University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

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

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
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
Language
en
Permalink
http://hdl.handle.net/2142/106725
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1353/lib.2020.0000
Copyright and License Information
Copyright 2020 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Owning Collections

Library Trends 68 (3) Winter 2020: Strange Circulations: Affect and the Library PRIMARY
Library Trends 68 (3) Winter 2020: Strange Circulations: Affect and the Library. Edited by Kate Adler and Lisa Sloniowski.