Sara Ahmed’s Politics of Citation and Student Scholarship: Uncovering Indigenous Co-authors of British Folklore Collections

Abstract

In 2021, I taught an introductory literary seminar in which students read the folklore of colonized subjects and supernatural fiction by writers of color who had lived under British rule or Western imperial influence. We partnered with Adrian Wisnicki's digital humanities project One More Voice to create an online anthology and video series that critically frame folklore collections from Japan, India, South Africa, and Jamaica. The students learned about Sara Ahmed's politics of citation and applied her ideas in giving credit to the Indigenous coauthors who sourced, transcribed, and translated oral folktales for British colonizers. I argue that we should regard the students as scholars who modeled ways of undisciplining Victorian studies in their work on Lafcadio Hearn and Setsu Koizumi's Kottō (1902).