In this article we seek to intervene in conversations that frame Black abolition and decolonisation as antagonistic political projects. We respond to Garba and Sorentino’s (2020) “Slavery is a metaphor”, which critiques Tuck and Yang (2012; “Decolonization is not a metaphor”) and decolonisation. Our concern is that scholarship in this vein denies Indigenous sovereignty and futurity while unnecessarily characterising decolonisation as antiblack. We contend that ontological, epistemological, and disciplinary traps lead to this problem: reductions, conflations, and taking settler‐enslavers’ word as truth. We suggest that critiques of settler colonial studies shouldn’t be confused with the aims of Indigenous decolonisation, where the former is largely driven by white scholarship and the latter is an Indigenous‐led project rooted in Indigenous epistemologies. We focus on questions of land and sovereignty, gesturing toward framings that are inclusive of Black, Native, and immigrant communities.
In this article, I bring a feminist geographic analysis of embodied life and desire into a study of archives. Drawing on my experience as a library and archives professional and feminist geographer navigating the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I use two examples from UNC’s Wilson Library. I argue that archives are lived, messy spaces where history unfolds not linearly, but in proximity to bodies—bodies who physically handle materials before and after they may become “archival,” who make connections between actors or events throughout time and space, and whose lived experience and desires shape how they interact with archives. Archives do not merely exist as “the archive,” but are constantly being made through the interactions and desires of people across time and space. From this premise, we who utilize archives can be attentive to the labor of archival work that is often erased in scholarship and consider how embodied life shapes a non-linear temporality in archives.
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