This Library guide has been created to support you in decolonising curricula and academic practice, and provides resources for anti-racist learning, teaching and research. In the menu tabs on the left hand side you will find guidance and resources tailored to students, educators and researchers. This homepage introduces decolonisation in a higher education and library context.
Please do share your feedback on this guide so we can improve it and develop decolonial dialogue amongst the Sussex community. There is a feedback form on the bottom left hand side menu tab.
Image: "Ancestral Elders: Decolonizing the Mind" by Climbing Kilimanjaro. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
Decolonisation and the University of Sussex Library
The Library's activities are rooted in systems of inequality built upon the racist legacies of imperialism. Libraries are not neutral. By recognising white privilege and the existence of inequality we will ensure that our collections and our work are not controlled by a single point of view and are informed by evidence-based practice.
Decolonisation in the Library seeks to redress the inherent imbalances and power-structures present in our work and collections. We recognise that these unequal power structures are embedded within wider institutional systems of whiteness and are committed to collaborating in a process of lasting change around this in line with the University of Sussex Race Equality Charter Mission.
The Library's areas of activity in decolonising practices, collections and services are outlined on the Decolonisation statement. We will promote decolonisation work throughout the Library, ensuring that all staff have opportunity to learn and engage. However, dialogue on decolonisation will continue beyond this statement; our work is - and will be - an urgent and ongoing process.
"Decolonisation in practice is about bringing to light and taking apart colonialist power in all its forms. For this, we also need to understand that society as we know it is built upon this power. This includes all the things that perpetuate and reproduce the legacy of colonialism in areas like education, housing, finance, policing, healthcare and many more [...] this is not a new issue. For example, if we look at education, it is about paying attention to how our education system, our schools, colleges and universities, and ways of learning are built on colonial histories. They all put whiteness at the centre and as a neutral perspective to learn about our world.
Decolonising means providing students, staff and their local communities with the tools and language to critically identify the ways our schools, colleges and universities are built using the same colonial hierarchies. It also means empowering them to confront, challenge and reject the status quo. They would then be able to reimagine how things can be done differently and create alternatives that would benefit us all."
Changing the stories we have inherited from colonialism | Priyamvada Gopal
Insurgent empire : anticolonial resistance and British dissent by Call Number: JC 8350 UK (GOP) MAPISBN: 9781784784157Publication Date: 2019Insurgent Empire shows how Britain's enslaved and colonial subjects were active agents in their own liberation. Not only that, they shaped British ideas of freedom and emancipation back in the United Kingdom. Priyamvada Gopal examines dissenting politics in Britain and shows that it was influenced by rebellions and resistance among the colonies in the West Indies, East Africa, Egypt, and India. In addition, a pivotal role in fomenting resistance was played by anticolonial campaigners based in London, right at the heart of empire. Much has been written on how colonized peoples took up British and European ideas and turned them against empire when making claims to freedom and self-determination. Insurgent Empire sets the record straight in demonstrating that these people were much more than victims of imperialism or, subsequently, the passive beneficiaries of an enlightened Western conscience - they were insurgents whose legacy today benefits the culture of the nation that once oppressed them".
Decolonising the University
“There is no discipline that is immune from this call of decolonisation” Dr Lwazi Lushaba
Rhodes Must Fall by Call Number: HC 7150 UK (RHO)ISBN: 9781786993908Publication Date: 2018-08-15When students at Oxford University called for a statue of Cecil Rhodes to be removed, following similar calls by students in Cape Town, the significance of these protests was felt across continents. This was not simply about tearing down an outward symbol of British imperialism - a monument glorifying a colonial conqueror - but about confronting the toxic inheritance of the past, and challenging the continued underrepresentation of people of colour at universities. And it went to the very heart of the pernicious influence of colonialism in education today.Written by key members of the movement in Oxford, Rhodes Must Fall is the story of that campaign. Showing the crucial importance of both intersectionality and solidarity with sister movements in South Africa and beyond, this book shows what it means to boldly challenge the racism rooted deeply at the very heart of empire.
Archival Silences by ISBN: 9781003003618Publication Date: 2021-05-10Archival Silences demonstrates emphatically that archival absences exist all over the globe. The book questions whether benign 'silence' is an appropriate label for the variety of destructions, concealment and absences that can be identified within archival collections. Including contributions from archivists and scholars working around the world, this truly international collection examines archives in Australia, Brazil, Denmark, England, India, Iceland, Jamaica, Malawi, The Philippines, Scotland, Turkey and the United States. Making a clear link between autocratic regimes and the failure to record often horrendous crimes against humanity, the volume demonstrates that the failure of governments to create records, or to allow access to records, appears to be universal. Arguing that this helps to establish a hegemonic narrative that excludes the 'other', this book showcases the actions historians and archivists have taken to ensure that gaps in archives are filled. Yet the book also claims that silences in archives are inevitable and argues not only that recordkeeping should be mandated by international courts and bodies, but that we need to develop other ways of reading archives broadly conceived to compensate for absences. Archival Silences addresses fundamental issues of access to the written record around the world. It is directed at those with a concern for social justice, particularly scholars and students of archival studies, history, sociology, international relations, international law, business administration and information science.
Decolonising the university : the challenge of deep cognitive justice by ISBN: 9781527509467Publication Date: 2017At each particular historical moment, the university appears as a heavy and rigid structure resisting changes, whereas, throughout time, it has actually undergone profound transformation. Often such changes have been drastic and almost always provoked by factors external to the university, be they of a religious, political or economic nature. This book explores the nature and dynamics of the transformation that the university is undergoing today. It argues that some of the projects of reform currently under way are so radical that the question of the future of the university may well turn into the question of whether the university has a future. A specific feature of this inquiry is the realisation that questioning the future of the university involves questioning its past as well.
Decolonizing the University by ISBN: 9780745338200Publication Date: 2018-08-15In 2015, students at the University of Cape Town demanded the removal of a statue of Cecil Rhodes, the imperialist, racist business magnate, from their campus. Their battle cry, #RhodesMustFall, sparked an international movement calling for the decolonization of universities all over the world. Today, as the movement develops beyond the picket line, how might it go on to radically transform the terms upon which universities exist? In this book, students, activists, and scholars discuss the possibilities and the pitfalls of doing decolonial work in the heart of the establishment. Subverting curricula, demanding diversity, and destroying old boundaries, this is a radical call for a new era of education. Offering resources for students and academics to challenge and resist colonialism inside and outside the classroom, Decolonizing the University provides the tools for radical change in our disciplines, our pedagogies, and our institutions.
Narrative Expansions by ISBN: 9781783305216Publication Date: 2021The demand to decolonise the curriculum has moved from a protest movement at the margins to the centre of many institutions, as reflected by its inclusion in policies and strategies and numerous initiatives in libraries and archives that have responded to the call, and are critically examining their own historic legacies and practices to support institutional and societal change. Narrative Expansions: Interpreting Decolonisation in Academic Libraries explores the ways in which academic libraries are working to address the historic legacies of colonialism, in the context of decolonising the curriculum and the university. It acknowledges and explores the tensions and complexities around the use of the term decolonisation, how it relates to other social justice aims and approaches, including critical librarianship, and what makes this work specific to decolonisation. The book is international in scope, and considers the contextual nature of decolonisation, with discussion of the impacts of settler colonialism, and post-colonial contexts with authors from Canada, the United States and Kenya, as well as universities in the UK. Split into two sections, the book first addresses experiential contexts, discussing the environment in which the academic library is enmeshed: legacy knowledge systems, the neo-liberal university, the pervasive Whiteness of the higher education sector, the global publishing industry – how these structures are constitutive of coloniality and how they can be challenged. It then brings together theory and practice featuring case studies interpreting what it means to ‘decolonise’ in information literacy, collection management, inclusive spaces, LIS education, research methods and knowledge production through the lens of critical pedagogy, critical information literacy and Critical Race Theory (CRT). The book also addresses the impact and implications of the Whiteness of university library staffing. Bringing together the theory and practice of an area of critical concern to the academy, this book is an important reference for academic librarians, educators and researchers in LIS, education and sociology.
Unsettling Eurocentrism in the Westernized University by Call Number: Short LP 12000 UNSISBN: 9781138061804Publication Date: 2018-08-14The westernized university is a site where the production of knowledge is embedded in Eurocentric epistemologies that are posited as objective, disembodied and universal and in which non-Eurocentric knowledges, such as black and indigenous ones, are largely marginalized or dismissed. Consequently, it is an institution that produces racism, sexism and epistemic violence. While this is increasingly being challenged by student activists and some faculty, the westernized university continues to engage in diversity and internationalization initiatives that reproduce structural disadvantages and to work within neoliberal agendas that are incompatible with decolonization. This book draws on decolonial theory to explore the ways in which Eurocentrism in the westernized university is both reproduced and unsettled. It outlines some of the challenges that accompany the decolonization of teaching, learning, research and policy, as well as providing examples of successful decolonial moments and processes. It draws on examples from universities in Europe, New Zealand and the Americas. This book represents a highly timely contribution from both early career and established thinkers in the field. Its themes will be of interest to student activists and to academics and scholars who are seeking to decolonize their research and teaching. It constitutes a decolonizing intervention into the crisis in which the westernized university finds itself.
Visualizing Empire by ISBN: 9781606066683Publication Date: 2021-01-19An exploration of how an official French visual culture normalized France's colonial project and exposed citizens and subjects to racialized ideas of life in the empire. By the end of World War I, having fortified its colonial holdings in the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa, the Indian Ocean, and Asia, France had expanded its dominion to the four corners of the earth. This volume examines how an official French visual culture normalized the country's colonial project and exposed citizens and subjects alike to racialized ideas of life in the empire. Essays analyze aspects of colonialism through investigations into the art, popular literature, material culture, film, and exhibitions that represented, celebrated, or were created for France's colonies across the seas. These studies draw from the rich documents and media--photographs, albums, postcards, maps, posters, advertisements, and children's games--related to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century French empire that are held in the Getty Research Institute's Association Connaissance de l'histoire de l'Afrique contemporaine (ACHAC) collections. ACHAC is a consortium of scholars and researchers devoted to exploring and promoting discussions of race, iconography, and the colonial and postcolonial periods of Africa and Europe.
Search our reading lists and library collections
You can check out our reading lists on Anti-Racism, Decolonisation, and Black History; as well as search our Library collections on Black History Month, the BLDS Legacy Collection and Diverse Databases as useful starting points. Use the menu on the top left hand side of this page to navigate to resources for students, educators and researchers.