Mohamed Amjahid and Max Czollek will engage in a conversation with guests in the U.S. about strategies for a more open, diverse and just society in Germany and the U.S. Thomas Mann Fellow and author Mohamed Amjahid and poet and publicist Max Czollek talk about political activism and diversity. In their work, they discuss the politics of history in the discourse on integration in both countries and raise the question: How is social diversity expressed in politics and art in both countries? What are counter-concepts to white, hegemonic culture?

The first guest in the series is Priscilla Layne, one of the pioneers of Black German Studies and a Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Participants

Mohamed Amjahid was born as the son of so-called guest workers in Frankfurt am Main. He studied political science in Berlin and Cairo and conducted research on various anthropological projects in North Africa. During his studies, he worked as a journalist for taz, Frankfurter Rundschau and Deutschlandfunk. He has worked as a political reporter for the weekly newspaper Die Zeit and the Zeit Magazin. Anthropologically and journalistically, he focuses on human rights, equality and upheaval in the US, Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. Mohamed Amjahid is a 2020 Thomas Mann fellow.

Dr. Max Czollek was born in Berlin in 1987, where he still lives and works today. In 2012, he received a degree in political science from the Technical University of Berlin (Technische Universität Berlin). In 2016, he completed his doctorate studies at the Center for Research on Antisemitism (Zentrum für Antisemitismusforschung, ZfA), also at the same Technical University. Since 2009, Czollek has been a member of poetry collective G13, which has published books and organized lectures.

Priscilla Layne is Professor of German and African American Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her publications deal with the themes of "Blackness" in German film, protest movements in the post-war period and Turkish-German culture. She is the author of "White Rebels in Black: German Appropriation of African American Culture", which was published by the University of Michigan Press in 2018. She is currently working on a monograph on Afro-German Afrofuturism.