Concealing white supremacy through fantasies of the library: Economies of affect at work

Santamaria, Michele R.

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/106725 Copy

Description

Title

Concealing white supremacy through fantasies of the library: Economies of affect at work

Author(s)

Santamaria, Michele R.

Issue Date

2020

Keyword(s)

• Libraries
• White supremacy
• Affect
• Affective economies

Date of Ingest

2020-04-07T15:01:14Z

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.

Publisher

Johns Hopkins University Press and the Illinois School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Series/Report Name or Number

Library Trends 68 (3). Winter 2020

Type of Resource

text

Genre of Resource

article

Language

en

Permalink

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/106725

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1353/lib.2020.0000

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Copyright 2020 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

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