Hey Guys!
Writing to you all from the Great Lakes Ottomanist Conference here at Guelph!
These last few weeks have been a real scramble to get the chapbooks project finished. We have planned to have it completed before the project deadline of April 9th by around Tuesday, April 2nd. This weekend I have been quite busy at the Conference, however I have managed to edit a few more images.
There are two more chapbooks which I have scanned and wish to edit, however they need to be added to the google-drive to make it accessible to my Laptop, however, due to the fact that this weekend is Easter and the archives are closed, these documents have not been made available to me online. Going with my theme of Scottish perceptions of foreigners, one of the documents is of real interest to me as it is a(n inaccurate) re-telling of the life of the Prophet Muhammed, and I cannot wait to edit it and post this up online. It was also 24 pages, and so I just wanted to have it all scanned in one sitting, but not giving myself the time to edit each page individually.
I am looking forward to taking the time to upload all the times along with their respective Metadata, but part of me is a little scared because it is new territory! I need to have a glass of wine and bite the bullet….. (or maybe two glasses of wine).
I also have been talking with my American History Professor Dr. Nance, and last semester she introduced me to the idea of American and Anglo-Saxon (often European) conceptualisations of others- particularly those who they colonise, or discriminate against believing that their “race” was superior to others- as children. One of the poems I scanned is called “The Negro Boy” and it is about a child in Africa living a simple life and then being taken as a slave. Often Westerners would anthropromorphise “less developed” others as children, or beautiful young women- someone unthreatening and able to be manipulated and “taken care of” by the “sophisticated” and “civilised” Westerner.
For our respective pages, the Chapbooks will be presented not as a paper, but rather as a story. In addition to other depictions of foreigners I scanned which portray them as such non-threatening, dependent figures, I will tell a story with these chapbooks and bring up this idea that perhaps “The Negro Boy” is a metaphor for the African continent and those who have been taken up in the slave trade: often it is easier to sympathise with children then with a grown adult- or with the faceless millions caught up in a cultural genocide.
What do you all think??
nminiacidigitalhumanities 