Decolonising: to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up
In this, the second in a series of blogposts from the Inclusive Cataloguing Working Group of the Diversity and Inclusion Allies, Philip Milnes-Smith works towards a provisional definition of decolonising catalogues.
Decolonising: to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up
Let’s start with the prefix ‘de-’: this is used in English to indicate moving away from and undoing or reversing the impact of the word it precedes. In the case of decolonising archival practice, the opposite is not, perhaps, obvious. What has been ‘colonising’ about our profession? First, to start with (past) colonial recordkeeping, it prioritised, for example, the written record at the expense of oral (and other) recordkeeping traditions of conquered peoples (deemed primitive). It has also ‘taken as read’ that the authoritative records of empire were just those written in English by the colonial civil service (even when they may have mischaracterised, misunderstood, or suppressed alternative indigenous perspectives). It has not questioned the rectitude of records being appraised for retention only in the interests of Britain, or of the resultant archives of former colonies belonging in England rather than the successor states, and easily accessible to their citizens.
Even for those of us who do not work with these kinds of records, we are likely to have had our practice informed by the colonial era public record office mindset of Hilary Jenkinson without having surfaced for ourselves what was being taken for granted. Employing local and national lenses may mean that we have not spotted the international ramifications of the records we are cataloguing (a Lancashire cotton mill did not get its raw materials from local yeoman farmers, and a railway or brewery might have been founded with compensation payments for slave-holding). Our archival description might be over-dependent on the vocabulary in the records themselves, rather than taking a more impartial stance that does not continue to privilege as definitive the partial perspective of the records creator. We have not problematised the extent to which we have catalogued archives for people who look and think like us – or bothered too much that the profession has a cataloguing workforce with a profile that does not match the society in which we live.
Decolonising has been dismissed as woke virtue-signalling to appease radicalised students, allowing institutions “to insulate themselves from the charge of 'being on the wrong side of history.” There are opportunity costs if the canon we study has more diverse perspectives, meaning we may hear less from dead white men (but that does not mean racially motivated cancellation). However, in my opinion, the work of decentring European viewpoints could (and should) still be done by someone who believes on balance that the British Empire was a force for good in the world and something of which to be proud. This is because decolonisation is not a project rooted in “cringing embarrassment about our history.” It is not (in Oliver Dowden’s words) seeking “to run from or airbrush… history”, “[p]urging uncomfortable elements” or demanding collective white guilt or shame. Nor is it unpatriotically damning “the faults of previous generations whilst forgetting their many great achievements”. Indeed, ensuring understanding of the “moral complexity” of the past could see us implement “retain and explain” by foregrounding past critiques of, for example, enslavement, or oppressive and violent exploitation (allowing people to ‘judge’ the past by the standards of the past).
So what would ‘decolonising catalogues’ mean?
Decolonisation of archival description is an ongoing process rather than a destination.
Decolonising means cataloguing with as much care for records subjects (named or not) and records users as records creators. It means being alert to and acknowledging the gaps and silences and ensuring our users understand that the archival sliver is not, and was never intended to be, representative. The sedimentation process that resulted in our collections was not always a natural or equitable one – sometimes streams of thought were dammed up and limbs of the tree of knowledge lopped off through human agency, erasing parts of, and calculatedly editing, the record to ensure some perspectives would be forgotten. NB Our collection development response may mean un-Jenkinsonian practices like deliberate collection of viewpoints that might otherwise be lost.
Decolonising also means supporting a wider variety of users than heretofore, ensuring they can access our records without being alienated by language they deem inappropriate, offensive or wrong. That may mean engagement with community groups with an attitude of cultural humility rather than archival fragility, paying for their time and expertise, and acknowledging that baggage from past actions can be a barrier now.
Decoloniality means greater impartiality (rather than less) through being more scrupulously honest about the parts of a story that have been glossed over (e.g. enslavement as ‘trade’, or ‘estates in the Caribbean’). Similarly, it means taking greater care to distance ourselves from the powerful and literate whose records we have been keeping, and whose world views we have been perpetuating by suggesting that their perspective is the only one that matters, or uncontestedly the only one that could exist (e.g. using both riot and uprising; using both rebellion and independence struggle) and valuing languages other than English (e.g. Mosi-oa-Tunya and Victoria Falls).
Decolonisation might also entail an increased respect for oral recordkeeping.
Thumbnail image photo credit Joel Naren via Unsplash