Vance Johnson and Dr. Rob McFarland, German and Slavic
During the last years of the 19th Century German colonialism was reaching a powerful peak. They were conquering nations around the world, most specifically and most concentrated in Africa. In these lands the German Colonizers positioned themselves to be protectors and cultural benefactors to the inhabitants of the African Colonies. During these years of German colonialism, colonizers spread out into lands across the west-central African Coast to develop them as extensions of the Western European Empire. This created a new, and numerically significant, variant of German culture that was somewhere between the “savagery” of the natives and the “civilization” of the German conquerors. This “median” culture began to produce its own literature thus forming its own culture that was, in turn, sent back to and published in the Fatherland.
It is from this point that my ORCA grant picks up and begins. Over the course of this year I have been able to go to another country and perform important research in the field of German colonialism—more specifically colonialist literature written by female German authors. The research that I have done has developed and grown into something slightly different than I first anticipated, but I feel like as I have learned and done research that the act of research has helped mold me and my topic into some different, something better.
My work was originally intended to analyze and write about German Inner-colonization at this time. As I set out into the archives of Berlin it was my original goal to find original texts dealing with the “colonization” of inner spaces inside the German Empire. This proved to be problematic in some ways and very beneficial in others. It was the process of looking in these texts and the archives surrounding them that I was able to discover something very worthwhile in German Colonialism.
When I first arrived in Berlin with my mentor, we worked together finding texts and working to formulate ideas and theses in the area of Inner-Colonization. He taught me how to navigate the archives and find the things I needed without getting bogged down in the things that I didn’t. During this time I was also asked to find, and copy texts that might be of interest to the German Department’s SOPHIE project. I took this in stride and set about to find the texts that I needed to help further study and research in the field of German Inner-Colonization.
As I found text relating to Inner Colonization, I found other texts, almost by accident, that featured women authors writing poetry and other texts about German Colonialism abroad. As these texts were foreign to me, I asked my mentor, Dr. Rob McFarland, if he had ever heard of women colonialist authors who wrote poetry. He told me that he had heard of women colonialist authors, but that he had never heard of them writing poetry. When I told him of my discovery, he explained to me the remarkable nature of my find. I became very excited and my motivation for this new field of research increased.
I spent the next several days in the archives trying to find anything that I could about these particular women authors and the things that they wrote. What I found in the National Archives of Berlin was certainly something of value. I not only found women colonialist poets but I also had found women authors who wrote about native African poets and published some of the native Africans’ work. This was exciting and I soon began to realize that this was something that I needed to spend my time working on, for in some respects I had found an academic “diamond in the rough.”
The next several weeks in Berlin hurried by as I primarily focused on getting enough information to be able to write something on this particular facet of the German Colonialist literary movement. There was a great deal of excitement associated with it because I felt like, in many ways, I was “blazing a new trail” in this “literary frontier.” I spent time working with Professor McFarland on formulating thesis ideas, cataloging my collected findings (both about Inner and External Colonization), and enjoying the German culture and atmosphere of Berlin all in the hopes of helping my findings find a place in a scholarly publication.
I returned home and began the long process of writing the paper which would help me express my ideas and begin to bring this particularly specific, but nonetheless important academic area to light. I began writing and have to this point completed many different drafts and forms of the paper. I have also had the privilege of working with more than one mentor in the process of editing the paper in preparation for publication.
The other professor, with whom I worked, gave me new and fresh perspectives on the topic I was working on. Working in conjunction with Professor McFarland, Professor Michelle James helped me in this process. They have helped me focus my efforts and have both helped me to give my paper a solid theoretical background on which to stand. Draft after draft has led me to the point where my paper currently is; taking the final steps towards publication and possibly presentation in an academic setting. It is here that my project now stands and I plan to continue to make progress to ensure that this information receives the interest and attention that it deserves.
The resources provided to me by the ORCA group have given a way for me to do this research in a way that would not have been possible otherwise. I feel like the resources I obtained have helped me in making a true academic discovery that will shed some light on a topic that has, as yet, received little academic attention in the world of German literary scholarship. Without the generosity of the ORCA office, this research would have been nearly impossible; as the books and other resources are very obscure and some are only to be found places like the national archives in Berlin. The ORCA funding helped make those resources accessible to me and have given me a way, as an undergraduate student, to make my mark on the academic world. This has been a rare and wonderful opportunity.