New Year’s Resolution: Stop ‘Decolonizing’ Your Bookshelves
If you type ‘“decolonize bookshelf” into Google’s search box, you’ll receive over 200,000 results in approximately 40 seconds. Despite the seeming infinity of articles, most casual readers (and I’m assuming here) only care about the results on the first page. It turns out that these highlighted results are the most recent, having been published within the past year. The headline of the top result, from NPR, reads “Juan Vidal: Decolonize Your Bookshelf: NPR” with an in-article title of “Your Bookshelf May Be Part Of The Problem.” The second result reads: “10 Ways to Decolonize Your Bookshelf” with the third being “What Does it Mean to Decolonize Your Bookshelf.”
These articles and more are complimented by thousands of artistically curated Bookstagram images advocating in both photography and words the objectives of this collective call to decolonize the shelves that were heretofore occupied by predominantly white, male, and Western tomes. “You may have seen the phrase ‘decolonize your bookshelf’ floating around…” Juan Vidal writes, “In essence, it is about actively resisting and casting aside the colonialist ideas of narrative, storytelling, and literature that have pervaded the American psyche for so long.” Instagram produces the visual counterpart to this assertion, with many books embodying the flouting of Western literary conventions of storytelling.
A recurring thread throughout these results is the conflation of ‘decolonize’ with ‘diversity’ for which many interpret as a call to include more non-white and non-male readers into their reading lists. This coincides with the proliferation of anti-racist listicles and Bookstagram posts in the wake of global anti-Black protests and the tearing down of, and calls to remove, confederate and colonial statues in the United States, England, and the Caribbean. But what is happening when people share images of ‘decolonized’ bookshelves? What elements are missing from articles that invoke the language of decolonization? In an essay titled “Coloniality of Gender and Power: From Post Coloniality to Decoloniality,” Breny Mendoza says that decolonization is often reduced to a metaphor for “vague yearnings of liberation or social transformation” and for “anti-racist, anti-capitalist critiques as well as critiques of Eurocentrism” (103). In their famous article, “Decolonization is not a Metaphor,” Tuck and Yang caution against metaphorizing the term which has the effect of re-centering whiteness and ensuring settler futurity.
Furthermore, since decolonization is a historical process, as Frantz Fanon reminds us in Wretched of the Earth, then it cannot be legible and understood as such at any given moment. This means that decolonization is always in process. To have a ‘decolonized bookshelf’ much like a ‘decolonized’ syllabus is to reduce the terms of decolonization to quick consumption and contained temporal markers. That is, we can celebrate having sufficiently decolonized our reading after having read ‘x’ number of books over a certain period of time. What’s more, the engagement with these texts- an engagement with ‘difference’ from whiteness as center- is also understood as an exercise in decolonization. At best, this is an extremely facile rendering of the work required of decolonization. At worst, it is a harmful practice that centers the virtue signalling reader and leaves untouched white settler colonial power that orders and profits from the dissemination of these books- the signals and signs of our progress. From predominantly white-owned and managed universities built on native land to overwhelmingly white publishing houses, calls to decolonize bookshelves are non-threatening to white colonial power precisely because those most visible doing and benefitting from ‘decolonizing’ are themselves white. The cry to decolonize one’s bookshelf holds as much weight as land acknowledgements that are frequently, and often performatively, recited by academics.
In “Toward a Decolonial Feminism” the late Maria Lugones maintains the following:
Decolonizing gender is necessarily a praxical task. It is to enact a critique of racialized, colonial, and capitalist heterosexualist gender oppression as a lived transformation of the social. As such it places the theorizer in the midst of people in a historical, peopled, subjective/intersubjective understanding of the oppression < > resisting relation at the intersection of complex systems of oppression. (747)
Lugones’ insights reveal the complexities that inhere within the task of decolonization that can be used to supplant vapid proclamations of viral articles and book photos. It is not enough for these books to take up space on shelves or serve as wokefishing embellishments for Instagram likes. We have to think through the terms in which they are read, interpreted, absorbed, and actionalized in relation to complex systems of oppression.
Many bookstagrammers are also self-proclaimed feminists and take it upon themselves to take photos of, read, and discuss books about Black and Indigenous women of colour. That some capitalize on the eclectic aesthetics of ‘decolonized bookshelves’ with scant engagement with the materials is another story. However, I believe that a reading praxis- fueled by the mechanics of what Paulo Freire terms conscientization or a critical consciousness that leads to action- is a helpful repurposing of an otherwise vapid and harmful deployment of the term ‘decolonize.’ The call, therefore, should be to read texts that center the lives of those differentially shaped and imperilled by colonization and then move beyond performative markers by engaging in praxis. The knowledge that we gain from our reading must incite meaningful action that has as its goal the resistance and upending of the complex systems of oppression that continue to haunt Black and Indigenous lives.
