Thanks for making your way up the great big hill from Leo’s to Lauinger Library, a trip harrowing for many Georgetown students and a common example of Georgetown’s deeply inaccessible campus. You’re now at the Brutalist doorstep of arguably the physical pinnacle of Georgetown’s role as a knowledge producing and reproducing institution, with its 1.7 million tomes. It’s a good opportunity to interrogate Georgetown’s epistemological traditions and philosophies, and what the library itself represents in this order.
For one, per Cusicanqui, Georgetown is often partaking in a type of academic ventriloquism—and a type of hierarchization that affords certain “academic heroes” a kind of epistemological ontology that lacks integrity, makes invisible Indigenous knowledge, and decontextualizes information. It’s hard to enter any classroom where critique is done where scholars like Foucault and Mignolo are not referenced, let alone not cited. Philosophy classrooms reproduce and venerate the logics of Kant and Locke and Rousseau. In fact, the library has whole shelves dedicated to each of these men and their theories, prizing them as epistemological grandfathers and unimpeachable field titans. Yet what gets lost is the roots of these work—many of these epistemological traditions are grounded in a deep sense of Eurocentrism, are undergirded by orientalism, and partake in the same eliminative logics that Dotson warns against. About Mignolo specifically, writing from an Aymara perspective, Cusicanqui problematizes the so-called “foundational” decolonialism theorist for creating an empire within an empire by adopting the language of postcolonial studies without shifting the power relations within universities.
From Bolivia, she has watched Mignolo and other postcolonial scholars turn the North American university into a practitioner of this sort of ventriloquism, repeating political theory without political urgency. To be more specific to Georgetown, it’s common for Georgetown administration and faculty to partake in discussions of radical theory without reflecting it in structural practice. It’s easy to speak about the settler colonial state and Eurocentric knowledge systems without interrogating faculty structures that reproduce said Eurocentrism, or challenging the day-to-day actors that perpetuate said systems. At the library, we see a lot of passive regurgitation of ideas without effectual implications on student or faculty behavior.
Forbes, writing from California in the 1970s after the AIM movement, notes how biased and/or racist scholarship is much more insidious than moral wrong: “such propaganda kills,” he says in Columbus and Other Cannibals. Some white authors—many of whom are sanctified as neutral objects in Lau—have, as he writes, been responsible for doing “irreparable damage” to Indigenous people, how they are perceived, and therefore how they are treated. He likens this sort of literature—fictional and nonfiction—to “ammunition” for racist teachers, missionaries, and other actors to justify elimination and indignification.
Part of this is also reflected in terms of absence. There is a dearth of Indigenous literature in Lau, especially specific to discussion of the displacement of Piscataway and Nacotchtank peoples from the land Georgetown occupies. Though a number of Native American hymnbooks exist in the Shea Collection, Lau too easily erases Indigenous knowledge systems from the epistemological traditions of Georgetown. And in prizing archives, Lau frames epistemology as fixed rather than held in communities and peoples, which bucks against a number of Indigenous theories about knowledge and knowledge passage.
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