Decolonising the library: a theoretical exploration, Crilly, J (2019)
I selected this reading as in my role as a Critical Studies Subject Tutor I work with object-based learning through an archive built from Colonised activity at the Edward James Foundation. I am also a white Australian and find the recent rise of awareness of decolonising the curriculum in the U.K. intriguing. Questioning colonial activities is embedded in my approach to teaching by de-centring traditional Global North concepts and references, which made me keen to discover innovative new learning strategies from the reading. When the article referred to Colonialisation as a “settler action” (Kennedy, 2016, p.2) I was concerned about the reductiveness until the authors introduced intellectual and cultural Colonialisation. I would argue aesthetic colonisation belongs to this discussion on the library owing to the aestheticisation of style, which students seem to misunderstand as “referencing”. I appreciated the authors being specific with terminology and describing ‘epistemic totality’ as a characteristic of Eurocentric knowledge. This could substitute the term “Universal” which is often used as a generalisation. The example of the 1768 Encyclopaedia Britannica may have had more depth if it had been aligned with Hume’s 1739 Treatise on Human Nature, which critiques objective and subjective reality because it results in Kant’s 1781 Critique of Pure Reason that posits man’s knowledge as central to understanding “worldly objects”. This intellectually reverses the 16th Century Copernican Revolution that understood man is not the centre of the universe and persists within contemporary academic problematics.
I understand the concept of epistemic ‘pluriversity’ as an attempt to acknowledge ‘the co-existence of different epistemic traditions and systems’ as a ‘horizontal strategy of openness to dialogue among different epistemic traditions’ (Mignolo, 2013b; Mbembe, 2016) however, the term attempts to “generalise” and “homogenise” that which persists as individual and multiple. It reminds me of a similar problem with the term “woman”, where the multiple is made “one”. The question to ask is why the ‘the co-existence of different epistemic traditions and systems’ needs a singular term and is this singularisation a colonising act in itself? I would argue that it is. I completely agree that the Dewey Decimal Classification System established in 1876, which is still used today inherently marginalises. The article did not seem to offer any solutions to this beyond focusing interventions on highlighting the biases of the system however, no examples were made explicit. The concluding point of the article was to decolonise reading lists and the library’s collaborative participation in this. I would expand on this to conclude library contents can also reflect student and tutor demand and as individuals we can all play an active role in decolonising how the creative arts are taught and understood by requesting books representing diverse epistemologies.
References
Crilly, J (2019) Decolonising the library: a theoretical exploration, Spark: UAL Creative Teaching and Learning Journal. Vol 4 / Issue 1 (2019) pp.6-15
Kennedy, D. (2016) Decolonization: a very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mignolo, W.D. (2013a) ‘Yes we can: non-European thinkers and philosophers’, Al Jazeera, 19 February. Available at: https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/02/20132672747320891.html (Accessed: 17 March 2024).
Mbembe, A.J. (2016) ‘Decolonizing the university: new directions’, Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 15(1), pp.29–45. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1474022215618513.