One of the aspects of Orientalism that
Edward Said seems to find most interesting is the question of how it
establishes its own authority. An almost ephemeral body of self-fueling
“knowledge,” manifested in forms as diverse as travel accounts, poetry,
fiction, visual art, translation, military accounts and scientific ideas,
Orientalism was, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, often
created, sustained, and adhered to by people who had no or very limited
encounters with the “actual” “Orient.” Despite
this fact, Orientalism had to at least appear to be a credible and legitimate
basis for study as well as for material (often violent) action. Said is
especially concerned with the connected but separate ideas of authority and
authoritativeness behind this phenomenon, writing that “each writer on the
Orient (and this is true even of Homer) assumes some Oriental precedent, some
previous knowledge of the Orient, to which he refers and on which he relies.”[1]
It is because of this pre-existing accumulation of Western impressions of the
Orient that French and English colonial writers, politicians, and speechmakers
“could say what they said, in the way they did, because a still earlier
tradition of Orientalism than the nineteenth-century one provided them with a
vocabulary, imagery, rhetoric, and figures with which to say it.”[2]
The authority of these ideas building upon each other was essentially given;
Said even explicitly likens this effect to that of “a library or archive of
information commonly, and, in some of its aspects, unanimously held.”[3]
This metaphor is somewhat discomfiting, and
it raises questions of how LIS professionals establish authority in their
approaches in everything from collection development to their positionality in
the communities they serve. In the context of contemporary libraries and
archives—and, more specifically, the body of literature produced by and about
them—questions of authority and legitimacy might be most relevant when it comes
to the acquisition, appraisal, and treatment of materials taken from or
representing marginalized peoples in a colonial context. Library and
Information Science as a professional and academic field often relies, whether
explicitly or tacitly, on precedent—new subject headings in classification systems
are approved only when literary warrant is established, official institutional
statements are composed with an eye towards echoing other institutional
statements, and professional standards govern expectations in many corners of
library life. Many of the authors from this week’s readings express concern
that the basis for authority for many of these decisions often goes unquestioned.
James David Hudson, for instance, is
interested in the foundations of the frameworks of diversity, “representation,”
and “information gaps” that predominate in the LIS world and that reify
already-dominant forms of colonialism and racialization. Hudson pushes back
against the institutional reluctance of libraries and archives to see
themselves as active and harmful participants in empire, writing:
Where empire has drawn its power from
swords and railroads, from pipelines, pesticides, and drone strikes, it has
also drawn its power from cultural practice—that is, from the production and
circulation, reproduction and recirculation, of texts, narratives, languages,
and imagery, both literally and figuratively.[4]
Much like Orientalism, these narratives of
racial difference have been granted the function of “knowledge” and have fueled
ostensibly “benevolent” interventions, both domestic and international, from a both
demographically and essentially white and middle-class profession into subject
communities.
South African writers Johannes Britz and Peter
Lor, writing about archives and digital documentation throughout Africa, express
similar concerns about the power structures behind apparently well-intentioned
digitization efforts, asking: “Who selects the material to be digitized? Whose
priorities and interests determines the selection? Who are the beneficiaries?”[5]
Like Hudson, they question the very frameworks in which LIS professionals
usually operate and make decisions, noting the principles of information rights
for “the world community” as set forth by UNESCO and similar organizations fail
to account for communal rights as well as individual ones.
J.J. Ghaddar also notes some weaknesses of
the “legalistic, universalistic human-rights framework”[6] that
archivists have often used to establish their authority when dealing with
artifacts and materials pertaining to indigenous peoples. Despite increasingly
vocal rhetoric about representation and culpability, Ghaddar describes the
systematic disenfranchisement (“spectralization”) of indigenous people who have
little actual control over whether important and often highly sensitive and
personal material is preserved, how it is displayed, and whether or not it can
be held back. Chillingly, but perceptively, Ghaddar writes: “Colonizers love
archives, and nothing is more common in the colonial world than the
enthusiastic, if rather callous, figure of the academic or artist going about
the self-appointed task of preserving – not Indigenous peoples themselves, but
a record of them.”[7]
Michelle Caswell, meanwhile, highlights a
specific case that illustrates some of the possible complications involved in
determining authority from an outside perspective: the case of millions of
Baath Party documents seized during the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Under the kind
of reductive, liberal diversity framework criticized by Hudson and others,
Kanan Makiya, as an Iraqi, might be considered qualified to make authoritative
decisions about the fate of these materials regardless of his affiliation with
Bush and the invasion (Makiya, who evokes Said’s descriptions of the
elusiveness of Orientalist “expertise,” was one of the originators of the perverse
idea that U.S. soldiers would be greeted in Iraq with “sweets and flowers”). If
Makiya, in hindsight, seems like an obviously wrong choice for control over the
Baath Party documents, however, determining the “correct” choice of
repository—and whether any outside voice on the question could be useful at
all—is far more complex. As Caswell writes, there are a number of subtly
differing or directly opposed institutions, organizations, and ideas at
play—the SAA and ACA, conservative pockets of academia, UNESCO policy and the
Hague Convention, frameworks of universal or national approaches to handling
cultural records. The importance of the result, however, is more clear: “In the
case of the Baath Party records, the fight is not just about the physical
custody of the records (as important as that is), but rather, who gets the
power to determine what will constitute the national archive of Iraq…Behind
each of these questions
resides competing claims of authority.”[8]
resides competing claims of authority.”[8]
In all of the vastly differing scenarios
in libraries and archives described by the authors above, there seem to be
actors willing to assume authority no matter how contentious or elusive the
basis for it. As Said wrote,
There is nothing mysterious or natural
about authority. It is formed, irradiated, disseminated; it is instrumental, it
is persuasive; it has status, it establishes canons of taste and value; it is
virtually indistinguishable from certain ideas it dignifies as true, and from
traditions, perceptions, and judgments it forms, transmits, reproduces. Above
all authority can, indeed must, be analyzed.[9]
Although there is, of course, much left to
explore in this discussion, it seems promising that ideas of authority in LIS
based on hitherto underexamined professional principles and frameworks are more
frequently becoming subjects of critical thought.
[1] Said,
Edward W. Orientalism. 25th Anniversary Edition. New York: Vintage
Books, 2003, 20.
[2] Said,
Orientalism, 41.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Hudson,
David J. “On Dark Continents and Digital Divides: Information Inequality and
the Reproduction of Racial Otherness in Library and Information Studies.” Journal
of Information Ethics 25, no. 1 (2016), 65, 66.
[5] Britz,
Johannes, and Peter Lor. “A Moral Reflection on the Digitization of Africa’s
Documentary Heritage.” IFLA Journal 30, no. 3 (2004):
216–23. https://doi.org/10.1177/034003520403000304,
217.
[6] Ghaddar,
J J. “The Spectre in the Archive: Truth, Reconciliation, and Indigenous
Archival Memory.” Archivaria 82 (2016), 7.
[7] Ghaddar,
“The Spectre in the Archive,” 23.
[8] Caswell,
Michelle. “‘Thank You Very Much, Now Give Them Back’: Cultural Property and the
Fight over the Iraqi Baath Party Records.” The American Archivist 74,
no. 1 (2011). https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.74.1.4185u8574mu84041,
220.
[9]
Said, Orientalism, 19, 20.
