Through the Eyes of a Child: The Portrayal of South Africa’s Apartheid in Children’s Cinema

August 1977: a thirteen-year-old African American girl stands at the gate of an airport holding a bouquet of flowers. Standing with her mother, she is anxiously awaiting the arrival of Mahree, a South African school girl her family has offered to host for the upcoming academic school year. The young African American girl, Piper, is excited to meet this South African girl, hoping their African heritage will bond them together. The passengers all exit the plane, and Piper starts to worry that they are at the wrong gate because neither Piper nor her mom spotted a fourteen-year-old South African girl leaving the plane. In hopes of locating Mahree, Piper calls out Marhee’s name. Suddenly, a young white girl turns around and says “I’m Mahree Bok.” Both parties are stunned; Piper pictured Mahree to be black South African, while Mahree pictured her host family to be white. The scene described above is a scene from the children’s movie, The Color of Friendship, released in 2000. From the outside, this scene seems to be an innocent interaction-- two young girls are meeting for the first time. However, put in the context of the South African apartheid, one learns that this scene carries certain historical truths that warrant a deeper understanding. Its 1977 and South Africa is still entrenched in a strict and oppressive system of racial segregation. When meeting her African American host family for the first time, is it safe to assume that Mahree’s shock comes from a set of apartheid cultural ideologies that believe blacks to be inferior to whites. Directed by Kevin Hook, The Color of Friendship is a children’s TV film that seeks to address issues of race in the context of the South African apartheid. The Color of Friendship raises important questions about the genre of children’s film, memory, and history when analyzed through a historic lens. How can children’s film be used to address important but difficult themes of discrimination and race? Can directors use children’s film to accurately portray historical injustices? These series of questions can be answered through a deep historical analysis of the film, The Color of Friendship. The film’s representation of South African race relations through the portrayal of Steven Biko’s death and Afrikaner ideologies illustrates that difficult historical themes can be accurately portrayed through children’s cinema

Drawing Survivance, Embodying Survivance: The Work of Contemporary Ledger Artists Dwayne Wilcox and Monte Yellow Bird Sr.

This paper examines the work of two contemporary Indigenous Artists, Dwayne Wilcox and Monte Yellow Bird Sr. using Gerald Vizenor\u27s theory of suriviance. I first discuss survivance, drawing on the ways both Vizenor and other scholars have used survivance in their academic works. I then move on to situating ledger art in its historical context, analyzing the ways ledger art has been historically examined and written about. The last two sections of this paper are dedicated to highlighting the ways in which two contemporary Indigenous artists, Dwayne Wilcox and Monte Yellow Bird Sr., have embodied Vizenor’s theory of survivance in their artwork. By analyzing the works of artists Dwayne Wilcox and Monte Yellow Bird Sr. through the lens of survivance, I propose that examining ledger art through survivance gives scholars a nuanced way of understanding both nineteenth century and contemporary ledger art

Face to Face, Carl Beam and Andy Warhol

Keira Koch ’19 examines representations of indigenous cultures in prints and photographs by American artist Andy Warhol and First Nations artist Carl Beam. In this comparative study, Koch considers the topic of appropriation and re-appropriation of Native imagery. Warhol, as a non-Indigenous artist, is using this imagery to highlight the dominant narrative of the American West. Beam, however, incorporates photographs of Native subjects and traditional narratives by re-appropriating those images to tell a distinctly Native narrative. This exhibition invites discussion about the role of contemporary indigenous artists and how indigenous identities are expressed in contemporary art. This exhibition intersects with the issues and methodologies studied in Koch’s individualized major titled “Indigenous Cultures, History and Identity.” In addition to studying aboriginal arts and indigenous communities in Australia during her Junior year, Koch serves as the Co-President of Students for Indigenous Awareness at Gettysburg College.https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/artcatalogs/1027/thumbnail.jp

Women and World War II at Gettysburg College

An examination of the women attending Gettysburg College during World War II. This project examined what the women did and experienced during the World War II, along with analyzing campus culture and life

Finding Meaning in Land

This post is the final one of a series featuring behind-the-scenes dispatches from our Pohanka Interns on the front lines of history this summer as interpreters, archivists, and preservationists. See here for the introduction to the series. This summer, I had the privilege of interning at the Civil War Defenses of Washington, in Washington D.C. The Civil War Defenses of Washington is unique within the National Park system. Unlike most historical and military parks, the Civil War Defenses of Washington has no central location or site. Rather, the park is made up of nineteen different fort sites used in defense of the city of Washington during the Civil War. What also makes this park unique is its relationship with the land and local terrain. Most of these forts were constructed through the strategic manipulation of land. Civil War soldiers molded the land to build earthen trenches, mounds, and hills. At many of the forts, these earthworks are the only structures that link these places to the Civil War. [excerpt

Flora and Fauna in East Asian Art

Flora and Fauna in East Asian Art is the fourth annual exhibition curated by students enrolled in the Art History Methods course. This exhibition highlights the academic achievements of six student curators: Samantha Frisoli ’18, Daniella Snyder ’18, Gabriella Bucci ’19, Melissa Casale ’19, Keira Koch ’19, and Paige Deschapelles ’20. The selection of artworks in this exhibition considers how East Asian artists portrayed similar subjects of flora and fauna in different media including painting, prints, embroidery, jade, and porcelain. This exhibition intends to reveal the hidden meanings behind various representations of flora and fauna in East Asian art by examining the iconography, cultural context, aesthetic and function of each object.https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/artcatalogs/1025/thumbnail.jp

#dssf16: Library-led Digital Scholarship for Undergraduates at a Small Institution

In the summer of 2016, Gettysburg College’s Musselman Library piloted the Digital Scholarship Summer Fellowship (DSSF), a library-led, student-centered introduction to digital scholarship. The Fellowship, a 10-week, paid, summer program for rising sophomores and juniors, is programmatic, based on a curriculum designed to introduce the student fellows to digital tools, project management, documentation, and the philosophy behind digital scholarship. The Fellowship aimed to create a digital scholarship community of practice at Gettysburg College, collaborating with educational technologists and faculty engaged in digital scholarship to support the needs of the first cohort; in addition, the Fellowship supported the digital scholarship activities of students participating in other summer research programs. R.C. Miessler, coordinator of the Digital Scholarship Summer Fellowship, will discuss the creation, development, implementation, and future of the program. The student fellows, Keira Koch, Julia Wall, and Lauren White, will reflect on their experience and present the digital projects they created

#dssf16+1: Library-led Digital Scholarship for Undergraduates at a Small Institution

Librarian R.C. Miessler and Digital Scholarship Fellows Keira Koch, Julia Wall, and Lauren White were invited to speak to at the Pennsylvania Library Association, College and Research Division, Spring Conference about their experiences with the first cohort of the Digital Scholarship Summer Fellowship

“Hello Coed!” A 1950s History of Gettysburg College Women

Hello Coed! A 1950s History of Gettysburg College Women is an interactive website that provides a snapshot view of what life was like academically and socially for women at Gettysburg College during the 1950s. On this website, you can explore life on campus through an interactive map, listen to a 1952 recording of the Gettysburg College Choir, learn more about the rules and regulations women had to follow, and much more

Properties of hadronic final states in diffractive deep inelastic ep scattering at DESY HERA

Characteristics of the hadronic final state of diffractive deep inelastic scattering events ep-->eXp were studied in the kinematic range 4g states at the parton level