In a 2005 speech to the Society of American Archivists (SAA), Randall C. Jimerson called on archivists to “commit themselves to ensuring that our records document the lives and experiences of all groups in society, not just the political, economic, social, and intellectual elite” and noted a growing effort in the archival field to collect materials by and about groups historically marginalized and oppressed based on gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, and other vectors of difference [1]. Such calls to diversify collections have become common in archives, libraries, museums, and other cultural heritage sites in recent decades and are often framed within the discourse of promoting diversity and inclusion. However, scholars and practitioners across a variety of disciplines have also warned against simplistic approaches to such efforts, highlighting the ways that sites of knowledge production like archives and libraries have historically been used to bolster and enact Western imperialist and settler-colonial projects. Drawing on ideas put forth by Edward W. Said, David J. Hudson, and J.J. Ghaddar, I argue that, in order to serve truly liberatory aims, collecting efforts to fill silences and gaps in information institutions must be guided by explicitly anti-racist and anti-imperialist values and actions, in addition to the values of diversity, inclusion, and pluralism traditionally invoked in LIS.
Control of Knowledge
There is a tendency in the West to treat the production, collection, dissemination, and use of information and knowledge as an unqualified source of empowerment and good. In its most recent strategic plan, for example, the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) states its “belief that people, communities and organisations need universal and equitable access to information, ideas and works of imagination for their social, educational, cultural, democratic and economic well-being” [2]. The American Library Association (ALA) similarly asserts in its strategic plan that “[l]ibraries play a crucial role in empowering diverse populations for full participation in a democratic society” [3]. The Society of American Archivists (SAA) outlines in its Core Values Statement and Code of Ethics that the “values shared and embraced by archivists” enable them to ensure that archives “benefit all members of the community” and serve a “public good” [4]. Such value statements align with Hudson’s assessment that the LIS fields generally portray information production and access as something that inherently “enables socioeconomic development and political agency” and that will inevitably produce a more “equitable global landscape” [5].
There is a tendency in the West to treat the production, collection, dissemination, and use of information and knowledge as an unqualified source of empowerment and good. In its most recent strategic plan, for example, the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) states its “belief that people, communities and organisations need universal and equitable access to information, ideas and works of imagination for their social, educational, cultural, democratic and economic well-being” [2]. The American Library Association (ALA) similarly asserts in its strategic plan that “[l]ibraries play a crucial role in empowering diverse populations for full participation in a democratic society” [3]. The Society of American Archivists (SAA) outlines in its Core Values Statement and Code of Ethics that the “values shared and embraced by archivists” enable them to ensure that archives “benefit all members of the community” and serve a “public good” [4]. Such value statements align with Hudson’s assessment that the LIS fields generally portray information production and access as something that inherently “enables socioeconomic development and political agency” and that will inevitably produce a more “equitable global landscape” [5].
Such views, however, often fail to account for the ways that the production of knowledge and culture is shot through with societal power structures and can be used for ill just as easily as for good. Said, for example, outlines how complex ecosystems of knowledge about “the Orient” were (and are) produced in the West to constitute a subject “suitable for study in the academy, for display in the museum, for reconstruction in the colonial office, for theoretical illustration in anthropological, biological, linguistic, racial, and historical theses about mankind and the universe” [6] and that such “Western techniques of representation” [7] were integral to the project of “dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” [8]. Drawing on the work of Said and others, Hudson similarly asserts that “Western colonialism has never been a purely military or economic undertaking” and “that 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” [9]. He goes on to outline how such “colonial knowledge production” serves to limit and control how “communities under the gaze of conquest” can “be known and named” [10].
Representation and Recognition
Ghaddar, writing about the relationship between Indigenous groups and Canadian government archives, notes that the “contested nature of the archive in (neo)colonial settings” represents a set of “complex and seemingly irresolvable dilemmas” around memory, forgetting, control, recognition, reparations, and justice [11]. In particular, she demonstrates the ways that to be represented and recognized within mainstream archives or other memory institutions can mean ceding control of one’s history and culture, even while facilitating certain forms of justice. She tells us that “power differentials lead to a representational dynamic whereby settler societies are placed in a position to affirm or negate how Indigenous people represent and identify themselves” [12]. As such, she notes that she is not alone in calling on the field to “move beyond notions of archival pluralism and a liberal politics of recognition,” in which materials of colonized and/or oppressed communities and cultures are often assimilated into dominant modes of categorization, description, preservation, access, and use [13].
With all this in mind, we can see how collecting initiatives that aim to include and represent more materials from traditionally marginalized or oppressed groups in archives and libraries bring up a host of complex considerations. They are not inherently empowering, though they absolutely can be. To be so, efforts to diversify collections must be accompanied by commitments to facilitating self-determination and self-representation, as well as explicitly interrogating and dismantling processes, practices, standards, and infrastructures that uphold racist, imperialist, and oppressive systems.
[1] Jimerson, Randall C. “Embracing the Power of Archives.” New Orleans: Society of American Archivists, 2005. https://www2.archivists.org/history/leaders/randall-c-jimerson/embracing-the-power-of-archives.
[2] “IFLA STRATEGY 2019 - 2024.” International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions. Accessed January 26, 2020. https://www.ifla.org/strategy.
[3]“American Library Association Strategic Directions.” American Library Association. Accessed January 25, 2020. http://www.ala.org/aboutala/sites/ala.org.aboutala/files/content/governance/StrategicPlan/Strategic%20Directions%202017_Update.pdf.
[4] “SAA Core Values Statement and Code of Ethics.” Society of American Archivists. Accessed January 20, 2020. https://www2.archivists.org/statements/saa-core-values-statement-and-code-of-ethics.
[5] 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 (Spring 2016): 64.
[6] Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1978, 6.
[7] Said, Orientalism, 22.
[8] Said, 3.
[9] Hudson, “Information Inequality and the Reproduction of Racial Otherness,” 65-66.
[10] Hudson, 66.
[11] Ghaddar, J.J. “The Spectre in the Archive: Truth, Reconciliation, and Indigenous Archival Memory.” Archivaria 82 (Fall 2016): 5.
[12] Ghaddar, “The Spectre in the Archive,” 15.
[13] Ghaddar, 7.
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