International Online-Workshop: Narrating Emancipation in Cuban and Eastern European Graphic Storytelling. Analogies and Entanglements (March 25, 2026)
Throughout the 20th and 21st century graphic storytelling has served as a significant, though often underestimated means for disseminating and negotiating emancipation narratives. Such narratives play a pivotal role in socialist and post-socialist societies in Latin America and Eastern Europe since the Cold War and after 1989. For instance, in Cuba comic hero Elpidio Valdés was meant to show children and adults the courage of the 19th century anti-colonial fighters while his creator Juan Padrón transformed his experience in the USSR into a part of his graphic autobiography. In the Soviet Union image-text narratives about Cuba, such as the children’s books by Vasily Chichkov, Vitaly Korzhikov or others, not only helped to reinforce the idea of the USSR’s superiority as master and mentor of socialist emancipation, but in some cases emphasized the autonomy of Cuban cultural development, thereby challenging the official Soviet narrative. Regardless of such telling examples, little research has been conducted so far to unravel the role of graphic storytelling in emancipation discourses within the respective regions. Even fewer studies have explored comparative perspectives or transatlantic entanglements between Latin America—particularly Cuba, the “adored child of the socialist world” (Anne Gorsuch 2015: 520)—and Eastern Europe in this context.
Although often dismissed as mere popular entertainment or children’s fare, image-text narratives such as comics, illustrated books, and graphic novels have long served as powerful tools for conveying political messages—ranging from state propaganda to dissident views. Moreover, in the second half of the 20th century an underground comic scene emerged that sought to escape this dichotomy. What unites the various types of multimodal storytelling is their apparently intuitive accessibility appealing to a wide-ranged readership. As a result, image-text narratives often address multiple audiences and may entail ambiguity. The interplay of verbal and visual strands of narration and representation offers a wide range of possibilities for producing different layers of meaning, in particular in terms of time, spatiality, and perspective “asking us to read back and forth between images and words” (Marianne Hirsch 2004, 12–13).
The workshop focuses on the tension between official and unofficial, as well as collective and individual narratives of emancipation. These include, among others, socialist narratives of liberation from feudalism, colonialism, and slavery, as well as post-socialist narratives portraying the end of socialism as the “end of history” and entry into the so-called “free” world. Of particular interest are ex-centric emancipation narratives that engage critically with official discourses—for example, those emerging from exile and diaspora, from youth cultures, or from other societal groups such as LGBTQI+ communities, ethnic minorities, religious groups, and others.
Favoring both a comparative and an entangled history approach our workshop gathers a small group of international scholars (Austria, Brazil, France, Germany, Ukraine) interested in socialist and postsocialist graphic narratives from Cuba and Eastern Europe. Contributions focus the reception of Cuban art in the GDR, the politics of Global Leftist Comic Culture, the negotiation of traumatic pasts in Cuban and Ukrainian graphic narratives, as well as emancipation in Cuban graphic narratives about the USSR and in Soviet and Polish children’s literature about Cuba.
The online workshop is organized by Anne Brüske (Department for Interdisciplinary and Multiscalar Area Studies / University of Regensburg) and Karoline Thaidigsmann (external link, opens in a new window) (Slavic Department / Heidelberg University).
Please direct any inquiries to:
anne.brueske(at)ur.de (opens your email program) and karoline.thaidigsmann@slav.uni-heidelberg.de (opens your email program)
You can find the detailed program and the Zoom link in the attached PDF document.