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.

---

[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.

A Feminist Critique of Women's History Month Programming┃Dana Laderer

"What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy? It means that only the most narrow perimeters of change are possible and allowable"

- Audre Lorde[1]

As a straight, white, cisgendered, able-bodied woman, I check nearly all of the boxes of the privileged WEBCCCHAM identity framework that puts me in a position of power as defined by our social structure.[2] When feminism demands that we acknowledge difference, it demands that I, and women who identify similarly, recognize the privilege of our established normativity. Recognizing socially constructed privilege is not only necessary for us as individuals, but also for the spaces we create. By spaces here, I am not referring just to the physicality of space, but to the power relations formed within space as well. Who is seen in a space? Who is prioritized? Having spent a majority of my adult life in New York, I was interested in seeing how a feminist critique of created space would map out onto the New York Public Library (NYPL) system's Women's History Month programming.[3] After reviewing the 2020 programming through the lens of feminist ideology, I found that the events valued personal experience and the creation of community, but failed to focus on difference in its presentation of womanhood. Without highlighting difference, the NYPL fell short of creating a feminist space by centering white, ethnically European, bourgeois, Christian, cis, citizen, heterosexual, able-bodied women (WEBCCCHAW)[4] as the "normative" female experience and creating a platform through which white supremacy, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism could be perpetuated.[5]

Feminist frameworks operate with the goal of "exposing and ending oppression against women and all other kinds of marginalization".[6] True feminist frameworks work in the service of all women, whose identities are multifold. With this in mind, I want to be clear in stating that there are layers of oppression that impact a woman based on the many different aspects of their identity, and a feminist framework requires us to call attention to all of these aspects in order to fight oppression. Feminist frameworks therefore depend on our recognition of difference as well as our valuing of women's experiential knowledge that are informed by these differences.[7] Additionally, feminist frameworks rely on the promotion of community collaboration[8] and the centering of women with the purpose of subverting the dominant social hierarchy.[9] I considered these core aspects of a feminist framework when looking at the NYPL Women's History Month programming. 

As I did not attend any of these events myself, I chose to rely on the promotion information for these events released to the general public by NYPL.[10] I tracked how many of the events centered women, promoted community/collaboration, and highlighted experiential knowledge by noting trends in the types of events offered and event topics detailed in the event descriptions. I analyzed NYPL's recognition of difference by looking through the descriptions and noting explicit mention of race, ethnicity, class, religious identity, sexual orientation, mental/physical ability, or transgender identity. For descriptions that referenced a particular person, group, or movie but made no explicit reference to any number of these identities, I performed additional research and noted representation of these identities (especially focusing on how individuals have identified themselves). These methods guided my understanding of how the NYPL utilized the various aspects of feminist ideology in their Women's History Month programming and how the events did or did not work to subvert dominant social hierarchy.

A common theme across the NYPL events was an emphasis on personal experience and community collaboration. Events like the International Women's Day Poetry Reading gave women space to write their own poems and share them with the community. Book socials, women's circles, and the Local Voices Network Conversation for working women were designed to provide women opportunities to gather together and share their perspectives with one another. A community partnership event with Women's Activism NYC focused on the stories of individual women working to make active change around the world. These events create space to value women's experiential knowledge and provide opportunities for community collaboration, learning, and joy. NYPL should continue to highlight these aspects of feminist framework in their future events.

My issue with the programming came in how the events failed to address difference. Feminist ideology acknowledges how our educational and cultural spaces are "tethered to the dominant patriarchal, sexist, racist, and homophobic culture from which [they] emerged"[11] and I noticed the replication of these oppressions in the NYPL programming. NYPL created space to celebrate "women" and "females" without being clear that the female experience is not a monolith.[12] When looking through the program descriptions, only 6 of the 38 listed event descriptions on their main page made explicit reference to race, ethnicity, or class.[13] There were no explicit references made to religious identity, sexual orientation, mental/physical ability, or transgender identity. Additional research on the events showed that just over a quarter focused on identities outside of the WEBCCCHAW narrative. Of this quarter, there was difference in race, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, and religion (albeit in a limited capacity) in relation to the authors, artists, and speakers, but there were no events offered that specifically highlighted transgender women or women of differing ability. This demonstrates an overwhelming focus on the normative WEBCCCHAW perspective and excludes the experiences of a wider range of women. While the programming emphasized personal experience, it only made space for the certain kinds of experiences that society has privileged. By not identifying women's differing identities and experiences in the world, NYPL is allowing this dominant narrative to consume the space they created for the Women's History Month programming. 

Audre Lorde clearly states that "difference must not merely be tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic."[14] This understanding should act as a guiding light for NYPL moving forward. It is my hope that NYPL will truly invest itself in creating space that honors women and works to subvert the dominant social hierarchy. It can start by taking a critical look at the role it currently has in tolerating difference and ask: In what ways do we as a library currently prioritize the experiences of women that society deems "normative"? Whose experiences have we excluded and need to make space for? How can we be explicit in highlighting women's differing experiences and knowledge with the goal of subverting oppressive systems? These starting questions can be a guide for library programming in general to avoid molding feminism into a platform for perpetuating white supremacy, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism[15] and the NYPL Women's History Month programming is a great place to start.

Discipline in Archives by Juliana Clark

 What strikes me most about Michel Foucault’s Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison is how normalized and wide-spread these modes of power and dominance and docility are across the world. Foucault writes that, “The classical age discovered the body as object and target of power,” and that bodies which are docile can be, “subjected, used, transformed, and improved.”[1] In order to achieve domination over said bodies, discipline must be enforced on them, and this is achieved by four methods that Foucault discusses: distribution of bodies in a space, the control of their activities, the organization of their geneses, and the composition of bodies into forces.[2] The objectification of bodies as cogs in a machine intended for production can be applied in archives in the sense that artifacts and documents function as cogs in an information machine which is utilized for the production of new information. I argue that archivists rely on discipline to exercise control over bodies via records by housing them, organizing them, following collection policies, and by compiling records into collections and exhibits.

    Because most records that we collect are about cultures and people, it can be said that records are the embodiment of real bodies that lived. Ramesh Kumar Sharma explores the topic of embodiment and the self, writing that, “[One’s] manifestation to others as a conscious subject becomes possible only through the medium of the body.”[3]  But because all bodies die, he argues that, “The self is not ‘existentially’ dependent on the body,” and therefore, “it is possible that the self should not perish along with the death of the present body and go on rather to survive in some other form, whether embodied or otherwise.”[4] When the medium of the body ceases to exist, a different type of body carries on the manifestation of the self. Records are the replacements of bodies that have died or will die. Here we will think of records as bodies. The mere existence of archives already establishes Foucault’s first method of discipline, which is that bodies be distributed in space. First they are enclosed within an institution’s walls, which is represented by a physical repository, then this, “Disciplinary space tends to be divided into as many sections as there are bodies or elements to be distributed.”[5] Archives enclose records down to the item level, where they are enclosed into envelopes and boxes. This has the purpose of isolating individuals for their assessment, classification, and ranking into hierarchies, and so that each body may be surveilled. 

    The second method of discipline is the control of activity. This is practiced by establishing rhythms, imposing particular occupations, and regulating the cycles of repetition as a means of regulating time.[6] Records cannot literally perform activities, but archivists are able to impose activities onto them via monitoring record life-cycles, accessioning, deaccessioning, and organizing materials into classification systems. Another way that we see this is in what Foucault calls exhaustive use, where bodies are constantly put to use by the machine so that the use of time may increase into, “Ever more available moments.”[7] This makes me think of the preservation and conservation efforts of archives to use every last bit of time that a record can be useful before its ultimate deaccession and/or disposal. 

    Third is the organization of geneses, which refers to, “The progress of societies and the geneses of individuals,” that uphold power structures through time.[8] Melissa Adler notes how libraries accomplish this via library classifications, which she argues, “Are in the business of producing and reproducing disciplinary norms within the academy.”[9] She continues that, “Those in control can formulate categories, averages, and norms that are in turn a basis for knowledge” and that, “they reproduce dominant discourses and produce silences through censorship or undercataloging.”[10] Because archives set their collection policies and project their values and interests on what records they collect, they are able to curate and present a body of information (which often includes dominant narratives) to society that they choose to reproduce. This screening of records limits the ways that society, who uses said records, may think by presenting them with only certain types of information, reproducing an information norm. When archive users engage in research, this facilitates the genesis of new information that upholds the norms set by information institutions. 

    The fourth method of discipline is the composition of bodies into forces, “In order to obtain an efficient machine.”[11] Foucault says that, “The soldier whose body has been trained to function part by part for particular operations must in turn form an element in a mechanism at another level.”[12] Again, Adler makes the connection between libraries and discipline, stating, “Library materials are placed in sections of the library according to the discipline in which catalogers determine the books intend to participate.”[13] We see this in archives when records at the item level become part of a distinct collection or exhibit. An example could be a record, which represents the individual (like a photograph of  Dolores Huerta), being part of a broader collection, which represents a force (a collection about the Chicanx Movement). This is accomplished through the use of metadata and description, which categorize and organize records so that they are more easily identified and aggregated into collections or exhibits. Jeffrey Pomerantz says that, “The word ‘metadata’ indicates something that is beyond the data: a statement or statements about the data.”[14] Thus, metadata contributes to the disciplinary processes by assessing, classifying, and ranking records into hierarchies in the same way that bodies are in society.

    Archives today function out of societies that uphold power structures of dominance and docility, and so naturally are designed to further uphold these power relations. Archivists have already been taught by society to perpetuate norms and judgments. When dealing with records, which are pseudo-bodies of the masses, it makes sense that archivists would feel an almost natural obligation to objectify the cultures and life experiences of people via their records, and to regulate and control them. Archives further contribute to the regulation and control of living bodies by exposing them to dominant discourses that the institutions reproduce so that the population can abide by.

[1] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Random House, 1995), 136.

[2] Foucault, 141-169.

[3] Ramesh Kumar Sharma, “Embodiment, Subjectivity, and Disembodied Existence,” Philosophy East and West 61, no. 1 (2011): 7, https://www.jstor.org/stable/23015253.

[4] Sharma, 29.

[5] Foucault, 143.

[6] Foucault, 149.

[7] Foucault, 154.

[8] Foucault, 160. 

[9] Melissa A. Adler, “Disciplining Knowledge at the Library of Congress,” Knowledge Organization 39, no. 5 (2012): 370, https://doi.org/10.5771/0943-7444-2012-5-317.

[10] Adler 370-371.

[11] Foucault, 164.

[12] Foucault, 164.

[13] Adler 371.

[14] Jeffrey Pomerantz, Metadata (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2015), 6.

Creative Acts in Foucault’s Panoptic Surveillance State by Daryl Bergman

 “…with certain acts of cultural production we can find performances of freedom and suggestions of alternatives to ways of living under routinized surveillance.” [1]

 

In Disciple and Punish, Michel Foucault describes post Enlightenment structures of power that forge socially constructed individuals through discipline. [2] Foucault gives little consideration to the idea of human agency in his portrayal of the panoptic state. His characterizations of social interactions are wholly habituated, even vapidly procedural. Discipline and Punish conjures a kind of horror show; his analysis de-humanizes without reprieve. Although Foucault’s descriptions of the effects of panoptic surveillance are resonant, I found myself interested in the ways in which agency might be repossessed. Through this lens, the emergence and endurance of samizdat under domestic Soviet surveillance regimes offers a compelling challenge to Foucault’s portrayal of the docile, state-controlled body.

 

Broadly speaking, samizdat describes the practice of creating and distributing self-published clandestine texts in Soviet Russia and the greater USSR. (The term samizdat is derived from the Russian word samebyaizdat which translates to ‘a publishing house for oneself.’) [3] Early samizdat began circulating in the mid 1950’s and were primarily produced in academic and intellectual circles. [4] Samizdat provided a channel for distributing content outside of the prescriptions of the state and included, among other things, literary works, periodicals and bulletins, news, open letters, analytic texts, religious materials, manifestoes, satire and pornography. [5] Since access to printing equipment was minimal, some publishers used carbon paper and typewriters to copy texts while many others had only pen and paper. Some publications were bound, while others might have been held together with only paperclips. Many samizdat were meant to be added to or diffused through many writers. Since few copies could be made by such labor-intensive means, and since fewer copies were easier to keep out of the hands of secret police or government officials, samizdat were produced in small quantities and passed from person to person through trusted networks. [6]   

 

Like other modes of self-publishing, samizdat operated as loci of social activities that existed outside authoritative bodies of knowledge. In this way, samizdat can be seen as a form of resistance that undermines Foucault’s assertion that panoptic surveillance necessarily conditions people to behave in prescribed ways through the “partitioning” of “docile bodies.” If it is true that people were partitioned, then, via samizdat, they passed concealed notes through holes in their “cells.” Samizdat constitute physical evidence of resistance to the attempted partitioning of bodies. Their materiality bears traces of human touch and trade: paper brittle or crinkled from handling, smeared ink, handwritten notes, typos and corrections [7] convey a deep desire for communication and exchange of knowledge. 

 

Samizdat produced, preserved, and disseminated knowledge which might have otherwise been buried or lost. Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, for example, was first circulated as samizdat [8] as was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s, The Gulag Archipelago which was published, uncensored, outside the USSR in the early 1970’s.[9] The rights activist bulletin, Khronika Tekushchikh Sobytii, or Chronicle of Current Events, ran from 1968 until 1983 and informed readers of reports of human rights abuses and violations. Editors instructed readers to aid in the distribution of the Chronicle by re-typing or transcribing issues or by simply handing their copy to another reader. Since it would have been dangerous to publish the names or mailing addresses of the editors, information was passed from the Chronicle’s readership to the editorial team through the same person-to-person channels that were used for distribution. [10]

 

Through the proliferation of texts, and therefore knowledge, samizdat allowed editors, publishers and readers to maintain agency through creative cultural production. If, as Foucault asserts, power is everywhere, the persistence of samizdat represents a reactionary oppositional power that was able to preserve and grow its own influence. Given the success of samizdat, can it really be said that Soviet citizens were rendered docile? In 1982, several years after the publication of Discipline and Punish, Foucault gave his lecture Technologies of the Self in which he states that technologies of the self “permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies, souls, thoughts, conduct and way of being.” [11] Is this statement a re-examination of his earlier depiction of the disciplined body? If so, perhaps Discipline and Punishis a warning rather than a polemic.  

 

Like samizdat, libraries and archives are creative sites that legitimize knowledge and proliferate power. Art historian Ekaterina Degot contends that samizdat’s orientation was “on human relationships” and that “it [constructed] a system of interactions.” [12] Likewise, librarians and archivists construct systems of interaction and power through creative acts under prescribed systems of standards and rules. As LIS professionals, our work should also place emphasis on human relationships and interactions rather than prescribed procedures. If we privilege the idea that LIS work is a creative social activity, rather than an administrative one, we will necessarily construct practice around community needs and requirements. 

 

**

While searching for a topic, I became interested in samizdat from a history-of-rare-books-perspective as well as the notion that they might provide a connection to what I found lacking in Foucault’s explication of modern panoptic surveillance societies. This post is exploratory, but I am interested in continuing to examine how all this relates to LIS work, as well as other ways in which Foucault’s theories can be applied to the history and political nature of samizdat, artists’ books and small presses.  

 

Anecdotal to this post (but perhaps relevant for a longer paper) I learned while doing research that in 2014 a law was passed in Russia that made it possible to shut down websites with more than 3,000 daily visits unless owners gave the government full access. This law forces website owners to forfeit their anonymity and take legal responsibility for the factual accuracy of their content. [13] Effectively, it became impossible for dissident or anti-government speech to be posted online. Social media outlets are also easily censored by governments; a fact which inspired New York times opinion columnist Gal Beckerman to suggest that Russians “forget Facebook” and “bring back samizdat.” [14]

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[1] Browne, Simone. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.

[2] Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.

[3] Johnston, Gordon. “What is the History of Samizdat?” Social History, vol. 24, no. 2, d1999, pp. 115-133. Taylor & Francis Online, doi: 10.1080/03071029908568058. Accessed 23 Jan, 2021.

[4] Komaromi, Ann. “The Material Existence of Soviet Samizdat.” Slavic Review, vol. 63, no.3, 2004, pp. 597-618. JSTOR, doi: 10.2307/1520346. Accessed 23 Jan, 2021.

[5] Johnston, Gordon. 

[6] Komaromi, Ann. “The Material Existence of Soviet Samizdat.” Slavic Review, vol. 63, no.3, 2004, pp. 597-618. JSTOR, doi: 10.2307/1520346. Accessed 23 Jan, 2021.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Komaromi, Ann. “Samizdat and Dissident Publics.” Slavic Review, vol. 71, no.1, 2004, pp. 70-90. JSTOR, doi: 10.5612/slavicreview.71.1.0070. Accessed 23 Jan, 2021.

[9] Komaromi, Ann. About Samizdat. Soviet Samizdat and Periodicals, https://samizdat.library.utoronto.ca/content/about-samizdat. Accessed 23 Jan, 2021.

[10] Ibid. 

[11] Foucault, Michel. “Technologies of The Self: Lectures at University of Vermont October, 1982.”  Foucault.info, https://foucault.info/documents/foucault.technologiesOfSelf.en. Accessed 23 Jan, 2021.

[12] Gilbert, Anne. Publishing as Artistic Practice. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016.

[13] “Russia Enacts ‘Draconian’ Law for Bloggers and Online Media.” BBC News, 31 July, 2014, https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-28583669.Accessed 23 Jan, 2021.

[14] Beckerman, Gal. “Forget Facebook, Bring Back Samizdat.” New York Times, 11 May, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/12/opinion/forget-facebook-bring-back-samizdat.html. Accessed 23 Jan, 2021.

Producing Truth at the Skid Row History Museum & Archive | Brian Belak

In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault concludes his chapter on disciplinary training with a statement on the productive nature of power: “In fact, power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth.”[1] Through processes of hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment, and examination, Foucault describes systems of disciplinary power that construct classification and knowledge about individuals and moral society. Melissa Adler then applies this analysis to library and archive work through a critique of classification at the Library of Congress. Arguing that library classifications “reproduce dominant discourses and produce silences through censorship or undercataloging,” she calls for the implementation of self-tagging within these systems, thereby providing “opportunities for minority and marginalized voices to speak in their own terms.”[2]

In this post I will apply these analyses of disciplinary power to the work of the Skid Row History Museum & Archive (SRHMA), where I am interning this academic year.[3] As a community-based archive dedicated to the unhoused and neglected community in Los Angeles’ Skid Row neighborhood, SRHMA demonstrates a process of resisting dominant strains of discourse to produce alternative knowledge. Like Adler’s call for self-tagging, SRHMA creates the opportunity for production by the marginalized, not those in control of a surveillance system. Despite this potential, I conclude by questioning my own positionality as an MLIS student working remotely on this archive during the COVID-19 pandemic and contributing to its organization as an outsider.

            As a project of performing arts group Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD, an acronym itself designed to confuse the nomenclature of power), SRHMA has its roots in previous LAPD projects that assert the past and presence of a thriving and artistic community, notably the 2002 exhibition Is there history on Skid Row?.[4] The archive today contains a variety of materials made by LAPD and affiliated artists across its almost forty-year performance history, collected from activist organizations working from Skid Row, and created by academics, journalists, politicians about Skid Row and its residents. The museum and archival workspace is situated in a storefront downtown and ordinarily hosts exhibitions, performances, and community gathering—though the museum is currently closed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

            For Foucault, examination is one part of disciplinary power that constructs knowledge through “the accumulation of documents, their seriation, the organization of comparative fields making it possible to classify, to form categories, to determine averages, to fix norms.”[5] Archivists demonstrate this power through their collection and documentation procedures, thereby asserting significance about materials and deciding norms in the historical record. SRHMA’s mission is therefore to use this same power on behalf of the marginalized community to create alternative understandings of significance and normality. Furthermore, Michelle Caswell describes the productive power of identity-based community archives as “not just about collecting materials that document people who look like us … but about finding precedence in the past for how we move forward” – the archival imaginary.[6] By asserting the history and humanity of those who live in Skid Row, SRHMA produces knowledge for the future and tools for justice.

This process is executed through a collection policy that expands beyond materials made by Skid Row residents to materials from outsiders, creating a corpus of discourse about Skid Row to be analyzed and mobilized. One of the collections I’m working on consists of newspapers and articles related to Skid Row and homelessness, including many from mainstream publications – Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Herald ­­Examiner – that present a dismissive view of the neighborhood. Simone Browne quotes Steve Mann to define sousveillance, a corollary to surveillance, as “acts of ‘observing and recording by an entity not in a position of power or authority over the subject of the veillance.’”[7] SRHMA’s collection presents a method of sousveillance of the systems marginalizing the neighborhood and its residents through popular and political discourse. Articles that emphasize violence, drug use, and portray Skid Row residents as criminals on the street by choice have fed directly into programs like the Safer Cities Initiative that increased the police presence on Skid Row dramatically.[8] Similar to the case study from Gillian Rose of historians studying London’s East End of the 1880s to “examine the way bourgeoisie produced an apparently truthful account of the working-class area, and to explore the effects that had on its residents in terms of the various institutional interventions legitimated by that ‘truth,’”[9] LAPD uses these collections in their performances and activism to advocate for better treatment and resources for Skid Row residents. The current exhibition at the museum, “How to House 7000 People In Skid Row,”[10] connects directly to LAPD’s organization of public comments on the City Planning Department’s DTLA 2040 plan, arguing instead for a plan to extend affordable housing zoning to all of Skid Row.[11]

Beyond simply collecting the material, SRHMA presents the opportunity for materials to be contextualized according to the community’s perspective. Adler discusses institutional Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) that misrepresent and marginalize groups that are deemed somehow flawed and “incapable of adequate social participation.”[12] Yet LSCH and other disciplined vocabularies are adopted widely by institutions to describe archival and library materials, regardless of affiliation to the Library of Congress itself or other federal institutions. The description and metadata at SRHMA does not incorporate LCSH and is instead formed from the vocabulary of activists and residents in Skid Row. As the archival work is typically undertaken in the same museum space that acts as a community gathering space, dialog can readily inform description. Additionally, as many of the collections are formed from LAPD projects written and performed by Skid Row residents, their perspective is inherent in the documents themselves. A project like What Fuels Development? (2016) that comments directly on events in the neighborhood—in this case, activism to halt a liquor license for a restaurant in the ground floor of a residential hotel housing formerly homeless people—demonstrates this process. Within the project is a critique of euphemisms for parts of Skid Row used by developers to rebrand the neighborhood without its current residents like “historic core,” “gallery row” or the “new downtown.”[13] The materials and recordings of the performances are housed in the archive and serve to frame and describe collected outside accounts of the events.[14]

Unfortunately, the days of the COVID-19 pandemic are not typical times. While archival work continues, I began my internship in September and haven’t been able to work in the museum or collaborate much with the community that would otherwise influence the description and classification I impart to SRHMA materials. While the pandemic has furthered hardship for Skid Row residents, I am privileged to have steady housing, food, and means to stay healthy. In many ways, I am an outsider, yet I participate in the discourse that produces knowledge in the archive. That my perspective may reproduce dominant discourse and limit the productive power of SRHMA’s archival work remains a challenge.

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[1] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish and The Birth of the Prison. (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 194.

[2] Melissa Adler, “Disciplining Knowledge at the Library of Congress,” Knowledge Organization 39, no. 5 (2012).

[3] Sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the UCLA Community Archives Lab.

[4] Los Angeles Poverty Department, “Is there history on Skid Row?” https://www.lapovertydept.org/projects/is-there-history-on-skid-row/

[5] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 190.

[6] Michelle Caswell, “Inventing New Archival Imaginaries: Theoretical Foundations for

Identity-Based Community Archives,” Identity Palimpsests (Los Angeles, CA: Litwin Books, 2014), 49.

[7] Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 19.

[8] Heather Mac Donald, “Skid row in rehab,” Los Angeles Times, November 18, 2007, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2007-nov-18-op-mac_donald18-story.html/

[9] Gillian Rose, “Discourse Analysis I and II” in Visual Methodologies: 3^rd Edition (Sage: Thousand Oaks, CA, 2012), 196.

[10] Video walkthrough available while the museum is closed: https://vimeo.com/481505119

[11] “Public Comments by Skid Row advocates submitted to DCP's DTLA2040 draft community plan.” YouTube video, 43:07, Los Angeles Poverty Department, January 13, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wx-aZN0IdRw

[12] Adler, “Disciplining Knowledge.”

[13] Los Angeles Poverty Department, “What Fuels Development?” https://www.lapovertydept.org/what-fuels-development/

[14] Gale Holland, “Alcohol permit denied for eatery in building that serves homeless,” Los Angeles Times, March 13, 2014, https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-xpm-2014-mar-13-la-me-ln-skid-row-alcohol-20140313-story.html