By Alice Corble and Rhiann Tester This overdue blog post features a guest contributor, Rhiann Tester, Assistant Library Administrator at Sussex. I’ll briefly introduce the context of our collaboration before handing over to Rhiann. Future blog posts will build on…
Blog Archives
Re-collecting Ranajit Guha through a counter-archival lens
A few weeks ago I received an email requesting an interview with me from two post-graduate students at Presidency University, Kolkata, Sohini Sengupta and Sourav Chattopadhyay, who convene Bhabuk Sabha (roughly translated to The Thinker’s Club). They wanted to engage…
Posted in Library Legacies
The Power of Poetry and Living Libraries for Decolonial Dialogue
As Black History Month draws to a close (yet Black History must continue to be shared) and I adjust to the turn of the season and new positions, I want to reflect today on The Power of Poetry and Living…
Tagged with: black history, Black History Month, event, Living Archives, Poetry
Posted in Library Legacies
Posted in Library Legacies
Unboxing and Mapping Black History in Sussex Library Legacy Collections
This summer the Library was blessed to host its first Junior Research Associate (JRA): Myisha Box (History and International Relations BA student, now in her final year). The project was supervised by Gavin Mensah Coker and Anne-Marie Angelo, with a…
Posted in Library Legacies
Re-discovering and mapping the British Library of Development Studies Legacy Collection through global metadata space and time
“Being explorers ourselves in a new university, explorers with ample maps of other universities but with none of our own, we wanted to make our students into explorers also, to encourage them to find relations between subjects where we did…
‘Libraries of Racial Discovery’: transatlantic hidden histories and the politics of memory
Introduction In my first blog post I introduced the Centre for Multi-Racial Studies (CMRS), which was established at Sussex in 1964 and ran until 1974, with its main site in Barbados in partnership with the University of the West Indies.…
Tagged with: Centre for Multi-Racial Studies, Fernando Henriques, Hidden Histories, Living Archives
Posted in Library Legacies
Posted in Library Legacies
Making Black British history and future: reviewing the launch of Black at Sussex
It is noh mistri Wi mekkin histri (Johnson, 1984) Introduction The thing about making history, especially institutional history, is that the truth of lived experience often gets disfigured, silenced, or buried. Such archival asymmetries were addressed by a brilliant line-up…
Tagged with: AFRAS, Black British History, Black Cultural Archives, Intersectionality
Posted in Library Legacies
Posted in Library Legacies
Many Happy Returns? Reading the November 1964 birth of University of Sussex Library through a (de)colonial lens
58 years ago, on 13 November 1964, University of Sussex Library was officially opened by Queen Elizabeth II. At this point in time, Sussex was in the first term of its third academic year of life as the first of…
Welcome to the blog
The Decolonial Maps of Learning blog will serve as a research diary for the project, highlighting snippets from the archives and my ethnographic journey traversing the hidden historical and contemporary institutional and cultural trails of library and archival life at…
Posted in Library Legacies