Decolonial Book History
Matt Cohen, "Time and the Bibliographer: A Meditation on the Spirit of Book Studies," Textual Cultures 13.1 (2020): 179-206)
" But I believe that there are several spirits haunting the study of books, several kinds of relationship to time, that allow us to see ways it can respond to the serious political challenges posed by an engagement with indigeneity." (180)
" In today’s moment, with the global return of tribalism, racism, nationalism, and religious hypocrisy to power’s center stage, it is worth returning to the question of the relevance of bibliography. It is a time when, at least at the seats of power in the United States and some other places, books seem to have become almost meaningless. McKenzie’s strategy was not to constrain bibliography in self- defense, but to expand it, to go on the offense. What is our course? Bibli- ography will need new allies in order to survive the effects of the current collapse of the old conservative order (and perhaps of the liberal one as well). Indigenous ideas about media, about what constitutes a “process”, and about the historical and political meanings of recorded forms, are key not just to transforming the imagination of the study of books, but to grow- ing and enriching its life in, and in relation to, the world." (181)
"Bibliography, I will contend, has for the most part functioned within a colonialist set of assumptions about its means and its ends. But at the same time, having been at times in something of a marginalized position them- selves in their departments or professions, its practitioners have developed unique tools, passions, and intellectual focuses with decolonial potential." (181)
"to think about bibliography in relation to Indigenous stud- ies is less about introducing particular systems of thought or analysis than it is about relations and an orientation toward time." (181)
"Bibliography, like other metrical tools of colonization, has long both been trained on Indigenous people and appropriated by them." (183)
justifying lack of work on indigenous cultures because they did not have written texts / scripts -- comparing indigenous media to western books and writing
"So what, then, do books have to do with Indigenous media? The reso- nance for analytical purposes may have less to do with media continuities, and more to do with the concepts of time and the kinds of deep attentive- ness and passion required both to preserve and make sense of records of various kinds." (185)
Indigenous methods of keeping alive stories/histories: "The risk of loss is a creative force. Responsibility, dedication, sympathy and spirit are the keywords, not accuracy, authenticity, history, or even truth. Counting, making words count, is a metaphor. It is not collation; it is keep- ing alive. Preservation, the task of the storyteller, the textual editor, and the bibliographer, is based in shared principles here in some ways, but with an orientation unfamiliar to us from the writings of many great bibliographers. Mohegan, Nipmuc, and Wampanoag language revivers today are using the translations made by their ancestors and John Eliot to bring back spoken Algonquian languages and to create stronger tribal communities; colonial- ist preservation is turned to cultural restoration." (188)