Center for German and European Studies

German Writers and Race: Karl May and His Legacy

Monday, October 5, 2020
12-1:30 pm Eastern Time (US) / 6-7:30 pm German time
Zoom Webinar 

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About the Event

The teacher turned con man turned best-selling author Karl May (1842-1912) is one of the most widely read German-language authors, with hundreds of millions of copies of his works in circulation. Particularly popular are his travel and adventure novels set in the American West featuring Apache Winnetou and white German Old Shatterhand, which have inspired hobbyist groups, theater festivals, and westerns on the both sides of the Iron Curtain, as well as a recent big-budget television adaptation (RTL, 2016). 

The enduring popularity of Karl May—and the persistence of the static images of Indigenous life in the Americas he propagated—are topics that have long interested readers, scholars, journalists and activists. Panelists will discuss Karl May and his legacy through the lenses of decolonization and race, including how the Winnetou books and film adaptations center depictions of whiteness and erase narratives of Indigenous resistance, survival and sovereignty, their impact on the representation of Indigenous American cultures in museums, festivals, and hobbyist circles, and the intertwined German and American legacies of migration, colonization, and racism. 

About the Speakers

Maureen GallagherMaureen Gallagher is a Lecturer in German Studies at Australian National University. She holds an MA from the University of Nebraska and a PhD in German Studies from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research interests in German Studies are in the areas of gender studies, critical race theory and critical whiteness studies, and postcolonialism and decolonization. Recent publications have focused on inclusive and decolonial pedagogy, race and gender in German colonial literature, and First World War literature, and she is currently working on a book manuscript on whiteness in Wilhelmine German youth literature and culture based on her dissertation, which was awarded the 2016 Women in German dissertation prize. She is also on the authoring team of the online, open access German curriculum Grenzenlos Deutsch, which has been supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Lisa KingLisa King is Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Writing, and Linguistics in the Department of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Her research and teaching interests are interdisciplinary, and include cultural rhetorics with an emphasis in contemporary Native American and Indigenous rhetorics. More specifically, her focus rests on the rhetorics of cross-cultural sites such as Indigenous museums and cultural centers, and theorizing cross-cultural pedagogy through the teaching of Indigenous texts in rhetoric and composition classrooms. She is the co-editor of Survivance, Sovereignty, and Story: Teaching American Indian Rhetorics (2015), and author of Legible Sovereignties: Rhetoric, Representations, and Native American Museums (2017).