively titled “Night Shift – Queer Subcultural Spaces and the Black Diasporic Experience.”

In this project, she looks at queer black writing and art in Germany between the 1960s and early 1980s to trace the intersections of race and queerness prior to the beginning of the younger Black German movement in the mid-1980s. Earlier in 2022, she completed her dissertation, which was published as Why Are You So Angry? Anger and Rage in Black Feminist Literature by Peter Lang in May 2024. She is a joint winner of Peter Lang’s Emerging Scholars Competition “New Perspectives in Black Studies.”

Wassan Ali is an archive activist affiliated with the Spinnboden Lesbian Archive. She organizes workshops that explore intersectional histories in the archive and their impact on the present, in part through the release of the zine Writing the Archive. At Humboldt University in Berlin, Wassan Ali is associated with the research project “Queer Theory in Transit,” where she examines traces of queerness in lesbian magazines. Ali has contributed to the essay collection Nicht die Ersten: Bewegungsgeschichten von Queers of Color in Deutschland (ed. Tarek Shukrallah), writing about archiving from an intersectional perspective, and also written about Gillian Rose and digestion in the hand-bound book The Roses in Constellation (ed. Rachel Pafe).