Decolonisation in libraries, archives and museums: Action, inaction, redaction

Chair: Dr Lola Boorman

Nearly two years on from the movements that provoked a raft of commitments from cultural organisations to ‘decolonising’ and becoming anti-racist, this talk reflects on how the still dominant conversations around decolonisation have figured in the British Library and beyond.

On the one hand, the BL response will be contextualised within the wider political and cultural discourse. That discourse often reduces broad subjects such as imperial history, structural racism, or the inaccessibility of cultural opportunity to black-and-white pro/contra positions, thereby escalating the debate to the level of “culture war”. The talk will interrogate the inevitable resignation of many organisations in the sector to participating in the same reductive discourse.

On the other hand, time will be devoted to presenting issues specific to libraries, including problematic terminology in cataloguing metadata, acquisition approaches, content strategies, policy and public engagement. This will be informed by recent developments from the Library’s ongoing Anti-Racism Project, a three-year funded and in part grassroots-directed change programme.

Threaded through the talk will be references to the actions of Staff Networks within such organisations, often the spaces where change begins, or more cynically, often the spaces that carry the burden of progress. The link is frequently ignored or misunderstood between ‘decolonising’ collections, artworks, museums and galleries, and the everyday lived experience of staff discrimination, marginalisation and barriers to opportunity. An insight into the workings of Networks such as those at the BL will serve to remake that link and will ultimately underline the relevance of reinterpreting the cultural legacy of Britain’s colonial entanglements now.

Further context can be found in the recently published chapter, ‘Towards Decolonising the British Library: A Staff-Led Perspective’, in Narrative expansions : interpreting decolonisation in academic libraries, ed. by Jess Crilly and Regina Everitt (London: Facet, 2022).

Pardaad is a curator at the British Library and a former postgraduate student at York. He is also part of the steering committee for the BAME Staff Network at the BL, representing the Network’s Decolonising Working Group.