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: