Concealing White Supremacy through Fantasies of the Library: Economies of Affect at Work

Abstract

Whether the library in question is as small as a personal collection of books or as large as the Borgesian conception of the library as universe, this article argues that "The Library" can function as a fantasy space that denies its role in white supremacy even while it is intimately and affectively tied to it. As such, the fantasy of the library is a significant obstacle in terms of "denaturalizing whiteness in academic library spaces" (Brook, Ellenwood, and Lazzaro 2015). In order to reveal what the fantasy of the library always seeks to obscure, this article examines three types of "affective economies" (Ahmed 2004): that of library awe, that of library nostalgia, and that of library trespass. By drawing attention to these affective economies, the hope is to shift focus away from the library as a fantastic space to the bodies that circulate in libraries. In doing so, a distinction is always drawn between the bodies that belong and do not belong in library space. Given my status as light-skinned Latina academic librarian, I weave autoethnographic analysis throughout the article as a way of addressing that liminal space between belonging and not-belonging in the library, further accentuating how belonging at the library is constructed around whiteness. In contrast to the affective economy analysis that precedes it, the final section of the article examines how library video tours created by students of color portray aspects of library awe and library nostalgia while also establishing the right of bodies of color to take up space in libraries and fashion their own, sometimes fantastic narratives.

Toward a Critical Turn in Library UX

“…We begin by considering the ways in which the concept of UX, with origins in HCI, industrial design, and applied anthropology, has been adapted within library discourse and practice and then focus our attention on UX's two foundational concepts, user and experience. Concluding that both concepts reproduce the library as a space where "belonging is constructed around whiteness" 3 and being able-bodied, we advocate for a critical turn in library UX, one that would result from a deeper engagement with user-centered theories that emerge from LIS as well as critical and feminist perspectives on practice, embodiment, and power.…”

“Nice White Meetings”

“…CRT argues that the deep and complex oppression of BIPOC is structural and cannot be easily mitigated by addressing discrete incidents, nor by treating everyone the same (Carbado 2011). As a consequence of the profound failure to substantively address institutional racism, the library transforms into a fantastical, ahistorical space where affective notions such as awe and nostalgia (Santamaria 2020) grounded in white cultural traditions simultaneously flourish and complicate the denaturalization of whiteness in academia (Brook, Ellenwood, and Lazzaro 2015). CRT challenges such ahistoricism by revealing how the library's perpetration of inequities through its bureaucratic practices is part of a historical continuum of racism (Lawrence et al 2018, 6).…”

Spatial thinking, gender and immaterial affective labour in the post-Fordist academic library

“…In the academic library context, conceived space can be understood as "the abstracted domain of maps, floor plans, rules, regulations, controlled vocabularies, standards and the myriad other bureaucratic frameworks that govern social environments" (Payne, 2018, p. 154). Perceived space, or the affective dimension of library space, may be associated with feelings of anxiety (Mellon, 1986), nostalgia (Radford et al, 2015;Santamaria, 2020) and awe (Radford et al, 2015;Ettarh, 2018;Santamaria, 2020); being active, creative, self-regulating and entrepreneurial (Hancock and Spicer, 2010); or feelings of exclusion or being out of place (Brook et al, 2015;Santamaria, 2020). Lived space, the "space of daily activities", includes "the pathways of daily rituals, habits, patterns and routines" (Payne, 2018, p. 154).…”