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Decolonising bibliographies, referencing and citational practices.�Gurnam Singh, 24th May 2023

twitter: @gurnamskhela

Email: gurnam.singh.1@warwick.ac.uk

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Citational practice as discursive colonial infrastructure

…layers of discursive infrastructure enables us to analyze the role citations play in shaping that which is built upon them…’(Itchuagiyaq and Frith, 2022 p11)

1. Inclusiveness: writing, which might include automated data outputs,

2. Relationally defined: How it serves different interests

3. Alliance Brokering: Writing creates alliances amongst groups

4. Mission Critical: essential to the function of the end-product it shapes and supports. (Read, 2019)

Itchuaqiyaq, C. U., & Frith, J. (2022). Citational practices as a site of resistance and radical pedagogy: positioning the multiply marginalized and underrepresented (MMU) scholar database as an infrastructural intervention. Communication Design Quarterly Review, 10(3), 10-19.

Read, S. (2019). The infrastructural function: A relational theory of infrastructure for writing studies. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 33(3), 233–267.

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What is colonialism?

  • Settler Colonialism. Large numbers of settlers claim land and become the majority. Employing a “logic of elimination”.
  • Planter Colonialism. Typically associated with the Transatlantic Slave trade, here the colonizers institutes mass production of a single crop, such as sugar, coffee, cotton, or rubber.
  • Extractive Colonialism. Here the primary aim is to build wealth by extracting raw materials and goods found in a particular locale.

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How has western scholarship and academia become implicated in the colonial project?

"terra nullius” or “territory without a master.”

Oxford Martin School formerly Old Indian Institute

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The role of libraries in colonialism�

  • “Western academic libraries — emerging as they did from Enlightenment-derived epistemology and premised on Euro- and Christian-centric knowledge structures – retain the legacy of imperialism, whether we consider biased Library of Congress classification and subject headings, the enculturating role of library collections, or our libraries’ very physical presence on Treaty – or stolen – land.”

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  • “Librarianship has been complicit, if not responsible for perpetuating colonial approaches to knowledge by replacing traditional knowledge with Western knowledge, especially in physical libraries established under colonial regimes, by failing to maintain the authority of the [I]ndigenous people who produced the knowledge, or by stealing or appropriating the knowledge without appropriate compensation. (p. 132)’
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  • Sandy, H.M. & J. Bossaller. (2017) Providing Cognitively Just Subject Access to Indigenous Knowledge through Knowledge Organization Systems. Cataloging and Classification Quarterly 55 (3), 129-152.

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Western scholarship and the white man’s burden.�

  • Associating the European Enlightenment with the moment in history where reason and science triumphed over superstition.
  • Rendering the non-European other as culturally and intellectually primitive.
  • “… I certainly never met with any orientalist who ventured to maintain that the Arabic and Sanscrit poetry could be compared to that of the great European nations. But when we pass from works of imagination to works in which facts are recorded and general principles investigated, the superiority of the Europeans becomes absolutely immeasurable. It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanskrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgements used at preparatory schools in England…’’ Is it believable that the same man would utterly contradict himself in the same speech by saying, “…we break the very backbone of this nation which is her spiritual and cultural heritage….” Macaulay (1835)

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Colonialism and Eurocentric citation practices.�

Arborescent thought

Rhizomatic thought

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How do we move forwards?�

  1. Recognise citational systems for what they are and are not!
  2. Strategize in order to break the ‘chains of binding conventions’.
  3. Reimagine the ‘field’ or ‘terrain’ on which scholarship is done.
  4. Need to remind ourselves that humans have a ‘deep history’.
  5. Rationalism and reason were not invented European Enlightenment.
  6. Shift from hierarchies to ecology of knowledges