The Uses and Limits of Archives in Decolonial Curricula

Abstract

The Uses and Limits of Archives in Decolonial Curricula Deanna P. Koretsky (bio) I am fortunate to teach at an institution that encourages students to read against the grain of the imperialist white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchal power structures that built, and that continue to inform, most Western academic disciplines.1 Spelman College, a historically Black college for women, emphasizes the critical study of what much of the Western academy still calls difference or otherness as an essential component of all students' education, regardless of personal background or intended course of study. In their first year at Spelman, all students take a two-semester course called African Diaspora and the World, which trains them to read their studies and their lives through the lenses of critical race theory, feminist theory, and African diaspora studies. By the time they step into my classroom, they have already been introduced to the critical vocabulary necessary for thinking about who and what is left out of a field like eighteenth-century British literature. My teaching invites students to think with me—with us—about the dis/function of disciplinary boundaries and why moving toward decolonial academic practices requires more than simply adding writers of color to our syllabi.2 Expanding our canons is crucial, but this can quickly amount to tokenism if we do not also create opportunities for students to understand [End Page 151] why—beyond empty neoliberal rhetorics of diversity and inclusion—these expansions matter. As Achille Mbembe has argued, decolonial efforts must reach beyond content knowledge, to the very notion of knowledge itself, because Western epistemic traditions are traditions that claim detachment of the known from the knower. … They are traditions in which the knowing subject is enclosed in itself and peeks out at a world of objects and produces supposedly objective knowledge of those objects. The knowing subject is thus able to know the world without being part of that world and he or she is by all accounts able to produce knowledge that is supposed to be universal and independent of context.3 A decolonial teaching practice requires us to acknowledge our necessarily subjective, always partial, inherently biased position in the world. Further, it necessitates laying bare the methods by which we arrive at certain types of knowledge. To that end, I ask students to engage with the raw materials that, in many Western educational contexts, continue to be regarded as foundational for understanding historical periods: I send them into archives. In my introductory survey of eighteenth-century British literature, students complete a semester-long research project in which they use physical or digital archives (such as Eighteenth Century Collections Online [ECCO] or the open-access Internet Archive) to curate their own online collections around topics of their choosing. Toward the end of the semester, they share their projects, and we spend the last few weeks of the course discussing whether and how their findings reframe the primary and secondary materials that we had been reading together all semester. What inevitably emerges is a conversation about how lack of representation at the scholarly level trickles down into broader cultural perceptions and value patterns. Producing these projects in the form of a website underscores the stakes of this type of inquiry: publishing their work online makes students active participants in framing how anyone with an Internet connection can potentially encounter a long-whitewashed literary past. The expectation is not that students will make some groundbreaking discovery, though many do begin their research hoping for such a find. Most hit the obvious road blocks and have to recalibrate. But instead of completely changing their plans, I ask them to sit with the obstacles and find new ways into their original research questions. And this is actually the lesson: at some point, almost all students find themselves grappling with the ideologies that underwrite cultural preservation and academic knowledge production. Ultimately, my goal is to encourage students to think about how [End Page 152] such seemingly neutral concepts as "knowledge" and "history" function as instruments of larger power structures that can be interrogated and transformed.4 I invite students to become aware of how historical knowledges are constructed by engaging and, if necessary, questioning...