Category: Unit 2

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:

Our opening session of the year featured a wall-mounted post-it note timeline of UK Higher Education. The Coldstream Reports that reformed art and design education were the least familiar to me of all the legislation referenced there yet seemingly the most profoundly impactful on teaching and assessment practice in art subjects. On reading Julia Lockheart’s re-examination of the 1960 and 1970 reports (Lockheart, 2018) I was struck by her revelation of the original dress of the report from under the overlaid cloaks of its interpreters. The reports brought about the transition of craft-based training in art into the university sector, thereafter academic thesis writing was introduced as a feature of such study but Lockheart argues, convincingly, that this was never the intention of the reports. The imposition of this humanities culture on art practice persisted as it proved useful in maintaining parity of assessment standards. This unsympathetic, standardising approach came at the cost of “a diversity of pedagogical approaches, including writing practices, that are complementary to and inform the purposes of creative practice” (Lockheart, p. 151).

Some years ago when taking HPL work at Wimbledon, the theatre programme started to offer wider modes of assessment to students. These proved popular and video and oral presentations increased year on year. Over the last two years the LCC Photography programme has diversified its allowable submission formats and now video essays are the preferred submission mode for c.50% of some cohorts. It seems we are moving back to accepting that writing practices should not be a prescribed as an “examinable measure rather than as a tool for learning” (Lockheart, p. 152). As Lockheart notes, and scores of consultations with my students attest, this misreading has come at a considerable cost to visual-spatial thinkers and dyslexics.

Reference List:

Lockheart, J. (2018) ‘The importance of writing as a material practice for art and design students: A contemporary rereading of the Coldstream Reports’, Art, Design & Communication in Higher Education, 17(2), pp. 151–175. doi:10.1386/adch.17.2.151_1.[Accessed 10 March 2026].

The 11 March lecture prompted me to reflect on the presence of AI in recent photographic debates and in discussions of rights of photographers and subjects.

At the start of this academic year the Photography programme hosted a photojournalism conference titled Lines of Engagement. One of the most startling and concerning presentations was Exhibit AI presented by Jenifer Kanis, a laywer leading a social justice campaign ‘Exhibit Ai: The Refugee Account’. The project enlisted the AI engine Midjourney to generate images as ‘evidence’ based on prompts from court documents to accompany 32 recorded oral statements from refugees held on Manus Island, Nauru and Christmas Island. This generation of AI images toward the goal of social justice campaigning begs interesting questions about transparency and the feasibility of codes of ethics covering the use of well-intended AI generated content in or out of context.

Fig. 1. We are at War. Toledano, P. (2024)

The ethical dilemma seems less arresting and more profound when one pauses to reflect on the vast evidence of the truancy of lens based arts, how the subjectivity, the choice of the photographer gives the lie to the notion of the photograph or film as a positivist record of the world. Inevitably in this time of flux, trickster characters are playing with notions of fidelity and truth in their use of AI and interesting work of this nature is now to be found amongst our photobooks section – perhaps they need their own classification. Phillip Tolledano’s We are at War, is a startling example: “at Omaha beach, the photographer Robert Capa. Capa shot approximately 4 rolls of film, and sent them to London to be developed, but due to a lab mishap, only 11 images survived. Capa created an empty pocket of history – a pocket that can be filled with AI.” That Tolledano initially presented, at a conference in Paris, the resulting images as recovered Capa shots is a trickster’s coup, that it was believed is far more concerning.

Reference List:

Toledano, P. (2024). We are at War. Bologna, Italy: L’Artiere Edizioni.

Image List:

Figure. 1. Toledano, P. (2005) We are at War [AI generated image] In: Toledano, P. (2024) We are at War. Bologna, Italy: L’Artiere Edizioni.