Catalogued Out
Colonial classification in African collections
This event is part of a demonstration of what Lera offers for running knowledge events. Its content is written with care and draws on real sources, but the conference has not taken place, and apart from the convener its participants are fictional.
In the religion class of the Dewey Decimal Classification, most of the numbers went to Christianity from the start, and all the other religions of the world were squeezed into one small range. The languages of Africa, more than two thousand of them, were placed under a single three-digit number. These are not technical errors. They are a map of where the makers of the system stood when they looked at the world. And this same map is still in use on the shelves of university libraries in Accra, Lagos and Nairobi.
Hope Olson (2002) called this ‘the power to name’: a subject heading decides where we will find a book and, more importantly, as what we will find it. Colonial-era catalogues described Akan religious practice under headings such as ‘idolatry’ and ‘fetishism’. A Ghanaian researcher looking for the history of her own religion in the archive today must first learn someone else’s contemptuous vocabulary in order to search for it.
Correction is possible, but it is difficult and political. After years of dispute, the Library of Congress finally dropped the heading ‘Illegal aliens’ in 2021. Emily Drabinski (2013) reminds us that no correction is ever complete: every new term will one day grow old. Her proposal is that instead of pretending to be neutral, we make the politics of the catalogue visible. I want to take this proposal one step further.
If description is always written from somewhere, why should there be only one? My proposal is plural, signed description: the official cataloguer writes their description, the community the work came from writes its own in its own language, and both remain side by side with the name of their author and a date. Description becomes part of the work’s orbit, not a label stamped on it once and for all. Achille Mbembe (2002) sees the archive as an institution that builds a state’s imaginary. Perhaps an archive of many voices can build a different one.
In this talk I describe the experience of a pilot project re-describing a collection of colonial-era photographs, and show what this method made possible and where we met institutional resistance: from indexing rules to a simple question asked again and again, ‘Which description is the right one?’
Questions for discussion
- Does plural description make searching harder for the reader, or more precise?
- Who has the right to describe a work on behalf of a community?
- Should libraries in the Global South build their classification systems anew, or transform the existing ones from within?
References
Olson, Hope A. 2002. The Power to Name: Locating the Limits of Subject Representation in Libraries. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Drabinski, Emily. 2013. “Queering the Catalog: Queer Theory and the Politics of Correction.” The Library Quarterly 83 (2): 94–111.
Mbembe, Achille. 2002. “The Power of the Archive and Its Limits.” In Refiguring the Archive, edited by Carolyn Hamilton et al., 19–27. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Stoler, Ann Laura. 2009. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton: Princeton University Press.