RE: Afterwor(l)ding Toward Imaginative Dimensions by Andrea Domínguez

RE: Afterwor(l)ding Toward Imaginative Dimensions

I am so focused on the imaginary world which is trying to whisper to me how to write a story that unlocks a heart - adrienne maree brown

One of my favorite reads of 2021 was Knowledge Justice edited by Sofia Y. Leung and Jorge R. López-McKnight. I know it’s a favorite because I keep thinking about it and weaving the book’s offerings into my personal and academic reflections. For months now it has stayed on my mind. And isn’t that what we say to people when we care about them: “I am thinking of you”, “you are on my mind”. So it makes sense to say that I care about this book, and why I decided to share this response with you my dear reader. 

In “Afterwor(l)ding: Toward Imaginative Dimensions” the editors write “we believe deeply that something brought you to these voices and words; we know you found more than you were hoping for”. [1] And they are right. I feel a deep gratitude for the gift of language that was shared on the pages of this book. A language that names and identifies the pervasiveness of white supremacy and its harmful manifestations: epistemic supremacy, neutrality, vocational awe, and the apartheid of knowledge in LIS. This is more than just a word catalog. Leung and López-Mcknight remind us of George Lipsitz’s affirmation that “every site of knowledge is a site of liberation”. [2] The commitment of knowing and naming these harms brings forth the possibility for disruption and transformation.

As a Chicana and first year MLIS graduate student I was relieved to encounter the writings of information professionals engaging with a framework that validates my experience of reality. Isabel Espina, April M. Hathcock, and Maria Rios share in “Dewhitening Librarianship”: “CRT helps us relax and understand that it’s not us, it’s the racialized system that creates an ontological dissonance”.[3] It’s not easy to arrive at these conclusions alone in a world that tells us exactly the opposite, so to receive these messages, this much needed validation is healing. I don’t take it for granted, it’s the reason why I feel compelled to write this reflection.

Because the work is always ongoing, Sofia and Jorge know to leave us with this hopeful concluding message, a gentle invitation to continue expanding our understanding of liberation:

“It would bring us joy if BIPOC information workers committed to liberation engaged, debated, and assessed these ideas. We hope the work opens up new pathways of hope, imagination, and community, reshaping our relationships to the world, each other, and ourselves. The work, we hope, is always already in motion, and in the same moment, already where it needs to be, right here with you”.[4]

And so in reciprocity to the care of the editors and collaborators of Knowledge Justice, and with the hopes that it will bring them joy, I engage their ideas to move alongside them ‘toward imaginative dimensions’. However, after more than two years of pandemic and collective grief, I feel untethered and disoriented. I know where we’re headed to, but how do we get there? 

The most grounding and hopeful answer to this question comes from the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh, from whom I learned that it is possible for us to touch the future in the present moment—”the future is being made out of the present, so the best way to take care of the future is to take care of the present moment”.[5] This lesson on the interbeing of time means that we’re already there, in the imaginative dimensions we hope for, or in Thich Nhat Hanh words: “not only is the past here in the form of the present; the future is here too”.[6]We can touch the future in the present moment when we listen, because it leads us to compassion and understanding, thus moving us forward. 

In “Being Assumed Not To Be: A Critique of Whiteness as An Archival Imperative”, Mario H. Ramirez discusses questioning whiteness and having honest dialogues about how we perpetuate inequality to liberate ourselves and in turn, inaugurate a praxis that listens.[7] I love this idea of a praxis that listens, and I wish we can continue envisioning collectively what this praxis looks like. I wonder how we can teach ourselves to listen, first to ourselves and then to all our relations. How can we include the practice of listening into our accountability models, especially in a field that has perpetuated so much harm? 

I believe listening is necessary, it can be an antidote to the historical silencing we seek to address in LIS. It can also aid us in shattering colonial fantasies because it is about connection, about interbeing rather than distance and fragmentation. We need to compliment the courageous act of speaking up, of sharing our truths with the act of listening. We need to learn how to listen in a way that allows for the speaking up to be transformative. It matters that we think about who gets to be heard, and it matters more that we recognize ourselves as deserving of this compassion. 

I feelthink[8] that to ‘inaugurate a praxis that listens’ we must recognize all that listening entails, and ask of us – physically, mentally, spiritually–so we can engage mindfully in this practice. In Memory Serves beloved literary ancestor Lee Maracle’s (Sto:lo) offers us great insight about the embodiment of listening:

“Listening is an emotional spiritual, and, physical act. It takes a huge emotional commitment to listen, to sort, to imagine the intent, to evaluate, to process and to seek the connection to the words offered so that remembering can be fair and just. Spiritually words are sacred; this makes listening a ceremony. And because it engages our imagination it is also an art form”.[9]

I pause this reflection for now and pray that we can find moments in the present to continue this dialogue on listening. I also hope that the next time you find yourself feeling lost or disheartened that you find comfort in remembering that the dimensions where love is, they’re already here with us, because we imagined them so. 

[1] Sofia Y. Leung and Jorge R. López-McKnight,  “Afterworlding: Toward Imaginative Dimensions,” in Knowledge Justice, ed. Sofia Y. Leung and Jorge R. López McKnight (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2021), 330.

[2]  Ibid, 325.

[3]  Isabel Espina, April M. Hathcock, and Maria Rios, “Dewhitening Librarianship,” in Knowledge Justice ed. Sofia Y. Leung and Jorge R. López McKnight (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2021), 226.

[4] Sofia Y. Leung and Jorge R. López-McKnight,  “Afterworlding: Toward Imaginative Dimensions,” 332.

[5] Thich Nhat Hanh, You are here: Discovering the magic of the present moment (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 2012), 51.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Mario H. Ramirez, “"Being assumed not to be: A critique of whiteness as an archival imperative,” The American Archivist 78, no.2 (2015): 352.

[8] Inés Hernández-Avila, “Reflections on Dignity from a Woman Who Walks Tall”, About Place Journal 5, no.3 (2019) https://aboutplacejournal.org/issues/dignity-as-an-endangered-species/identity/ines-hernandez-avila/. I learned about sentipensar (to feelthink) from Professor Inés Hernández-Ávila (Nimipu/Tejana): “Mayan and Zoque thinkers in Chiapas have combined the two verbs, “sentir” [“to feel”] and “pensar” [“to think”] into the verb verb “sentipensar” [“to feelthink”]. The mind does not work by itself, but is in dialogue with the heart”. 

[9]  Lee Maracle, Memory Serves (Edmonton: NeWest Publishers, 2015), 21.

The Master's Tools: Incommensurability and Transgression in the Archive, by Anna Robinson-Sweet

“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]

Audre Lorde’s words challenge belief in the liberatory possibilities of the archive. The archive has been undeniably a tool of the racist patriarchy—the records that constitute the archive’s holdings a means by which human lives were turned into disposable commodities. As Sadiya Hartman says, “The archive of slavery rests upon a founding violence.”[2] Acknowledging the truth of this statement means we must also contend with Lorde’s assertion and interrogate the archives’ utility in dismantling the master’s house.

Doing so compels me to revisit a paper I wrote five years ago, in which I argued that archivists, through their work, have the ability to influence the enactment of reparations. Inspiration for this paper came initially from two sources: reading Verne Harris for the first time and emerging news from Georgetown University, where a discovery in the archives documenting the university’s sale of enslaved persons led to the establishment of a commission to award reparations to descendants of these persons. Articles by Harris such as “The Archival Sliver: Power, memory, and archives in South Africa” suggested that archives could open the door for a reckoning with racism, if archivists were willing to “hear the calling of justice.”[3] When writing my paper I hadn’t yet encountered another article by Harris, this one from twelve years after “The Archival Sliver,” in which he bemoans the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as mostly a failure, “an expression of…a need by particular global interests to have experts who can claim a social scientific ability to conjure new democratic life from the corpses of authoritarian politics without giving any space to revolutionary transformation.”[4] The Georgetown example also proved a disappointment, as the university has yet to award any of the reparations promised in the wake of their archival “reckoning”.[5]

Sadiya Hartman, like Lorde, could have predicted this failure. In Lose Your Mother, Hartman writes of her “agnosticism” on the cause of formal reparations: “I had grown weary of pleading our case and repeating our complaint. It seems to be there is something innately servile about making an appeal to a deaf ear or praying for relief to an indifferent and hostile court…”[6] These words point to the futility of expecting the master’s tools—in this case, the court system—to dismantle systems that continue to perpetuate harm. If we dismiss the possibility, or even desirability, for reparation via the archive, where does that leave the archive? What can it offer? Hartman suggests that the answer might be found in grappling with the very inadequacy of the archive. She writes that the “silence in the archive” when combined with the constraints of an episteme focused on quantifying violence, results in a sense of loss that suggests, “it would not be far-fetched to consider stories as a form of compensation or even as reparations, perhaps the only kind we will ever receive.”[7]

The stories that Hartman longs to tell are not afforded by the archives and its evidence, but rather are told in an effort to push against “the limits of the sayable dictated by the archive.”[8] These limits have been set when it comes to telling the stories of the enslaved, but can they be negotiated in the present? If we understand the futility, as Harris says, of attempting transformation from a past that has not actually past, is it possible to construct an archive that imagines a future where the injustice is in the past? Is there an archival future that bridges the gap between the incommensurability of the experience and the facts of the record?

My desire for an affirmative answer to these questions has subconsciously motivated my work as an archivist. For example, upon taking a position at a university archives, I was dismayed to discover that the repository held almost no records documenting the history of student struggles at the institution. The only evidence of the discontent that frequently manifested in hunger-strikes, sit-ins, and labor stoppages was administrative memos and reports. Such records are unlikely to ever bring about a historical reckoning. My archival response was to begin filling this silence by conducting oral histories with past and present student organizers, interviews which now reside in the university’s online archive, alongside university leaders’ oral histories. While the silence I identified may have been partially filled, there is a different discomfort in seeing stories of struggle against the institution’s racism and patriarchy couched so neatly within the confines of the institutional archive. There is an incommensurability between the story-as-record, compliant with oral history best practice and tidily described, and the persistence of the struggles being conveyed. Perhaps the best we can hope for is that this incommensurability will be recognized and named, that future storytellers will continue to transgress the archive, creating their own tools for dismantling the master’s house.


[1] 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): 111.

[2] Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” small axe 26 (June 2008):10.

[3] Verne Harris, “The Archival Sliver: Power, Memory, and Archives in South Africa,” Archival Science 2:1-2 (2002): 85.

[4] Verne Harris, “Antonyms of Our Remembering,” Archival Science 14, no. 3–4 (October 2014): 26, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-014-9221-5.

[5] Susan Svrluga, “Georgetown students renew push for reparations to descendants of enslaved people, Washington Post, December 9, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/12/09/georgetown-reparations-slavery-students/.

[6] Sadiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007): 166.

[7] Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 4.

[8] Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 12.

Proposing a Holistic Approach

 

“For a long time, activists did not necessarily think that it mattered to take care of themselves in terms of what they eat, in terms of mental self-care, corporal self-care, and spiritual self-care...what mattered was the movement and that hurt a lot of us.”

-Angela Davis, On Radical Self-Care via Afropunk

In the chapter, “Praxis for the People: Critical Race Theory and Archival Practice” Rachel Winston writes about the reality of being a Black woman archivist. She writes, “I find myself fewer than five Black professional staff and the sole Black archivist in an entire library system at one of the largest universities in the country.”^[1] What brings her to this role and what keeps her persisting through the difficulties she faces as an archivist is her identity as a Black woman. Winston rightly names the “twofold”^[2] nature of whiteness in the archive. She writes about the first, “I feel its oppressive presence when I walk into the library building and when I walk into the archival stacks.”^[3] As well as, the inability to “turn away or disengage”^[4] with historical trauma of records. Winston uses Critical Race Theory (CRT) as a critical framework to determine archival praxis that, “create space for racially and nonracially marginalized voices to be elevated.”^[5] She also names Black feminism (BF) as another important critical theory of future archival praxis because of the ethic of caring centering the notion that ideas cannot de divorced from the individuals who create and share them.

            While I agree that CRT and BF have been essential critiques of power, economy, and white supremacy in relation to marginalizing oppression, I argue that neither address the significance or perspective of being a Black woman. These ideologies support and uplift the cause of undoing Black women’s oppression in context of “anti-capitalist praxis”^[6] and “acknowledging the inherent politics of our work and the false pretense of archival neutrality.”^[7] They speak mostly to the nonblack woman outsider. I argue that the inclusion of womanism in critical discourse along with CRT and Black feminism will create a holistic approach that help archivists find wholeness. Incorporating womanist methods along with CRT and BF, archivists may craft the space within themselves to find embodiment and a sense of self while encountering whiteness working in the archive.

CRT uncovers to the “bloody”^[8] roots of the institutions like the archive. Black feminism challenges systems rooted in “economic exploitation, white privilege, and power.”^[9]  It resists all too often misrepresentations of Black women that influence law and policy. Womanism, a close cousin of Black feminism points Black women archivists (or any Black women who proclaim their life and witness) back to herself.  In this way, doing womanism alongside Black feminism and CRT is practicing radical soul-care while physically encountering records of terror and joy and working with microagressive coworkers.

The line of womanism I am referring to is sourced from several writings by Alice Walker in the late 1970s and early 1980s. She makes the claim that “a womanist is aware of her own value.”^[10] From this cultural center, Blackness is implicit. There is no need to preface it with “Black” as in Black feminism because the primary knowledge source is Black women’s intersectional experience. This concept comes from the legacy of honoring Black women’s life and witness.

Winston writes that she wants her work to be “an act of counternarrative by challenging the normalization of erasure.”^[11] That task should no longer be completed with CRT and Black feminist framework alone. Partnering with methods from womanism, such as womanist counternarrative, by Emilie M. Townes offers that history can be told differently and language that emerges by centering the Black gaze is knowledge^[12]. CRT and Black feminism work with the tendency for institutions and their representative to “forget”^[13] the truth about racism and make circular requests for education. Townes writes, “it is not healthy–not even for the dominant elite–to fail to remember the textures of our common humanity…it is strategic in that to ‘forget’ is to be able to feign ignorance and lack of agency.”^[14] CRT and Black feminism push Black archivists to serve in roles where they are subjected to isolation, gaslighting, and justifying to their colleague and audiences why the source of their/our anger and joy matters, as Winston describes.

Womanist methods push the caring approach beyond “simply acknowledging the labor of archivist processing and working with challenging or difficult material.”^[15] it suggests that Black women’s labor should no longer be sacrificial,^[16] rather it can exist to build the substance of Black women’s particularity.^[17] I propose that the inclusion of womanism when seeking an archival praxis with CRT and Black feminism creates a holistic approach. Womanism affirms ethics, language and Spirit that challenge metaphysical notions of ageism, sexism, classism, colorism, homophobia, racism, and more.^[18] Womanist praxis centers the complex experience of being and gifts Black women a chance at wholeness.

---

^[1] Rachel E. Winston, “Praxis for the People: Critical Race Theory and Archival Practice,” in Knowledge Justice: Disrupting Library and Information Studies through Critical Race Theory (Cambridge: MIT, 2021).

^[2] Winston.

^[3] Winston.

^[4] Rachel E. Winston, “Praxis for the People: Critical Race Theory and Archival Practice,” in Knowledge Justice: Disrupting Library and Information Studies through Critical Race Theory (Cambridge: MIT, 2021), 284.

^[5] Winston.

^[6] Rose M. Brewer, “Black Feminism and Womanism,” in Companion to Feminist Studies, ed. Nancy A. Naples, First Edition (New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2021), 91–104.

^[7] Winston, “Praxis for the People: Critical Race Theory and Archival Practice.”

^[8] Jarrett Martin Drake, “Blood at the Root,” Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies 8, no. 6 (2021): 1–23.

^[9]  Winston, “Praxis for the People: Critical Race Theory and Archival Practice.”

^[10] Brewer, “Black Feminism and Womanism.”

^[11] Winston, “Praxis for the People: Critical Race Theory and Archival Practice.”

^[12] Emilie M. Townes, Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

^[13] Townes.

^[14] Townes.

^[15] Winston, “Praxis for the People: Critical Race Theory and Archival Practice.”

^[16] Townes, Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil.

^[17] Townes.

^[18] Townes.

The Settled Library – Settler Colonialism in Library Settings, by Steenalisa Tilcock

            As a library user who is now progressing toward a career in librarianship, I am beginning to realize just how much I have taken the internal structure of the library for granted. However, like other forms of public space, everything in the library has been influenced and produced by dominant settler colonialist ideologies, which prevents them from fully serving indigenous users. Inspired by Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s critical inspection of research methodology[1], in this blog post I will examine the classification systems, organizational schemes, and conceptions of legitimate knowledge used by libraries in order to address their settler colonialist ties. I will also attempt to imagine how alternatives suggested by indigenous scholars can apply to a library setting.

The organization of library materials is not a neutral matter, but reflects the epistemology and values of a settler colonial society. Littletree and Metoyer discuss this in detail in their article “Knowledge Organization from an Indigenous Perspective,” which enumerates the ways in which standard cataloguing practices, guided by the Library of Congress, privilege non-indigenous language and concepts.[2] Littletree & Metoyer cite examples from a museum setting, but these concepts are very relevant in libraries as well. They state, “Scholars and librarians have indicated that the cataloging language silences Native American history. It disregards the sovereignty of Native nations, as well as historicizes and stereotypes Native people and cultures.”[3]  This misuse of language not only misrepresents indigenous concepts, twisting them and distorting them in order to fit into a settler context, but it also makes it difficult for indigenous users to locate material about their own cultures within libraries, privileging the settler user’s access to information about indigenous peoples. Subject headings beyond indigenous subjects prioritize settler perspectives: everything in the library, from fiction to cookbooks to history, is classified based on settler colonialist ideology. As such, indigenous users in libraries are forced to apply settler concepts to their own searches for information.

Out of curiosity, I conducted some brief searches in the Library of Congress subject headings database. A glance at the subject headings for the term “Spirituality,” for example, reveals that there are a plethora of options for spirituality related to organized religious practice, especially predominately Western religions.[4]  The entry for the generic term states, “Here are entered works about the personal search for sacredness or meaning that may be independent from organized religion.”[5]  None of these options seem to be applicable in an indigenous context, in light of Littletree and Metoyer’s statement that “Spirituality is an all-encompassing presence throughout one’s life.”[6] I also searched for the term “Miwok,” the tribe on whose unceded territory I grew up. I clicked on the entry for “Miwok Mythology,” and under this heading, three works from the LOC database were listed. As far as I was able to ascertain, all three of them were written by white authors—an anthropologist, an ornithologist, and a British author.[7] None of them, notably, were Miwok themselves.

Although this is only a small sample of the LOC subject headings, it harkens to the large body of research that Tuhiwai Smith discusses which was by settlers about indigenous peoples.[8] This research was conducted without understanding of the social and epistemological structures of indigenous societies and tends to generalize settler concepts onto indigenous social structures.[9] Much of this work is not only inaccurate, but in service of settler dominance. Tuhiwai Smith, for example, cites research about Maori women which completely misplaces them, comparing their role to that of Victorian women in the “domestic sphere.”[10] However, as Tuhiwai Smtih states, “Indigenous women would argue that their traditional roles included full participation in many aspects of political decision making and marked gender separations which were complementary in order to maintain harmony and stability.”[11] Even though the experiences of Maori women directly contradicts what has been written about them, the settler body of research carries a legitimacy granted to it by settler epistemological prioritization of written work and the structures of academia, while Maori women’s stories are granted no such value.[12]

When works like these become available through libraries, they contribute to the perpetuation of harmful conceptions of indigenous peoples. Of course, libraries also contain works by indigenous peoples about themselves. The trouble is that when patrons enter a library looking for materials about indigenous peoples, it’s not always obvious who it was written by and what methods or motivations were employed. Does the author belong to or have a close relationship with the peoples they wrote about? What were their motivations? How does their personal position problematize their story? Placing works by indigenous peoples and by settlers in the same categories and shelf locations obscures the answers to these questions and affords them the same level of legitimacy, ignoring the epistemological biases of settler authors. In this way, academia’s privileging of “scholarly” settler works about indigenous peoples over their own knowledge about themselves[13] also presents itself in the library.

Libraries can take an active role in the “unsettling,” to use Tuck and Yang’s word,[14] of each of these structures, which would allow them to better serve indigenous patrons. For example, they could take cue from The Mashantucket Pequot Thesaurus of American Indian Terminology Project and use subject headings informed or wholly created by indigenous people when it comes to both indigenous and non-indigenous subjects.[15] This approach could help libraries distinguish texts created by indigenous people and harmful texts created by settler researchers—by including information about the origin of the text from an indigenous perspective in catalogue metadata, libraries may be better able to epistemologically separate them. Libraries could also think about the kinds of relationships between texts when they place them physically near each other on shelves. What kinds of epistemological biases are reflected in the current placements, and how can they rearranged to reflect indigenous ways of thinking and knowing? Can libraries re-examine current systems like Dewey and utilize other kinds of connections between materials, like genealogical ones? Grappling with questions like these may help libraries deconstruct their colonial biases and provide better information access to indigenous users.

---

[1] Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 3rd ed. (Zed Books, 2001).

[2] Littletree and Metoyer, “Knowledge Organization from an Indigenous Perspective: The Mashantucket Pequot Thesaurus of American Indian Terminology Project,.”

[3] Littletree and Metoyer.

[4] Congress, “- LC Linked Data Service.”

[5] Congress, “Spirituality - LC Linked Data Service.”

[6] Littletree and Metoyer, “Knowledge Organization from an Indigenous Perspective: The Mashantucket Pequot Thesaurus of American Indian Terminology Project,.”

[7] Congress, “Miwok Mythology - LC Linked Data Service.”

[8] Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies.

[9] Tuhiwai Smith.

[10] Tuhiwai Smith.

[11] Tuhiwai Smith, 153.

[12] Tuhiwai Smith.

[13] Tuhiwai Smith.

[14] Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.”

[15] Littletree and Metoyer, “Knowledge Organization from an Indigenous Perspective: The Mashantucket Pequot Thesaurus of American Indian Terminology Project,.”

Bibliography

 

Congress, The Library of. “- LC Linked Data Service: Authorities and Vocabularies | Library of Congress, from LC Linked Data Service: Authorities and Vocabularies (Library of Congress).” Webpage. Accessed January 30, 2022. https://id.loc.gov/search/?q=memberOf:http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/collection_LCSHAuthorizedHeadings.

 

Congress, The Library of. “Miwok Mythology - LC Linked Data Service: Authorities and Vocabularies | Library of Congress, from LC Linked Data Service: Authorities and Vocabularies (Library of Congress).” Webpage. Accessed February 6, 2022. https://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh94000795.html.

 

Congress, The Library of. “Spirituality - LC Linked Data Service: Authorities and Vocabularies | Library of Congress, from LC Linked Data Service: Authorities and Vocabularies (Library of Congress).” Webpage. Accessed January 30, 2022. https://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85126779.html.

 

Littletree, Sandra, and Cheryl A. Metoyer. “Knowledge Organization from an Indigenous Perspective: The Mashantucket Pequot Thesaurus of American Indian Terminology Project,.” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, 53, no. 5–6 (July 31, 2015): 640–57. https://doi.org/10.1080/01639374.2015.1010113.

 

Tuck, Eve, and K Wayne Yang. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40.

 

Tuhiwai Smith, Linda. Decolonizing Methodologies. 3rd ed. Zed Books, 2001.