Decolonising: What country, friends, is this?
In this, the first in a series of blogposts from the Inclusive Cataloguing Working Group of the Diversity and Inclusion Allies, Philip Milnes-Smith introduces decolonising as an archival practice, drawing on the history of its usage, and the emerging work of the Allies to support the sector.
Decolonising: What country, friends, is this?
The twentieth century saw the end of direct colonial exploitation by European states of many nations in the rest of the world (which does not mean that the effects of colonialism are all over). The process of gaining independence has itself been termed decolonisation. Stopping being ruled by and answerable to Europeans did not mean that the systems of government, law, education, and so on, switched overnight to ones rooted in indigenous thought and devoid of the assumptions and biases of the colonial era systems. When the successor states were building new, post-colonial systems, the ongoing process of weighing up what to keep and what to drop, amend or upgrade has also been called decolonisation.
In the meantime, the independence-era adult population, who had been schooled under empire, retained mindsets shaped to varying degrees by European thought. That worldview deemed European man and his civilisation self-evidently superior to the barbarism and savagery it perceived to be embodied by the Global south, but also the Americas (to the West of Europe) and Asia (to its East). Succeeding generations in the former colonies have been decolonising by decentring the European viewpoint, finding that there could be value in ideas that stemmed not from the dead white men of ancient Greece and Rome, the tenets of Catholic and Protestant Christianity, and the scholarship of the Enlightenment. It is not that these European perspectives were now unimportant, but they had previously crowded out all other viewpoints and achievements, not only those of their own ancestors but of other communities from across the world.
More recently, students and scholars in former colonial powers (and white majority nations that modelled themselves on them, like The USA and Australia), are re-evaluating their own institutions and curricula to benefit from divergent global viewpoints. This is the context in which Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums here have been reviewing their own established practice and committing to changes under the banner of decolonisation. At this level of abstraction, decolonising is something that all of us can do, rather than being relevant only to those with British Empire era collections. The Museums Association has asserted “Decolonising practice can be used in all areas of work and is applicable to all shapes and sizes of museums. It helps us to understand the present world and each other better. Colonialism has affected everyone and we all have an important role to play.”
In their terms:
“Decolonising practice challenges legacies of oppression and calls for an honest and accurate reappraisal of colonial history. Decolonising involves creatively reimagining the way museums work, who they work with and what they value. It covers all areas of practice and creates a framework to better support people and institutions... It is driven by the desire for justice and equity in that it aims to rebalance power and representation away from the coloniser narrative of history and society. This work is intersectional, as it challenges structural inequalities across the board to redress forms of historic and ongoing harm… It is important to recognise that decolonising practice is about facing up to histories of racism and exclusion – and this practice is necessary wherever you are.”
Even if MA courses in Archives and Records Management successfully decolonise their curricula, it will take many years for these students to rise to positions of power in the sector, and in the meantime they may meet with resistance to change from, for example, managers who want to spend less time cataloguing collections, rather than more, and no time revisiting legacy cataloguing (given volumes of outstanding uncatalogued material). Others may deem decolonising catalogues a woke, virtue-signalling fad that, at best, wastes resources and, at worst, undermines our professional integrity by ending our impartiality, and that could pose a reputational risk because of unwanted attention from thinktanks, the press and even Ministers and other prominent MPs, who have attacked decolonising, as polarising and unpatriotic.
If recordkeepers at all levels are being encouraged to engage with decolonisation in their workplaces, we know that case studies and sector specific guidance (like that from the Museums Association) will be helpful. We believe that taking a decolonising approach will affect more than simply archival description, but that is the chosen starting point for our working group. The working group hosted a workshop last autumn with practitioners who are already starting to decolonise catalogues, and this series of blogposts is the next step towards developing training materials and events.
In the next post, I will edge towards a provisional definition of decolonising catalogues based on what, from my perspective, it does (and does not) involve. In future blogposts, other Allies will write about their decolonising experiences, in response to the resources they have used to reshape their practice.
Thumbnail image photo credit Viktor Forgacs via Unsplash