I don't believe in decolonizing archives.
(It's amazing that the article says this with complete seriousness.)
(It's amazing that the article says this with complete seriousness.)
Honestly, it seems like a faddish buzzword, incorrectly used.
IIRC "decolonizing" sometimes means returning cultural artifacts acquired during colonial times to the regions/cultures where they originated. However, it doesn't make any sense to do that to cultural artifacts created by citizens a colonial power in their own originating culture. Honestly, that sounds like another kind of colonization.
This article seems like a mess trying to force a combination of trendy ideology with personal experience that don't really fit. For instance:
> For her, the archive became a place of postcolonial recovery and remembering.
What's that in reference too? A student seeing a card catalog that's still in use, and being reminded of personally using them in the past. It's weirdly trying to particularize the universal. I'm about the farthest from a "colonized" person there is, but I could have had the exact same reaction to the exact same situation as that student. The only difference is that I have the wrong background, so no one's going to try to gratuitously describe my reaction as something "postcolonial."
"I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail."
The only tool the author of that blog seems to have is their personal ideological beliefs regarding colonialism, thus the author proceeds to treat everything as if it was colonialism.
The issue here is that these works have been in a private library, inaccessible to the public, since the 1930s.
In this case, the author is using "decolonize" to mean to liberate the work from private ownership and make it available to the public.
When "decolonize" is used in the context of e.g. education, it refers to restructuring an education system to be more equitable to all students. As such, the idea of providing access to everyone is a default implication of the term, even if its origin more specifically relates to dismantling the colonial baggage that led to structural inequality.
If that's the case, it seems like jargon for jargon's sake. IMHO that sense would have been much more clearly communicated by using a word like "democratize."
The situation kind of brings to mind slang, where people often invent unneeded new words mainly as a way to signal being fashionable or being part of a group.
The people reacting badly to this are just being somewhere between parochial and bigoted.
Yes, they are just making the claim that the information should be available. They are putting it into their own contextualized argument framework.
I'm pretty sure a historian with the right background could easily find examples of that in, for instance, China before it had any significant contact with the West. Trying to particularize it seems incorrect.
> I believe they are making the case that fetishistic hoarding of historical documents is both, only available to those with a means of wealth created through probably exploitation...
That's probably true but well understood. Caring about historical documents, let alone hoarding them, is quite a luxury activity available only to those with wealth, and wealth (now, and especially in the past) usually comes from some kind of exportation of others.
When a single religion dominates academia, as has often been the case through the centuries, they can comment on anything, but it will always be expressed in the form of an argument for their institution's religious doctrines. Professors at Cambridge in the early 17th century were almost all puritans, so they could talk about chemistry experiments, but it would have to be presented as yet more proof of the glory of God and include some jab at popery.
In the religion of today's academies, they can choose to talk about Brontë family artifacts as being emblems of "white supremacy" that should be hidden or destroyed or public goods that need to be "decolonized" (opened and freely given to all), but either way, the jargon combines the opinion with the jab at "popery" required by their co-religionists.
> "decolonized" (opened and freely given to all)
Given that it's a word whose meaning you apparently understood in this context, was the rest of your comment really necessary? Its frothiness makes the whole "religious" charge seem like projection.
The rest seems to be you just jerking your knee at a term that triggers you.
Here on HN people will use computer jargon or appropriated scientific jargon to describe things. Guess what, the same happens in other circles, just with different terms.
The culture war you're fighting is all in your head.