On Wednesday, October 30, 2024, the International and Area Studies Library and the Center for African Studies invited Émilie Songolo—Head of Distinctive Collections at the MIT Libraries—to give a talk about the African Textile Archive housed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The talk featured a gallery of textiles which attendees could examine in person, in addition to specific fabrics Songolo highlighted during her presentation.
The talk, titled “African Textile Archive: Apertures in Decolonizing African Studies Collections,” focused on African commemorative textiles as a significant resource because fabric, in the African continent, serves many purposes and has a communicative role to play, especially amongst women. As such, they “embody communities often excluded from traditional published literature.” These fabrics often constitute collective memory of different social groups and form a nexus between identity and power. Songolo impressed upon her audience that in societies where a great number in the public cannot read, fabric—and the images printed on them—can communicate information visually to those who can see.
Songolo, who has been collecting African textiles since 1985, created the African Textile Archive in 2012. The Archive aids in the decolonization of the African Studies collections housed in university libraries, which often include materials beyond the traditional books and journals, such as comics, cartoons, posters, funeral programs, oral histories, and recordings of performances or voices. Archives such as these subvert so-called classical African Studies libraries which are often made up of texts written by Anglo-Europeans and Westerners in Western languages. By purposefully collecting non-traditional items such as fabric, we are forced to re-examine how knowledge is produced, how we research, what we consult, and how it is we preserve information for future users of our libraries and archives.
Citing scholars such as Peter Lor, Crystal Vaughn, and Hollie White, Songolo considers the role curators and librarians play in organizing knowledge for public consumption. Cataloging codes, schemes of classification, and metadata descriptions are often thought of as objective, but as any socially constructed methodology, are in reality key sites of biases and quite subjective. In 2016, the Library of Congress created a new subject heading for textiles, “commemorative textile fabrics,” spearheaded by Songolo. The creation of new subject headings are a key means of the very epistemological interventions that ‘decolonizing the archive’ hinges upon. What struck me most about this talk is the way the scope of the archive—its aperture, if you will—is widened precisely because the question of how knowledge can be communicated is necessarily broadened by thinking about who is doing the reading. Fabrics, as discussed above, can be ‘read’ by those who may be unable to read literature but can see images. They contain visual grammar that makes meaning for a broader cross-section of society. Even more importantly, fabrics evade censors—they are subject to a less tightly controlled system of communication by those in power, making them a significant medium of dissent and cultural memory.
During the Q + A portion of the talk, Songolo emphasized the importance of public outreach for archives such as the African Textile Archive, especially as a means by which a greater portion of society can be empowered by knowledge. Ethical care with respect to metadata and how each item of textile is described, is also a key site of critical intervention and information such as donor details and full description of each piece of fabric provides greater depth of knowledge for users of the archive.
All in all, Émilie Songolo’s talk was as fascinating as it was significant, and it directed our attention to questions such as What do we know? How do we know it? What contains information and how is that information packaged for the user? — questions everyone involved in the archive (which is everyone, whether librarian, scholar, or student) should stop to consider.
Further Reading:
Lor, Peter Johan. “Risks and Benefits of Visibility: Librarians Navigating Social and Political Turbulence.” Library Trends 65, no. 2 (2016): 108–27. https://doi.org/10.1353/lib.2016.0025.
White, Hollie C. “Decolonizing the Way Libraries Organize.” In Proceedings of the 84th World Library and Information Congress IFLA WLIC, Aug 24-30 2018, session 207. Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia: IFLA (2018). http://library.ifla.org/2221/
Vaughan, Crystal. “The Language of Cataloguing: Deconstructing and Decolonizing Systems of Organization in Libraries.” In Dalhousie Journal of Interdisciplinary Management 14 (Spring 2018): 1–15. https://doi.org/10.5931/djim.v14i0.7853.
