Together with David Smith, my librarian colleague, over the last two years I have run a project titled Decolonising the Archive with the cohort of MA Publishing here at LCC. In late May 2026 we held a discussion with this year’s students and their tutors on what active decolonising of the curriculum and the library would look like. We again selected a range of works from our Special Collections for the students to engage with and set up an object handling session wherein they had the opportunity to select these items based only on limited information compiled in the style of old library card catalogues. The selection of books this year extended beyond exemplars of a colonial mindset and items shaped by extractive traditions to include more recent works responding the those ideas and traditions. By limiting the information shared we encouraged a more thoughtful handling and reflection on the items, their period, provenance, perspective and reception.
To introduce one methodology for identifying coloniality in the library collections I discussed the recent scholarship of Dr. Mathelinda Nabugodi (2025, pp.) I circulated among the class the various editions held here of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1797) and his friend Robert Southey’s work The Sailor, who had served in the Slave Trade (1798). These works that helped establish the Romantic genre of literature are respectively coded and explicit depictions of the depredations of the triangular trade that bolstered the reputations of both men as ardent abolitionists. However, Nabufodi’s close readings of the works and correspondence of Coleridge and Southey reveal them as convinced white supremacists ready to live on the sinecure of slaver patrons. Southey’s work sustains racializing, sexualising representations of black people, an early edition features a title image of a naked black girl being whipped. And so a false note sounds under the cries for freedom that reach us from the Romantic literature of the period.
Fig 1: Image from the Parisien weekly ‘Le Rire’ during the run of L’Exposition Coloniale in 1931.
Fig. 2 (right): Three editions of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner held at LCC.
Our discussions with the group touched on potential strategies for meeting and answering this colonial gaze, from the creative appropriation of colonial archives (At Last, I Hold Your Gaze) to research which reveals what has been occluded. The gaze that shapes offensive depictions of colonized subjects (‘Le Rire’ a Parisien weekly, issues May 1931-October 1931) will casually avert when challenged. One of last year’s selections, Walter Crane’s India Impressions (1908) accounts of the artist’s tour of India via reports which appeared in columns for The Scotsman. His pen pictures touch on the people, landscape, religious relations, and once in Punjab, the newspapers: ‘The native papers, apart from those in the vernacular, are the Punjabi – of which the less said the better – and the Tribune.’ In our long run of the journal ‘The British and Colonial Printer’ we crossed checked the dates of his journal entries. The first ‘India’ entry: “The Proprietor of the Punjabi, an Indian newspaper, has been sentenced to two years imprisonment and a fine of 1000 rupees, and the editor to six months imprisonment and a fine of 200 rupees for exciting hatred against the Government and the European Community.’ The context of this censorship and repression being political agitation and thousands taking to the streets in protest at the colonisation bill of 1906 and agricultural policies driving the population to starvation, not a glimpse of this appears from Crane’s framing of India through his carriage window.
The critical work of the students in noticing the focus of the colonial gaze in our collections and the moments of occlusion, of active looking away, helps our understanding of how inherited literary and publishing traditions are shaped, in part, by oppression and exclusion. Meeting that gaze is just one step in decolonizing the library (and publishing more generally), but an important one in realising the further steps needed to effectuate equality.
Reference List:
Nabugodi M. (2025) The Trembling Hand: Reflections of a Black Woman in the Romantic Archive. Penguin Books Ltd.
Sallam S. (2020). At Last, I Hold Your Gaze. Netherlands: self-published.
Image List:
Figure 1. Le Rire (1931) [Periodical], Photography by Clarke. G (2026).
Figure 2. ‘Three editions of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner at LCC’. Photography by Clarke. G (2026).
4 replies on “PG Cert Unit 2: Inclusive Practices blog post 3: race”
Thank you, Gavin, for this enlightening post. It reminded me of a lecture and workshop we attended last term with a librarian, where we were asked to analyse images and objects without being given any contextual information. The exercise highlighted how meaning can shift when an object is removed from its original context and how our interpretations are often shaped by our own assumptions, prior knowledge, and experiences. It also encouraged us to reflect on how knowledge is constructed and to critically examine what we have learned throughout our education, particularly when considering perspectives beyond a colonial lens.
Your discussion also made me reflect on how differently history is taught depending on geographical and cultural context. My husband, who was raised in Hong Kong during British rule, learned about the Opium Wars as a significant part of his education. In contrast, my own history education focused largely on the World Wars and, later, the formation of America. While the transatlantic slave trade was covered, it was often presented as something that happened elsewhere rather than as part of Britain’s own colonial history. Looking back, I question why there was so little emphasis on the impact of British colonialism, despite Britain’s extensive role in colonisation.
As someone of Egyptian heritage, I have also reflected on how certain aspects of history are prioritised over others. Whenever I mention that I am Egyptian, people often express enthusiasm for Ancient Egypt, perhaps because many Egyptian artefacts are displayed in institutions such as the British Museum. However, a visit to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo highlighted for me the extent to which artefacts have been removed by European powers, particularly Britain and France. Equally, Egypt’s history extends far beyond the ancient world and includes periods of occupation and influence by numerous powers, including the Greeks, Arabs, Ottomans, French, and British. These complex histories are often overlooked in mainstream narratives.
More recently, I visited the Nigerian Modernism exhibition at Tate Modern, which offered a fascinating insight into how colonial education systems influenced the development of art schools in Nigeria. What I found particularly interesting was the way contemporary artists are increasingly reconnecting with and drawing inspiration from indigenous African artistic traditions that predate colonial influence. This resonated strongly with discussions around decolonisation and the importance of recognising diverse sources of knowledge and cultural expression.
I am interested to see how your intervention develops. Working within a library environment provides a unique opportunity to contribute to the decolonisation of the curriculum through the selection and promotion of diverse resources. By broadening the range of perspectives and voices that students encounter, libraries can play a significant role in supporting a more inclusive and critically engaged educational experience.
Hannah, many thanks for such a thoughtful, personal response. Had I not run out of word count I would have expanded on the Sara Sallam book, At Last, I Hold Your Gaze. Her site and her work in general is a direct confrontation to continuing colonial practices and legacies experienced by Egyptian people. I find such responses, such acts of recovery often more elucidating of colonial mindsets than the extant evidence, the negative nodes of the unsaid such Crane’s looking away as noted above. As you discuss, one of the points of these object based learning sessions is to encourage material awareness and critical thinking without the familiar prompts to understanding, this alone can help one find a fitting methodological response, this is always deepened by further research. Often that research leads to the negative node, ‘Crane’s occlusion’ one might call it. As we’re not at all prescriptive of the form of student response to the works we share in the decolonising session I do hope we’ll elicit a new work of art in response at some point.
Thank you for this fascinating and informative post!
The object-based learning methodology is particularly interesting, restricting catalogue information to prompt reflection on provenance and perspective is a deceptively simple intervention with real pedagogical force.
Your comment about the colonial gaze and its tendency to “casually avert when challenged” raises the question: what happens to these materials after students have named what they contain? I have no background in library cataloguing, but I am curious whether collections like these will be re-catalogued with contextualising notes, and whether UAL has plans to actively build anti-colonial literature collections that intentionally amplify Indigenous, marginalised, and underrepresented voices.
Thanks for yours Holly. Many re-cataloging initiates have developed over the last c.25 years, the Mayor of London sponsored ‘Mind the Gap’ programme in the 2000s comes to mind for addressing racialised language and absences in recording the presence of black people in London archives. My colleague Siobhan Britton at Chelsea is undertaking such work now, here’s their project description:
Objects and Agency: Embedding Artist and Community Knowledge in Cataloguing Practice. Focusing on three items from UAL’s African-Caribbean, Asian and African Art in Britain Archive, the project will use a collaborative workshop to test object-centred, artist- and stakeholder-informed interpretive methods grounded in oral history principles. It will also explore how the knowledge generated in the workshop can be meaningfully recorded within UAL’s existing cataloguing systems and made available for future collections-based research.
Of course, a thoughtful response to re-cataloguing can come from any direction but I feel with specific works a sensitivity to the source culture is necessary and thus adopting a ‘not about us, without us’ approach to engagement and review is sensible and equitable. Our annual sessions are more directed towards awareness raising for the students of the pernicious legacy of colonialism in the industry into which they are about to enter but the pamphlet they produce which lives on in the library does serve as a commentary to the work studied. Considering your query has prompted me to commit to adding a note to library record of each of the works included in pamphlet to direct to the reader to the further commentary for context. So thank you, you have effected a change and enhancement to our records.
In answer to the other part regarding building collections ‘that amplify indigenous, marginalised and underrepresented voices’, we are very active here at LCC and across UAL in this effort. This ethos has been at the heart of our zine collection development for the last 15 years, has informed my development of the Global South Photobooks Collection and is an effort I give emphasis to at every Librarians’ meeting. I’ll be updating our Special Collections page in the coming week or two to emphasize some of these efforts.