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Nícollas Cayann – Georg Bollenbeck Fellow 2024

Interview between Daniel Stein (Dep. of English) and Georg-Bollenbeck-Fellow Nícollas Cayann

Daniel Stein:
Hi Nico, we are so happy and honored to welcome you as a Bollenbeck fellow at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities. You have already met many of our faculty and staff, but for the people who don’t know you yet, could you introduce yourself and your background and say a few things about the work you are doing here?

Nícollas Cayann: Well, Daniel, thank you so much for the hearty welcome I’ve gotten from you and from all the people I had the chance to meet at the department (and university) so far. Everyone I’ve been in touch with has been not only helpful with all my questions and demands, but they have also been incredibly nice and attentive. Being here at the University of Siegen as a Bollenbeck fellow has been a blast! I have been exploring around and chit-chatting with faculty members in the kitchen and the hallways, but for those that I have missed, I will provide a quick introduction; nevertheless, we can also do this over coffee in the breakroom.
So, my name is Nícollas, it’s quite an adaptable name; every language has a version of it, but I do like Nico because it’s my childhood nickname and it has my Latino cultural heritage on it. I am from the extreme south of Brazil, in the Pampas, nearby Argentina and Uruguay. I grew up very interested in languages, cultures, and politics, and I’ve studied literature and international relations, which I believe was a great match for my academic development. However, matching these two fields, which at first seem obviously related, is not an easy task. At the end of my undergrad, I’ve encountered the idea of travel writing, or travel literature, and that was a great point to meet both of my academic passions. Through the lenses of travel writing theory and methods, I was able to explore other possibilities in my academic perspective, and from that point on, I was able to analyze different cultural artefacts (romances, pieces, accounts, and, of course, comics). That culminates in what I am doing here at the University of Siegen, which is an analysis of a comic series through travel writing academic approaches. To name things properly, my project’s name is DEPICTNESS (Depicting Otherness). This name was revealed to me in a dream, when I was trying to make a very long title sound cute. In a few words: I try to understand how visual and verbal selections from comics and other graphic narratives depict otherness regarding People of Color.

Daniel: What made you pick the University of Siegen as a place to apply for a fellowship? How would you describe your experience here so far?

Nícollas: Even if I am very interested in comics studies, most of my formal training is on other forms of narrative. By the end of my PhD (February 2022) and now, I have been exploring and flirting with translation studies and comics studies. I had a good foundation for translation studies, or at least that’s what I would like to think, but analyzing visual narratives was not something I have had the chance to explore that much. In order to fill that gap in my curriculum, I started reading articles and getting acquainted with the comics studies scene in Europe, and somehow I ended up in your CV, Daniel. I was very impressed with your take on comics studies, and I thought, “Wow, that is a guy from whom I can learn a lot,” and I emailed you to try the Humboldt Fellowship, and that was not a good idea for the moment, and you told me about the Bollenbeck Fellowship, and I immediately had a good feeling about it. Of course, I’ve also googled the university and the other researchers at the department, and I was very happy with the profiles I could find. The thing is, I was also very intrigued, because when you google Siegen, I must be honest, it doesn’t sound very promising, so I was very intrigued on how all these good researchers and this very nice, well organized, and developed university could all be located in Siegen. It was a very happy surprise to discover that not only the department and the university are incredible, but that the city of Siegen is beautiful; it has nice spaces, and the people are lovely. I think it is time to message the mayor and have a new marketing team, or maybe it is better to keep Siegen as a secret a little bit longer before the TikTok kids take over and it becomes crowned with tourists. Future will tell. My personal experience so far with the university and the city has been very positive. One thing I would like to mention is that I think it says a lot about the role of the university in this town that the University of Siegen has the restaurant with the best view of the whole town (the mensa on AR).

Daniel: You have also done research in other parts of Europe, and of course also in Brazil. How would you compare the different countries and academic cultures?

Nícollas: I think I would have to approach this question through two relevant topics: interdisciplinarity and freedom. My project encompasses many different ideas, and the subject is so plastic and malleable that it ends up touching different fields of study. Besides having a very versatile topic and corpus of study, I am also a very interdisciplinary researcher. Therefore, having an interdisciplinary environment is mandatory. I do feel that science in general has been expanding the fields and retracting the fields of study through the years, so you have this effect of separating disciplines only to then reunite them later in different forms. And of course, this feeling is much stronger in the humanities in general. I would say that Brazil still has a very divided idea of the humanities, and even if interdisciplinarity is a major demand in Brazilian academia (from the universities’ administration as much as from the ministry of education), I could not really feel the interdisciplinary approach working on the programs where I was enrolled. So even if both my master’s and PhD programs were supposed to have an interdisciplinary approach, I don’t think I had the freedom to be as interdisciplinary as I would like it to be. I do believe that my advisors Mirian Santos Ribeiro de Oliveira (UNILA) and Anselmo Peres Alós (UFSM) have done their best to provide interdisciplinary studies in our research groups; however, the programs themselves were not free enough to be interdisciplinary. I would say that the humanities in Europe (at least where I’ve been studying—Estonia, Italy, and Germany) are much more integrated, and researchers have more freedom to explore interdisciplinary ideas.

Daniel: Your work is located at the intersections of Postcolonial Studies, Translation, Comics Studies, and Linguistics. How important is this interdisciplinary scope to you, and how does it shape your approach and methods?

Nícollas: Exactly, so this goes hand in hand with the previous question as well. I do think that I am an explorer of interdisciplinary ideas. I love to break the lines and limits of academic approaches. Even though this sounds super cocky, I am not talking about ground-breaking ideas; it can be as simple as using travel writing theory to analyze a comic book. These small transgressions are for me the core of my research, and it is the thing that keeps my project going forward and taking very different directions every time I have the chance to give a lecture or exchange ideas with students or other researchers. I think that because of my very formal and traditional kind of training, I do see things in boxes. I do like the idea of being a researcher who is taking a few boxes from the library and putting them in some other room and reading the material inside these boxes in some other light. Even if I am under the impression that Europe has a more open mind space for interdisciplinary studies, I’ve encountered some researchers that were not very happy with me moving boxes; some people see it as a disrespect to their disciplines. However, the type of research I am trying to develop would not exist without moving some boxes here and there.

Daniel: What brought you to studying comics? And what made you choose Tintin as your case study?

Nícollas: That is a very old passion. So, as I’ve said before, I am from the deepest south of Brazil in the Pampas. It’s a very lovely region, and it has some big cities and some well-developed areas. I am not from any of those parts. I am originally from a very small village called Lavras do Sul, and I basically grew up in a rural area of Rio Grande do Sul. Growing up, I’ve had access to three small libraries: my granny’s, the municipal library, and the library at my school. My granny’s library was a joy; she left it all for me, a rare collection of Erico Verissimo (the subject of my dissertation and final PhD thesis); the municipal library had some nice historical documents and some nice books; and my school’s library, I would say, was very well equipped, but none of these libraries had comics (maybe some Turma da Mônica—this very popular Brazilian comic). When I was younger, me and my pals were obsessed with Pokemon and later Digimon (I was also very into Disney classics in the comics version), and it was very hard to access these magazines, books, and albums, so they’ve somehow become a kind of desire. The closest “big” city around would be Bagé, so when a relative or a friend would go to Bagé we would put together all our pocket money to buy a few comic magazines or books. We would exchange the comics within our group of friends, and we would also grow this group in order to have access to more material. I remember I was maybe 9 years old when the librarian (Lisete) showed me the new arrivals where Tintin e o Lago dos Tubarões was a reading option. If I’m not mistaken, some albums were published in Brazil during the 60’s and 70’s; these new arrivals were a donation the library got in the 2000’s. Now we have in Brazil some fancy publications from Companhia das Letras, with much better detail and curadorie. The thing is, I was immediately taken by that character that seemed to be from a small place, just like me, going around on incredible adventures around the whole world... He would talk about history, geography, humanity, and politics, and that was very impressive to me. Not all my friends were invested in Tintin as much as I was. Compared to the graphic details of the Pokemon and Digimon magazines at that time, Tintin would seem more childish and, of course, older, but for me it was the most incredible read I could have found. During my studies, I was led to believe that studying comics was not a good avenue to be taken; later in life, I’ve understood that I had been misled, and now I use this time as a postdoctoral researcher to explore this old love.

Daniel: You are specifically interested in linguistic and visual depictions of racism, including racist caricature. How difficult is it to address these issues in your research? How relevant are your findings academically but also outside of academia?

Nícollas: Literature, linguistics, translation, and many other subareas are, in Brazil, all part of something called Letras (letters), so they are all separate areas from this one same thing. Here in Europe, I see that in most cases, translation studies are very much grounded in the area of linguistics studies. Since my background in linguistics is more limited than my background in literary studies, I do believe I have a harder time explaining DEPICTNESS to people that can only, or primarily, see translation through the linguistics scope. DEPICTNESS departs from verbal and visual selections; while the imagery is obvious and undeniably racist, the verbal selection demands a higher level of attention from my part, of course. It was not very difficult to establish, academically, that the imagery selection was racist, even if, when it comes to comparison to other characters and authors, there are different levels of what is considered racist in a visual regard. The verbal selection is the most challenging part of my research so far because I am dealing with a very specific notion that was created within psychology studies and later applied to linguistics studies. I’m talking about the idea of eye dialect, which is not a dialect but the attempt of portraying an accent, and I do feel that I have a harder time explaining that to linguists. So I would say that explaining, academically, how racist the use of language can be is a challenge I am facing step by step. But even if the imagery selection is more obvious to understand, there are so many possible things to discuss regarding the depiction of people of color in comics and caricature settings. Defining characteristics or racialized traces as racism instead of a funny punch can raise new problematics! You have the intent of the artist, the times when things were written, the editorial decisions, and even bigger questions, as, for example, "Why is this considered funny?”. I would say that while my project may sound very niched, it has a very amplified possible future. The methods I'm developing today can be applied for many other future analyses of different genres, as advertisement campaigns, for example.

Daniel: Have you been able to connect and network with other researchers and/or institutions since you began your fellowship? And what are your plans for the future? Any upcoming fellowships? Any new projects.

Nícollas: Since my PhD, when I started to explore research possibilities in Europe, I’ve developed such a great hub of intellectuals that were generous enough to exchange knowledge with me and help me to grow my projects and develop my research ideas in several ways. DEPICTNESS was born in Tallinn University when I was finishing my PhD, and now DEPICTNESS is coming back home for a while. When I’ve finished my Bollenbeck Fellowship, I am taking a position as a postdoctoral researcher within the MSCA fellowships program at Tallinn University. I will be there for two years, expanding my project, getting new training, learning more about Estonian language and culture, and, of course, making my curriculum stronger for future applications. Who knows, I might find my way back to Siegen soon enough.

 
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