ClassInfo

"Please detail the most awkward social interaction you've had so far in Japan!" "Visit a traditional blacksmith!" "Try a rooftop rollercoaster!" These are three out of twenty-five tasks readers submitted in
2006 to Dirk Schwieger's interactive comic blog Moresukine. Schwieger, a German living in Tokyo, bravely met these challenges and reported the outcome as comic strips originally sketched and scribbled into his "Moresukine" (Japanese for "Moleskine") notebook. They provide fascinating and often funny insights into Japanese culture - and into cultural patterns that guide a Westerner's behavior in Japan and their expectations of Japanese culture. In some respects Schwieger acted as a cultural anthropologist by comparing cultural similarities and differences--not from an armchair or by compiling books, but rather by actively engaging with another culture and observing it in the "field." Generally speaking, comics are an ideal medium for depicting cultural encounters: They allow for the combination of verbal comments and narrations with pictures that "show" us concrete elements of an unfamiliar world.

This course will introduce you to a number of remarkable comic books that might be termed "ethno-graphic novels" since they report, narrate and present cultural encounters in a way that makes us aware of the relativity of our own cultural rules and assumptions. Of course, while such comics draw on anthropological and ethnographic methods, they are radically more subjective, but all the more engaging. We will look at comics from six categories:

1. Travelogues from authors like Dirk Schwieger who spent time in another country for professional reasons. For example, the Canadian cartoonist and animator, Guy Deslisle, created several "travelogues"
   based on work travels to Israel, Burma, China, and North Korea, using a minimalist cartoon style. At the other end of the spectrum, French photographer Didier Lefévre teamed up with comic artist Emmanuel Guibert to tell the story of his dangerous trip to Afghanistan in a realist graphic novel into which his photos are integrated.

2. Memoirs that address the cultural heritage of second-generation immigrants, like Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese, or GB Tran's Vietnamerica.

3. Graphic novels that draw attention to the situation of migrants who must make the transition from one culture to another under challenging circumstances. Examples include Parsua Bashi's Nylon Road, a memoir of an artist who emigrated from Iran to Switzerland; Paula Bulling's comic reportage Im Land der Frühaufsteher about African immigrants in Eastern Germany; and Shaun Tan's wordless visual narrative The Arrival that inverts the familiar story of economic migration from East to West in a beautiful, surrealist way.

4. Fictitious stories designed to familiarize Westerners with African cultures, namely Benjamin Flao's Kililala Song (situated in Kenya), and Marguerite Abouet's Aya (situated at the Ivory Coast).

5. Narratives that challenge Western traditions of visual storytelling by confronting them with indigenous ones. Thus, Michael Nicoll Yahgluanaas, born and raised on the Pacific Islands of Haida Gwaii
   (Canada) invented a genre called "Haida Manga", and three Latin American authors created a "Codex Espangliensis" that combines the form of pre-Hispanic codices with elements of catholic visual propaganda and US-comics to tell the story of colonialism "from Columbus to the border patrol." In this section, we will visit the Minneapolis Institute of Art at least once.

6. Finally, we will examine the concept of culture from a slightly different perspective by reading Ralf König's graphic novel Der bewegte Mann from 1987 and its film adaptation from 1994 .Both were crucial to making gay culture a respected part of German culture.

We will focus on the following questions:

• What do we learn from these comics about other cultures - and about our own culture(s)? (And what does "culture" mean in the first place?)

• Which formal devices (e.g., point of view, graphic style) are used and what is their effect?

To answer these questions, we will familiarize ourselves with some basic elements of cultural anthropology and comic theory. The course will be conducted in German and comics will be read in the German original or a German translation, unless they are only available in English.