Camille Anderson and Dr. Cindy Brewer, German
This project proposed an analysis of a series of children’s books published in 1904 by a mission in Berlin. The project’s depth and uniqueness were based on the reading of both the text and the accompanying pictures. I was able to participate in the collection of the documents, translate each book in the series of six, and write and present a research paper outlining a post-colonial art historical approach to the volume specifically about India.
The texts were collected by myself and my mentor in the Fall of 2008. I was able to accompany my mentor to Berlin while on Study Abroad with her in Vienna, Austria. It was an extremely valuable experience to learn how manuscripts are collected; especially in foreign libraries. The Berlin City Library was extremely easy to work with. I thoroughly appreciated going with a mentor who was extremely experienced and willing to teach me the proper way to go about finding and collecting texts. The copies of the picture books I am working with are scanned.
The translation of the documents proved more difficult than I originally anticipated. I was enrolled in German 202 at the time of translation but it still proved extremely difficult simply to understand the character’s used in the texts. Once I had figured out the letter of the text it was difficult to find quite a few of the words in modern German dictionaries. I actually stumbled upon an old German dictionary in a used book shop and it made my translation a lot easier. Once I had translated one book the remaining five were less intensive to understand. One of the most surprising things for me about the translation was just how blatantly racist these children’s books were. Obviously today’s cultural context is totally incomparable but it was difficult to separate my cultural context from the author’s at first.
This presented another avenue of research for me. I needed to understand their cultural context before I felt like I could productively analyze text and picture. Once I started a more in-depth research of German imperialist attitudes I felt better prepared to analyze the books.
After discussing Post-Colonial theory with several of my professor’s in the Art History department I decided that would be the best methodology to employ. I intend to write my senior thesis on these picture books and thus will present said thesis in April of 2011. The published scholarly work on this particular avenue is scarce and I hope to publish my findings and continue to search for other children’s picture books published during Germany’s colonial period in order to support and widen my research.