Narrative, Aesthetic, and Cartographic Space around 1850: The Three Palestines of Charles William Meredith van de Velde.

• Applicant: Dr. Jutta Faehndrich
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History ; History of Science
• Term: from 2015 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 281029285

The explorative unveiling of the earth in the 19th century called for a translation of these foreign worlds into a form that western audiences could digest. My research project asks how images of foreign space and place were created and communicated in this early globalization process. IMAGE, in this context, first and foremost refers to any kind of representation, with a focus on its FORM. In my previous research, it has become apparent that the purport of the European depictions of foreign lands not only depended on their author, their cultural background and the region depicted, but to a great extent also on the form the foreign expe­rien­ce was represented in. This can be studied paradigmatically in the case of the Dutch explorer C. W. M. van de Velde who published his Palestine travels in the mid-19th century in a travel narrative, a map, and a lithography album alike. The Palestine images presented in each of these deviate greatly, at times even contradicting each other. This work by the same author, based on the same travels and representing the same region in three different forms, offers the chance to identify and reconstruct the inherent logic of these three: image, in the narrower sense of the word as pictorial representation; text; and map. What does only the map show, what do the lithographs conceal, what is stressed in the narrative? What reference structures are there between them? And what does this tell us about the way that western depictions of foreign regions were constructed in the 19th century, in this case the Holy Land, heavy with meaning? Well into the 20th century, besides counting, measuring and describing verbally, drawing and, later, photographing was a valid method used by Europeans to appropriate and depict foreign lands. Nevertheless there is no comprehensive scholarly approach that discusses the pictorial, narrative, and cartographic depiction of space and place on an equal footing. This might be due to the fact that it is rare for a single author to produce all three of these representative forms. The singular material at hand is thus ideally suited for a foundational study that aims at understanding the role of representative forms in unveiling the earth in the 19th century. Ultimately we want to develop a model of how space and place are being represented. This can also further our understanding of the western appropriation of the world, and may subsequently be applied to other regions equally fraught with meaning.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants