Towards the Slow Library | Jeremy Abbott

Acceleration is essential to the neoliberal capitalist project, a project that has been pulling libraries into its wake for decades, and its accelerative drive has dehumanizing and deleterious implications for library workers. David Harvey emphasizes this desire for speed when describing the incorporation of information technologies into neoliberalism: “These technologies have compressed the rising density of market transactions in both space and time. They have produced a particularly intensive burst of what I have elsewhere called 'time-space compression.’ The greater the geographical range (hence the emphasis on 'globalization') and the shorter the term of market contracts the better.”¹ More succinctly, this is what Karen Nicholson refers to as “fast capitalism.”² I emphasize acceleration rather than the more frequently asserted neoliberal value of efficiency partially because of the rhetorical force it lends to my proposed remedy, but also because I see efficiency and its attendant process of metricity as building blocks of the greater neoliberal project of ever-increasing velocity. “Acceleration” by itself is not a process, but a value that has harnessed efficiency and metricity. I propose attacking those processes by erecting a new value in acceleration's place: slowness. This conception of slowness builds on David James Hudson’s resistance to the white-encoded practicality of the profession, embraces the emphasis on a feminist ethic of care and labor solidarity encouraged by the Great Lakes Feminist Geography Collective’s arguments for slow scholarship, and seeks to travel alongside the careful attention to process and collaboration that Kimberly Christen and Jane Anderson call for with their advocacy for a slow archives movement.³ Going slow provides an opportunity to remedy and hopefully prevent the difference-erasing smoothing that efficiency encourages. It opens up space to imagine alternatives to the neoliberal project, to imagine care-based modes of working, to make space for failure and experimentation. While the underlying financial roots of the neoliberal capitalism may be beyond the ability of libraries to solve,⁴ we can resist speed: we can claim slowness as a virtue.

Metricity is not measurement per se, rather it is an orientation of practice, a fixation on measurement as a means of increasing production. This conception of metricity follows after the “metricity” Martha Nussbaum introduced in her discussion of the “science of measurement.” Nussbaum suggests that the conclusion of that science is that “choices and chosen actions have value not in themselves, but only as instrumental means to the good consequences that they produce….the idea that there is some one value that is the point of rational choice, in every case, to maximise.”⁵ Metricity relies upon constant atomization and increase of measurable attributes to pursue that maximization. Each new split of the basic library process of shelving, for instance, into books per book truck, paperback versus library binding, time per shelf etc. provides another jagged edge in a formerly smooth process for neoliberalism to hook onto and refashion to fit into just-in-time organizational principles or a new performance indicator by which to measure salary or grant funding. Metricity demands norms and means on which to base performance evaluations. Not only does this create more work of measurement for LIS workers, but as increased data collection arrives at a mean, the metricity impulse then seeks to erase difference in the name of efficiency.

One of efficiency’s most damaging fellow travelers is exclusion. Processes of optimization and streamlining inevitably metastasize from analysis of process to analysis of person. This iteration of efficiency, as envisioned within the neoliberal project and ingested willingly or not by libraries, relies on exclusion of undesirable bodies to achieve its ends. An idealized middle-class, white, able-bodied patron and worker becomes the default around which metrics assert themselves. As Amelia Gibson, Kristen Bowen, and Dana Hanson very recently pointed out: “much of the current practice of librarianship and information science...in the U.S. is also embedded with and within neoliberal social and political institutions and norms...that often tie library and information access to selective membership and ‘productive citizenship’..., and marginalize disabled people who are considered ‘unproductive.’”⁶ Neoliberalism engineers its notion of efficiency around the people it values, which tend to be the people that produce the most value for it: “Under neoliberalism, ‘tax paying citizens,’ ‘dues paying members,’ and ‘loyal customers’ all claim rights and privileges denied to non-contributing ‘non-citizens’ or outsiders. This excludes disabled people, people experiencing homelessness, teens, nonresidents, and anyone else who has not sufficiently ‘paid their dues.’”⁷

Slowness, on the other hand, values and even seeks joy in difference. As the scholars of the Great Lakes Feminist Geography Collective argue in their case for a slow scholarship: “Slow scholarship can grapple with intersectional questions of social reproduction, of racialized, ableist, and class hierarchies imagined collectively; it has political potential.”⁸ Slowness has the time to unravel, rather than compound. As Hudson puts it: “It is difficult to undertake the slow, messy practice of unpacking foundational assumptions -- and their material implication in the dispossessive violence of existing social, political, and economic arrangements -- where one’s environment is governed by expectations of efficiency, directness, brevity, speed.”⁹ Slowness provides space to reckon with and welcome in difference, among patrons, workers, and collected materials.

Slowness allows for experiment and failure, which in turn leads to perhaps more meaningful forms of growth than occur under neoliberalism. Neoliberalism’s metric and market trend chasing tendencies encourage libraries to pursue proven “winners” and recently trending technologies. This leads to stultified innovation on the one hand and potential incoherence on the other. The slow library, however, does not chase the patron, it stands ready to be used. As Cathy Eisenhower and Dolsy Smith put it: “it is difficult to make more efficient the work of someone whose job it is...to stand and wait.”¹⁰ When liberated from efficiency, slowness provides time to experiment, as well as the capacity for absorbing and appreciating failure. Invoking Judith Halberstam’s ‘The Queer Art of Failure,’¹¹ the Great Lakes Collective suggests: “What if we were to follow Halberstam’s...lead and celebrate failure and its companion in neoliberal times - slowness - as essential components of good scholarship?”¹² Making space for failure and experimentation in library spaces would open up meaningful, organic avenues of innovation, as well as push back on neoliberalism’s narrow models of success.

Slowness also opens up a space where neoliberalism’s power flows lose their gravity, allowing for the imagining of a more caring world. The Great Lakes Collective, citing Luke Martell, notes that “...the ‘slow’ in slow scholarship is not just about time, but about structures of power and inequality. This means that slow scholarship cannot just be about making individual lives better, but must also be about re-making the university. Our call for slow scholarship is therefore about cultivating caring academic cultures and processes.”¹³ And crucial to building caring processes is careful attention to burden shifting. Concurrent with the neoliberal globalization impulse that Harvey alludes to is an outsourcing impulse, which further incentivizes atomization of work such that segments of a given process can be performed outside the library space by workers in more vulnerable labor markets. Slowness for some cannot come at the expense of acceleration for others. The cultivation of communities of care within library spaces cannot be blinkered to external conditions if slowness is to be meaningful and just.

Slowness may also mean pushing back against patron expectations. Placing holds on library materials via internet catalog search has been growing in popularity among patrons, but what may appear to be a frictionless, convenient, and speedy process for patrons to obtain materials actually requires a great amount of staff energy, labor that is generally invisible. The patron only sees the requested item waiting on a shelf for them when they arrive at the library to retrieve it, not the time spent locating and processing it. This method of interaction transforms workers into extensions of the online catalog, which generally runs on an infrastructure that is controlled by corporations unaffiliated with the library, further decreasing the hold process’s accountability to library workers. Here, as in many incidences of seemingly human-free internet-enabled convenience,¹⁴ reduction of friction for satisfying patron desires means much more invisibilized work for staff, which can easily become labor measured in terms of patron requests filled, rather than staff time demanded. This is not to say that expanding options for patrons to access collections is a bad thing, quite the opposite: the difference that slowness embraces should act to open more doors to patrons, especially those previously shut out of meaningful library access. But increased access cannot come at the cost of dehumanizing and invisibilizing staff labor. Invisibilized labor quickly becomes metricized labor, and this consequential shift merits careful vigilance.

The slow library perhaps seems unrealistic at the moment, as modes of library funding have become increasingly tied to the speedy adoption of new technologies and ever more evidence of “engagement.” But this is part of neoliberalism’s insidiousness: the steady assertion that it is reality, that “there is no alternative,” to painfully invoke Margaret Thatcher’s hopefully not-immortal echoing of Herbert Spencer. This essay does not pretend to be an answer, but hopefully can serve as a beginning. As Jamie A. Lee and Marika Cifor argue: “neoliberalism is a way of thinking, which means we can re-think our way out of it.”¹⁵ Unionization and labor solidarity both within library spaces and outsourced labor spaces can provide a foundation for slowness. Evaluation of the efficacy of programs and services based on criteria that staff actually value would be another, to the extent that evaluation is necessary at all. A shift towards slow libraries itself would have to happen slowly, and would be difficult to initiate in isolation. But that does not mean it is not worth thinking differently. And maybe if we think slowly, we can begin.

 

 

1 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 4.

2 Karen P. Nicholson, “The McDonaldization of Academic Libraries and the Values of Transformational Change,” College & Research Libraries 76, no. 3 (2015): 329, https://doi.org/doi:10.5860/crl.76.3.328.

3 Kimberly Christen and Jane Anderson, “Toward Slow Archives,” Archival Science 19, no. 2 (June 1, 2019): 87–116, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-019-09307-x.

4 But I absolutely refuse not to try.

5 Martha C. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 56. Nussbaum’s full conception is characteristically insightful, though it stretches outside of the work of this paper: “We can break the ‘science of measurement’ down into four distinct constituent claims. First, we have the claim that in each situation of choice there is some one value, varying only in quantity, that is common to all the alternatives, and that the rational chooser weighs the alternatives using this single standard. Let us call this claim Metricity. Next, there is the claim of Singleness: that is, that in all situations of choice there is one and the same metric. Third is a claim about the end of rational choice: that choices and chosen actions have value not in themselves, but only as instrumental means to the good consequences that they produce. We call this Consequentialism. If we combine Consequentialism with Metricity, we have the idea of maximization: that the point of rational choice is to produce the greatest amount of the single value at work in each case. Combining both of these with Singleness, we have the idea that there is some one value that is the point of rational choice, in every case, to maximise.”

6 Amelia Gibson, Kristen Bowen, and Dana Hanson, “We Need to Talk About How We Talk About Disability: A Critical Quasi-Systematic Review,” In the Library with the Lead Pipe, February 24, 2021, http://inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2021/disability/.

7 Amelia Gibson, Kristen Bowen, and Dana Hanson, “We Need to Talk About How We Talk About Disability.”

8 Alison Mountz, Anne Bonds, Becky Mansfield, Jenna Loyd, Jennifer Hyndman, Margaret Walton-Roberts, Ranu Basu, Risa Whitson, Roberta Hawkins, Trina Hamilton, and Winifred Curran, “For Slow Scholarship: A Feminist Politics of Resistance through Collective Action in the Neoliberal University,” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 14, no. 4 (August 18, 2015): 1249, https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1058.

9 David James Hudson, “The Whiteness of Practicality,” in Topographies of Whiteness Mapping Whiteness in Library and Information Science, ed. Gina Schlesselman-Tarango (Sacramento: Library Juice Press, 2017), 212, https://litwinbooks.com/books/topographies-of-whiteness/. Hudson’s chapter is also a masterclass on the joys and freedom to be found in footnote citation. See footnote three, wherein Hudson lavishes 112 words on a description of a joke from ‘The Simpsons’ about Johnny Unitas.

10 Cathy Eisenhower and Dolsy Smith, “The Library as ‘Stuck Place’: Critical Pedagogy in the Corporate University,” in Critical Library Instruction: Theories and Methods, ed. Maria T Accardi, Emily Drabinski, and Alana Kumbier (Duluth, Minn.: Library Juice Press, 2010), 305–18.

11 Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).

12 Alison Mountz et al., “For Slow Scholarship,” 1244.

13 Alison Mountz et al., “For Slow Scholarship,” 1238.

14 See Sarah T. Roberts, Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019).

15 Jamie A. Lee and Marika Cifor, “Evidences, Implications, and Critical Interrogations of Neoliberalism in Information Studies: An Introduction,” Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 2, no. 1 (2019): 4-5, https://doi.org/10.24242/jclis.v2i1.122.

The Asexual Librarian | Lisa Kahn

 

Oh, It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). A classic American Christmas film. Remember that scene in the alternate reality in which Jimmy Stewart’s character discovers that without him being born, his wife Mary becomes (drum-roll please) … A Librarian!!! [1] Not only that, but a spinster librarian wearing tan makeup, glasses, and homely clothing. The shame of it all (read: sarcasm).

Yet this trope of the spinster librarian is common. The LIS field, as we know, is historically highly feminized, white, and, in the media at least, often desexualized. While desexualization is completely different from asexuality, I will be using this image of LIS work as perceived feminine and asexual to discuss how concepts like sexuality and competitive power are not fundamental aspects of existence. Additionally, the terminology of the metaphor I will be using will be in binary terms such as “feminine” and “masculine”; these binary views do not reflect my perspectives, rather they support and contribute to the problematic image and relationship I am attempting to critique and detangle.

As an asexual person, I can’t help but see sex (the verb, not the noun) as often being a masculine expression of power and control [2]. The classic representation of toxic male greed and coercive sexual power is the lewd American businessman, imposing his power through sexual harassment of any woman in the office (Mad Men, Wolf of Wall Street, etc). The inverse of this character, the sexually-withholding woman, perceived either as innocent and virtuous, or vindictive and self-righteous, is still an object to be conquered, and therefore the woman is still seen as being in the weaker position [3].

I’d like to explore this problematic association of sex and power in the world of LIS. In this world, LIS work and workers who represent public, equitable access to knowledge resources, are perceived as feminine and asexual, in contrast to the masculinized and allosexual world of private business, consumerism and capitalism. This post, through the lens of specifically asexual queer theory, will discuss the position of LIS work in a capitalist neoliberal society, and how an asexual perspective applied to queer theory can help envision a different relationship of systemic power. Asexuality, as defined by the Asexual Visibility and Education Network (AVEN), can be defined as “a person who does not experience sexual attraction” [4]. It gets more complicated from there, as asexuality essentially contributes a whole other axis of understanding one’s existence. I will not be defining or discussing further what asexuality means, as there are plenty of resources for self-education on the matter online [5].

While queer theorist literature is beautiful and powerfully influential in liberating the self from restrictive societal and personal oppressions, they are frequently built upon the assumption that “sexuality is presumed to be natural and normal to the detriment of various forms of asexual and nonsexual lives, relationships, and identities” [6]. For example, Sharon Marcus states that “Queerness also refers to the multiple ways that sexual practice, sexual fantasy, and sexual identity fail to line up consistently. That definition expresses an important insight about the complexity of sexuality, but it also describes a state experienced by everyone” [7]. Within my metaphor of sex paralleling masculine capitalist power, Marcus’ vision of sexuality within queer theory suggests that competitive power is inherent and fundamental to human society.

While competitive power (read: allosexuality) is perhaps by far a more common understanding of existence, it is not the only way of understanding the world. Contemporary American society largely still believes in the pervasive myth of capitalistic success under neoliberalism, and therefore in the power of business, wealth and power (read: masculine, allosexual). Conversely, socialist institutions such as libraries and community archives, have seen progressively decreased funding and therefore can be perceived as weaker (read: feminine, asexual) in our profit-driven societal understandings of power. Asexuality threatens capitalism, as it undermines the feminine role of making babies to perpetuate a population of capitalist consumers. LIS threatens private businesses, as LIS work tries to promote equity and accessibility, notions incongruent with neoliberal capitalism.

This metaphor can also be applied within the LIS field (read: queer community) itself. It is commonly discussed in asexual community forums that asexual people are often pushed from queer spaces, being seen as not queer enough, but I cannot emphasize enough how queer our existence is [8]. In my metaphor, the exclusion of alternate imaginations of society that are not capitalistic can be seen in LIS workers who may consider themselves democratic or progressive, yet are unwilling to commit to radical inclusivity. Drabinski, Roberto, and Olson all acknowledge the power of old structures in Western knowledge organization, such as how “in LC’s terms, LGBT people are permanently othered, and purely sexual beings” [9]. This tension of holding onto old power structures within the LIS field reflects ace-exclusionist queer community members' unwillingness to acknowledge a destabilization of an assumed norm of existence (asexuality may be far from the norm at only 1% of the population, but that’s still millions of people who exist in this way).

This exclusionism and unwillingness to relinquish and acknowledge other types of societal structures (relationships) also manifests itself within the LIS field in the split in LIS workers’ desire to attach themselves to capitalistic, neoliberal structures. For example, the LIS world is still extremely white, entrenched in “neutrality” politics, and not fully on the overthrow-neoliberalism train. Asexuality, like other sub-umbrellas of the queer community, problematizes the idea of any normative or default way of existence by uncoupling sexuality from being alive [10]. Sex, like masculinity, is not bad or inherently abusive, but the assumption that sex (or masculinity / capitalist power as the controlling entity) is the default of existence because of its prevalence, is self-defeating of any movement toward accessibility and inclusion, whether in the queer community, the LIS field, or society writ large. There is so much that can be said about what asexuality can contribute to queer studies, and it’s unfortunate that there is so little inclusivity of it in queer theory canon, especially in LIS queer theory (I found one article) [11]. I hope that my brief thought experiment here can contribute to much more extensive and inclusive discourse in the future.

----

[1] “It’s a Wonderful Life - Mary The Old Maid (1946),” YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SLDMMGzkyI. 

[2]  I am very aware that is not all that it is, and it is very much a source of empowerment and goodness for people of all/no genders (but roll with my association for the time being, I have my own issues).

[3]  The caricatures for this metaphor were inspired by Maura Seale and Rafia Mirza’s article "Empty Presence: Library Labor, Prestige, and the MLS,” Library Trends 68, no. 2 (2019): 252-268. doi:10.1353/lib.2019.0038.

[4]  The Asexual Visibility & Education Network. https://www.asexuality.org/

[5]  See sites such as asexuality.org, asexualityarchive.com, https://medium.com/@herbixarre/acephobia-allosexuality-and-what-it-means-to-be-queer-cc5b5329bfdd.

[6]  Ela Przybylo, Asexual Erotics, pp.1. https://library.oapen.org/viewer/web/viewer.html?file=/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/24390/1005725.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

[7]  Sharon Marcus, “Queer Theory for Everyone: A Review Essay,” Signs 31 (1) (2005): 196.

[8]  To give one example, coming out as asexual tends to involve a lot of incredible invasive and inappropriate questions. Most assume it is suddenly okay for them to explain for you why you feel different (“You’re probably repressing some trauma,” “you just have to find the right person,” “you’re making that up for attention,” “how do you know if you’ve never tried it,” “is it a mental disorder? let's put you in therapy”, “it’s a phase,” “have you tried it with yourself?”, “are you an amoeba?”), rather than trusting that you know what you feel or do not feel.

[9]  K.R. Roberto, “Inflexible Bodies: Metadata for Transgender Identities,” Journal of Information Ethics 20 (20) (2011): 58.

[10]  Ashley O’Mara. “Coda: Asexual Awareness Week and the Future of Queer Theory.” Metathesis. https://egosu.wordpress.com/2014/10/31/coda-asexual-awareness-week-and-the-future-of-queer-theory/

[11]   Brian M. Watson, “‘There was Sex but no Sexuality*:’ Critical Cataloging and the Classification of Asexuality in LCSH,” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 58, no 6 (2020): 547-565. DOI: 10.1080/01639374.2020.1796876

Playing Whiteness in LIS | Antonio Buyard

      I am no stranger to the parental advice burdening Black youth with the responsibility of being “twice as good” as white students, or code-switching in order to be successful. Often, navigating whiteness, in both academia and the workplace, means sacrificing our authentic self-expression as it relates to race, gender and sexuality in hopes that playing whiteness effectively distances us enough from the realities of our marginalized identities. It hurts to agree with Derrick Bell’s assessment that “Black people will never gain full equality in this country,” and to perpetually witness our “empowerment” in white-dominated spaces continue to serve the interests of white supremacy. [1] “You play the game and give the white world what it wants just to get through the door. Then, once you’re inside, you blast that door wide open for others to follow you.” [2] I have played whiteness as a survival tactic my whole life — I’ve played it so well that I’ve managed to end up in a field that is predominantly white. As I read April Hathcock discuss her participation in this game and reflect on “Lifting as We Climb,” I wonder at what point do we retire the charade? 

     Using this idea of “Lifting as We Climb” as a point of departure, I call into question the effectiveness of playing white, a strategy that echoes “Racial Realism,” in its attempt to dismantle whiteness from within and argue the continued reliance on the “master’s tools” reinforces the same apparatus of whiteness it seeks to tear down.[2] This ideology requires us to accept a perpetual status of subordination as the foundation to prevent social and political self-sabotage rather than encouraging the oppressed to liberate themselves from white supremacy. Playing whiteness to trojan horse our people’s way into the LIS profession must recognize that the diversification of the field alone will not lay the foundation for material change. We must use Critical Race Theory (CRT) to further disrupt white hegemony and its indoctrination of “objectivity, neutrality, meritocracy and color-blindness” so that we no longer need to surrender our identities to find our place in libraries and archives.

     It’s important to stress that playing whiteness is not the core focus of Hathcock’s article, I am highlighting this point to discuss what I find problematic about this reconstruction of identity catering to whiteness. This is a difficult argument to levy as the refusal to act in accordance with whiteness can cost one their job, home, or promotion. [4] The isolation she speaks to, as a result of the lack of diversity in the profession, also resonates with me as one of three Black students in my cohort. A critical reframing of diversity initiatives is long overdue, and I agree that effective mentorship programs can alleviate the anxieties surrounding the whiteness of our profession. But how many handfuls of applicants from underrepresented communities are needed before we begin to divest from whiteness. This gradual approach to change buys whiteness more time to reify its power in new ways.

     When we consider the reasons why whiteness is so pervasive in LIS laid out by Chapman-Smith, the “rampant dropout rates among minorities, lack of early engagement with archives or other historical sources, and an educational system that places the bulk of minorities at a disadvantage,” I hope that it’s clear that validating whiteness should be low on our priority list. [5] I think often of “Mothering While Brown in White Spaces, Or, When I Took My Son to Octavia Butler’s Exhibit,” where Cecilia Caballero recounts being forced out of an exhibit, almost immediately, by staff while white women and their children enjoyed a space designed for them. [6] The irony is not lost on me – whiteness will continue to exert its dominance even in an exhibit dedicated to the woman who gave us Parable of the Sower. In the comment section of “White Librarianship in Blackface,” user, nina de jesus, makes clear the limitations for marginalized people in the field. “I did all the right things. I got a prestigious scholarship… published an article in this very journal. I’ve been attending conferences, given talks and such. And yet, I am still stuck in the same part-time position I got when I graduated three years ago.” [7] I ask again, how do we possibly change from within for the sake of others when we ourselves are reminded of how the system recognizes us?

     There are several, more effective, ways to dismantle whiteness within LIS. One, is with the establishment of community-based archives and programs – organizations for us – can empower marginalized communities, cultivate identity construction, and help communicate the value of archives to those who may not be aware of our field. Another is through counternarratives that challenge power. Dunbar uses the example of the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archive in Los Angeles in his discussion of counterstories as a means to “construct alternative realities to those constructed through social institutions of dominant culture,” and serves as a great example of how these two processes are intertwined. [8]

     Bell boldly claims equality is a fallacy and that any step forward is an inevitable step backward for Black people. Perhaps, Bell should redefine what it means to be equal. When asked to define freedom, justice and equality for the Black man, Malcom X stated, “Equality has nothing to do with whites. We don’t want to be equal with the white man, he’s not the criteria or yardstick by which equality is measured.” [9] He goes on to say equality is the opportunity for us to develop our dormant potential, find independence and establish our own society. As I stated earlier, I agree that we will never achieve equality in this country; the United States is so deeply entrenched in white supremacy that I cannot fathom reforming or performing our way out of it. As I continue to work to dismantle whiteness instilled in me, I urge us to invest in our own identities and communities and learn to recognize appeals to whiteness are tools of the oppressor to reinforce the status quo.

[1] Derrick A Bell, The Derrick Bell Reader (New York: NYU Press, 2005): 74.

[2] April Hathcock, “White Librarianship in Blackface: Diversity Initiatives in LIS,” October 2015, http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2015/lis-diversity/.

[3] Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 1984), 112.

[4]Derrick A Bell, The Derrick Bell Reader (New York: NYU Press, 2005), 75. 

[5] Mario H. Ramirez, “Being Presumed Not to Be:  A Critique of Whiteness as an Archival Imperative,” The American Archivist 78 (Fall/Winter 2015), 250.

[6] Cecilia Caballero, “Mothering While Brown in White Spaces, Or, When I Took My Son to Octavia Butler’s Exhibit,” Chicana M(other)work. https://www.chicanamotherwork.com/single-post/2017/08/23/mothering-while-brown-in-white-spaces-or-when-i-took-my-son-to-octavia-butler-s-exhibit.

[7] nina de jesus, “White Librarianship in Blackface: Diversity Initiatives in LIS,” October 7, 2015, http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2015/lis-diversity/.

[8] Anthony Dunbar, “Introducing Critical Race Theory to Archival Discourse: Getting the Conversation Started,” Archival Science 6 (2006), 115.

[9] reelblack, “Malcolm X - Interview At Berkeley (1963),” YouTube video, 40:57, June 11, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZMrti8QcPA.
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Rumor and Gossip as Familial Record Keeping

    In Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, he formulates the weight of mentioning, of moments in-passing: “I could not leave to chance the transformation of some silences into mentions or the possibility that mentions alone would add retrospective significance. The unearthing of silences … requires not only extra labor at the archives – whether or not one uses primary sources – but also a project linked to an interpretation.”[1]  I think about these moments a lot in the same way that we might think about footnotes and endnotes -- enough to mention but require more labor to expand and care for. In an attempt to expand Trouillot’s articulation of the “mention,” I posit that the act of mentioning operates as the technique in which the act of gossiping and rumor production in that create possibilities for forking pathways to understand alternative truths. I define gossip and rumors here as potentialities for alternative facts, or truths, as seeds for counter-narratives to dominant histories. 

    Roughly five years ago, I began going through salvaged family photos dating back to 1940-1960s, which situates these photos in the midst of the Vietnamese resistance in the French Indochina war and transition into the Vietnamese civil war, otherwise known as the American war in Vietnam. These photographs indexed my paternal grandparents’ travels, friendships, and interactions early in their marriage and into the creation of our family, and by extension our family history. Amongst these photos included a photo of my grandfather next to a man that looked vaguely familiar, like him, but marginally thinner and older. The photo was black and white but from what I could identify, his hair was beginning to white and he had some visible wrinkles. I asked my dad who this was to which he replied that it was his uncle, my great uncle. He was my grandfather’s older brother who the family seldom speaks of because he allegedly fought for the Communist North Vietnam whereas my family concretized their ideologies as Anti-Communist Southern Vietnamese. This decisive moment produced both the weight of silence and mentioning that I came to know as my family history-- a history siphoned in favor of Anti-Communist ideologies and narratives. In this utterance, I wondered what narratives and stories this great uncle could produce, or what possibilities could be transformed out of this brief mention. 

    Further, I often think about one of the last coherent letters my paternal grandmother wrote where she mentioned her belief in Communist ideologies as ideal but struggled with its implementation in Vietnam, which led to our family’s exodus. [2]  From this letter, my family often recollects her commitment to our family and her strength as a mother rather than acknowledging how this commitment was also tied to her political commitments to colonial resistance and her strength as Viet Minh  (Vietnam’s nationalist liberation front against the French).[3] Jeannette Bastian notes that constructions of history vitally rely on who is reading and interpreting such records and such utterances, or interactions, of interest are often “whispers in the archive.”[4]  For me, redefining “whispers” in the context of rumor production and the act of gossiping within family narrative production begins to materialize as a point of entry to understand the weight and possibility of “the mention.” Here, I’m contending with the ways in which my own family collectively continues to reproduce my grandmother in the family imaginary as strictly filial through their own storytelling. My interventions could disrupt this truth in the same way that rumors and gossip disrupt truth.  

    As I am working through these interactions within my family, I am left to toil with major questions including: how do I work in absence of materials? What can my methods look like when my primary sources aren’t materially tangible in the context of documents, especially when rumors temporally exist in the present as opposed to a past? In trying to work through these questions, Saidiya Hartman presents “critical fabulation” as a method through which she tries to explicitly work within such moments of impossibility.[5]  This method becomes particularly useful as a physical and discursive means to meditate on silences, ruptures, inconsistencies, and/or nonexistence. Working through my paternal grandmother’s letter, my maternal grandmother’s voice recordings, and family albums, I realize that I am working within the interstices of existing silences, a silence within a silence, just as Trouillot is working with “a war within a war.”[6]  To further think through specifically matrilineal silences, I invoke Trinh T. Minh-Ha’s notion of stories and truth that grounds storytelling as a means of understanding the story as quotidian truths; Trinh says, “I do not remember having asked grandmother once whether the story she was telling me was true or not.”[7]   Here, to locate truth in the story is not necessary because the affect in the story’s ability to “make each other cry, laugh, or fear”[8] remains. To think through gossip using critical fabulation, I meditate on the insistence on the possibility of an utterance to be true when materialized by the affect of the piece of gossip. For example, the affect that my grandmother’s mention of her political ideology had on changing the landscape of my family history. Truth in matrilineal storytelling materializes through the body’s ability to believe, or feel moved by, in an alternative telling, something Other Than what we dominantly know.

 [1] Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the past: Power and the production of history. Beacon Press, 1995, 58.

 [2] In 2000, after my paternal grandparents fiftieth wedding anniversary and in the wake of my grandmother’s Parkinson’s and dementia diagnosis, she wrote a letter to her childhood best friend recollecting her life, which she decidedly shared with her children and grandchildren after realizing the contents of this letter might be important to share with her family as well. At the top of the letter she writes, “Reading this letter over, I realized that there are many things that relate to our family. Since you were young, you may not have had the chance to share these experiences with me. So I’m using this letter to open my heart to you, my children and my grandchildren.”

[3] Vu, Ky T. Ky T. Vu to Khoa Nguyen, West Covina, CA, September 20, 2000. 

[4] Jeannette Bastian, “Whispers in the Archives: Finding the Voices of the Colonized in the Records of the Colonizer,” In Political Pressure and the Archival Record, Margaret 
Procter et al eds. (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2005), 33.

[5] Saidiya, Hartman. "Venus in Two Acts." Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008), 11.

[6] Trouillot, 67.

[7] Trinh, Thi Minh-Ha, and Thi Minh-Ha Trinh Trinh. Woman, native, other: Writing postcoloniality and feminism. Vol. 503. Indiana University Press, 1989, 121. 

[8] Trinh, 121.

Privacy, Hierarchy, and the 'Open' Reference Office

     Over the past eight years, there hasn’t been a single academic library that I’ve entered that didn’t have a bright and enticing Learning Commons. These large, open spaces have quickly become a modern staple in academic libraries looking to offer students with an aesthetically attractive ‘one-stop-shop’ for their research and study space, complete with fun technological equipment, various information service departments, and rearrangeable furniture & whiteboards. Comparisons between the group-oriented, supportive environment of Learning Commons and the “holistic, nurturing environment”1 that feminist librarians aim to facilitate are easy to make. But, how might the open interior design of Learning Commons hinder a supportive and secure environment for patrons when coming to reference desk spaces with personal or sensitive research? Additionally, how might library workers also be affected by the architectural choice to expose reference offices when considering “how organizational spaces are simultaneously gendered and gendering” environments through placement, visibility, and lighting?2 Using my experiences working with students in the reference offices at two separate academic libraries (labelled #1 & #2), I argue that applying Learning Commons design methods to reference assistance spaces can both worsen library anxiety, particularly for marginalized groups, and heighten a pressure for library workers to perform while serving patrons, particularly in a field when women work the majority of desk assistance positions.3 I finish by proposing how feminist ethics of care & empathy and theories of spatial gender-class work can be used to balance the needs for patrons to feel that a reference desk is findable, approachable, and a safe space to express their needs & research ideas.

Surveillance & Gendered space for Library Workers

     While working at library #1, I saw a stark contrast between the architectural layouts of the reference and administrative spaces at the library. The reference office was brightly lit with two glass walls that allowed visitors to easily view the reference desk and the dual-screen reference assistance computer screens. This office was mainly staffed by cisgender women. The office was also placed in a high-traffic area on the first floor next to the computer lab and a small Learning Commons space to increase the amount of walk-in assistance4. In contrast, the administration office was on the second floor with enclosed walls and only two glass doors that provided a birds-eye view of the first floor. This space mainly contained the offices of library positions held by cisgender men.5 In their work on spatial gender dynamics and organizational aesthetics, Varda Wasserman and Michal Frenkel identify how sexist and classist hierarchies are reinforced by architectural design, such as only providing secluded office space for higher management positions more often held by men and using the openness of office spaces created for lower desk workers as an opportunity to surveil women workers’ adherence to dress code and procedure. In my experience working in this glass-walled reference office as a nonbinary person frequently perceived as a woman, I often felt pressured to perform a socialized stereotype of feminine customer service rather than authentic assistance when being viewed by the cisgender men in the highest library administration positions. It could also be argued that this type of surveillance and power dynamics could cause library workers to develop a sense of “detached professionalism” that lacks an ethics of care as discussed by Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor.6 In this way, the stark contrast and physically hierarchical spatial layout of the reference office and administrative office, along with the gender divide between the offices, reinforced patriarchal power dynamics in the reference office that can remove a sense of safety and care from a reference space. 

Hypervisibility of Reference Offices & Library Anxiety

     While the power dynamics between the reference and administration spaces can limit the amount of authentic care and attention a library worker can bring to reference assistance, the patron-to-patron visibility of open-concept reference offices can also heighten library anxiety for a patron. Openness and visibility is often boasted as the ideal for information desks in academic libraries but reference desk assistance can vastly differ from the impersonal directional or technical assistance requested at circulation desks, with patrons often looking for more in-depth consultation about their personal research or interests. In Feminist Pedagogy for Library Instruction, Maria Accardi discusses how library anxiety, anxiety that a patron has at approaching library workers for assistance, disproportionately affects patrons from marginalized groups such as women, people of color, and queer folk. In addition, Accardi explains how a patron’s “query will be filtered through that anxiety, which will make it difficult for the learner to express what they need and desire” (40).7 When seeing reference spaces that are completely exposed by transparent walls with large computer screens, I can’t help but be concerned with how marginalized patrons may feel with this lack of privacy. For instance, while working at academic library #2, a roughly 2.5ft x 4ft flat screen TV was used in lieu of a desktop screen (to make the screen easier for a patron to see) that unfortunately broadcasted a patron’s research topic to anyone walking past the office. When a freshman student came into the office looking for assistance finding sources on representations of gender dysphoria through art, I perceived their questions and responses becoming short & shorter as more people looked into or entered the desk space. From my experience, the publicity of this patron’s interests, in relation to their own self-proclaimed identity as gender queer, seemed to be the source of their anxiety. This interaction shows how the lack of private space around reference desks can particularly worsen barriers to comfortable library service for marginalized patrons.     

Feminist Ethics-based Solutions

     So, how can librarians and library designers balance the need of open learning space designs while also providing space for private consultation and care? One simple solution that a feminist librarian could pursue that wouldn’t involve costly renovations could be to apply semi-opaque window sticks to the glass walls in transparent offices.8 The glass covers could function as an additional layer of privacy around the reference desk while also being printed with additional signage for the reference desk, possibly making up for the loss of direct visibility of the desk. Along the suggestions of Varda and Frenkel, the glass covers could also be an opportunity to introduce more color and creativity into stark, institutional environments. This reconstruction of the office space through color and signage could also create a more inviting space that could visually build privacy and breakdown conventionally bland office spaces. Another feminist ethics/pedagogy approach is to work around large, hyper visible computer screens. This can be done in the initial reference interview by being upfront with the patron and asking if they would rather want to use their own laptop in order to keep their research topic private to patrons and librarians that may pass by the office. By prioritizing the privacy of the patron and the creation of a safe space for a patron to express their interests, a feminist librarian can better approach the patron through a lens of empathy without being confronted with concerns about administrative surveillance themselves. 

_________________________________________________________________________

1.  Maria Accardi, Feminist Pedagogy for Library Instruction (Sacramento: Library Juice Press, 2013), pg. 54.

2.  Wasserman, Varda, and Michal Frenkel. 2015. “Spatial Work in Between Glass Ceilings and Glass Walls: Gender-Class Intersectionality and Organizational Aesthetics.” Organization Studies 36 (11): pg. 1485–1505. https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840615593583.

3.   I choose not to include names of the specific libraries because this piece is not intended as attacks on these individual libraries. Issues with lack of patron privacy, library worker surveillance, and hierarchically gendered space is in no way specific to these libraries; these are just the cases that come to mind from my own experience.

4.

    Library #1 Reference office

5. 

Library #1 Administrative office

6.    Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor, “From Human Rights to Feminist Ethics: Radical Empathy in the Archives,” Archivaria, 81 (Spring 2016): pg. 25.

7.    Maria Accardi, Feminist Pedagogy for Library Instruction (Sacramento: Library Juice Press, 2013), pg. 40.

8. These could be similar to the glass covers that some libraries already use to cover glass at the entrance of the building for event signage.

Laughing at a Funeral: Imagining Decolonized Library and Archival Spaces Through Humor | Hall Frost

“Spring” (Four Seasons). Image by Wendy Red Star, 2006.

The first work I saw by Wendy Red Star was a photograph at the Portland Art Museum.

 Part of a series, the photo featured her as the central figure, dressed in regalia against backdrops of nature, a serious expression on her face. The setting feels familiar because she is mimicking the well-known caricatures of Native Americans as Indian Princesses, of and one with nature, the stereotype of the “Ecological Indian,”[1] the Indigenous woman stuck forever in the diorama next to the dinosaurs at a history museum in Los Angeles.[2] It isn’t until a closer examination that the viewer begins to notice that Red Star is sitting on astro-turf, that the animals around her are cardboard cut outs, that the flowers are plastic. One has to laugh.

Red Star says: “when talking about Indigenous history you can just devastate yourself. And so, humor has been a way for me to cope with that.” Adding, “I find that if you have ever gone to a funeral; it’s always so appreciated when someone tells a funny story, and everyone is so sad but then everyone laughs! It feels so good.”[3]

There is something inherently connecting and human about laughing during stressful times, using humor as a coping mechanism, as a way to bond with other humans, as a way to have difficult conversations. In a world such as ours, one that centers Western values apparent in our education system, our white washing of history, even in the ways we catalog libraries and databases, and how we search the internet, finding subtle ways to decolonize these spaces is vital.  Linda Tuhiwai Smith, an Indigenous author from New Zealand highlights, “one of the strategies which indigenous peoples have employed effectively to bind together politically is a strategy which asks people imagine a future, that they rise above present day situations which are generally depressing, dream a new dream and set a new vision.”[4] It’s my opinion that humor can be an incredibly effective tool while imaging what a decolonized future could look like.

Red Star’s above mentioned photographs, part of her Four Seasons series, and much of her other work based in humor or nestled in pop culture references allow for her to critique museum and archival practices through irony and humor; to decolonize the narrative by placing Indigenous lives in the present; and nudges conversations towards more serious ones, paving the way for future works such as her latest installation that opened at the beginning of the year.

“Humor is healing to me,” she says. “To have that element in my work is quite Native, or Crow, and I’m glad that it comes through. It’s universal. People can connect with the work that way. Then they can be open to talking about race.”[5] Her Four Seasons series was an excellent gateway to her work for me. I remember standing at the museum and staring at the photos, longer than any of the others in the exhibit, which featured a handful of photographs taken by women in the Pacific Northwest. Red Star’s contribution was so funny, but also so bright and open and engaging. I felt like she wanted to challenge me to find all of the funny props. And I accepted that challenge with gusto. I went home and read about her and her other work, found her social media accounts and followed them all. I’m the kind of person who loves to think about and challenge societal norms that I find harmful, but sometimes, a little humor can change the narrative in my head from one of overwhelm and doom, to a realm of hopeful imagination.

Through Red Star’s social media account, I was informed that on January 30th, the installation of Indian Congress of Omaha, 1898 opened at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska. Visitors to the museum walk down a short corridor and are greeted with a floor to ceiling portrait of White Swan, an Apsáalooke (Crow) artist and military scout, and then turn a corner into a small room that houses the exhibit.

“Indian Congress of Omaha”. Image by Wendy Red Star, 2021.

The Indian Congress of 1898 was a convention of over five hundred Native Americans representing over thirty-five tribes and coincided with the Trans-Mississippi International Exposition, a large fair meant to mark the end of a Federal Indian policy and celebrate the United States’ westward expansion and Manifest Destiny.[6]

The official photographer for the expo, Frank Rinehart, ended up also photographing Native American delegates for the Congress, their lodgings, and various Congress events. Rinehart recorded each delegate’s name and tribal identity, thus creating an invaluable historic record of this monumental meeting. His series included the aforementioned photo of White Swan. Red Star’s exhibit mimics the booths seen at the expo: red, white, and blue banners and American flags hang over head, and stars and stripes drape a tiered display of hundreds of hand cut photographic reproductions of the Indian Congress members’ photos taken by Rinehart in his Omaha studio.

His entire collection is available for viewing on the Omaha Public Library’s website, but, Red Star says viewing them online, clicking on them one at time, felt disconnected; not only did she feel disconnected from the subjects, but the subjects were disconnected from each other. Instead, she “want[ed] to have an experience of what that gathering would feel like.” Adding, “It’s another way of not just pushing these images and these people off in the past, but really a way for people to feel the gravity of that extraordinary gathering.”[7] Clicking on individual photos in the digital archive can be disjointed, and Red Star thinks that viewers are likely to miss small details that she hopes to highlight through the exhibit: interpreters wearing cowboy hats with their tribe names written on the hat bands, or “one whole delegation carr[ying] identical blankets, carefully presenting a united front to the fair’s two million visitors.”[8]

Red Star’s Indian Congress of Omaha, 1898 is successful because it places the viewer within the Congress itself, while also attempts to remind that Indigenous peoples are not just a moment in history, thus critiquing the “settler gaze” so often accommodated in archives, libraries, museums, and online forums. Red Star’s work actively addresses colonialism, which often “is subtle, insidious, and nearly invisible to privileged citizens of a Settler state.”[9] This exhibit makes explicitly clear how an indigenous perspective on archival collections can create a greater understanding of not just the event, but who the delegates were, how they connected to each other, and the impact and significance of the event.

Red Star and others’[10] work is a direct response to colonization and the oppression of Indigenous peoples, and is centered on countering false stereotypes, inciting difficult conversations, and decolonizing the historical narrative. Using humor and art, she is able to contribute to the imagining of a new, decolonized future, specifically in archives and museums. This type of imagining can be difficult for professionals in the library world who were socialized to see things with a white/western perspective. Red Star shows that humor can help break down these barriers and help facilitate conversations that might overwise be made more difficult.

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[1] “The Problem with the Ecological Indian Stereotype,” KCET, February 5, 2017, https://www.kcet.org/shows/tending-the-wild/the-problem-with-the-ecological-indian-stereotype.

[2] Robert Sullivan, “A New Exhibition Is Part Historical Corrective, Part Ghost Story,” Vogue, accessed February 3, 2021, https://www.vogue.com/article/wendy-red-star-art-exhibition-a-scratch-on-the-earth-newark-museum.

[3] Salma Monani and Nicole Seymour, “How Wendy Red Star Decolonizes the Museum with Humor and Play,” Edge Effects, September 30, 2020, http://edgeeffects.net/wendy-red-star/.

[4] Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London ; New York : Dunedin, N.Z. : New York: Zed Books ; University of Otago Press ; Distributed in the USA exclusively by St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 162.

[5] “Artist Spotlight: Wendy Red Star | Art Docent Program,” accessed February 1, 2021, https://www.artdocentprogram.com/artist-spotlight-wendy-red-star/.

[6] “Indian Congress - Digital Collections,” accessed February 1, 2021, https://digital.omahalibrary.org/digital/collection/p16747coll2.

[7] “The Historic Indian Congress Is Reunited in Omaha by Artist Wendy Red Star,” accessed February 3, 2021, http://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/the-historic-indian-congress-is-reunited-in-omaha-by-artist-wendy-red-star.

[8] “The Historic Indian Congress Is Reunited in Omaha by Artist Wendy Red Star.”

[9] Marisa Elena Duarte and Miranda Belarde-Lewis, “Imagining: Creating Spaces for Indigenous Ontologies,” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 53, no. 5–6 (July 4, 2015): 682, https://doi.org/10.1080/01639374.2015.1018396.

[10] If you are interested in Indigenous American comedians challenging stereotypes through humor, check out the sketch comedy group The 1491s.