#postcolonialstudies

Hello fellow bloggers,

In today’s blog we review an uncategorized reading by Adeline Koh, entitled: From Print to Digital: Reconfiguring Postcolonial Knowledge. This piece speaks about moving the colonial library (which has existed in print form for centuries) to digital publication. As defined by V.Y. Mudimbe in The Invention of Africa, a colonial library is a fixed set of texts and representations that have been used to defined colonized people around the world.  It has been stated that publishing the colonial library in digital is much easier than print, distribution cost is low and much more of the work can be published instead of being highly filtered out. I completely agree with this point because we currently live in a digital era and if the colonial library was to be digital it would be widely available to anyone who needs to use it and can be easily accessed via the internet. Another reason being that if something was to happen to the printed copies, let’s say fire or water damage, these prints may not be able to be restored. So I think that there should be both print and digital publications. Having more than one copies of a document is always a plus.

Social media is very prevalent in today’s society and had made doing research very simple and easy. Majority of the world’s population has a smartphone or a computer and if one would like to look into the colonial library it’s as simple as typing it in Google, Twitter or any other app out there and finding some piece of information on it if it was to be made digital. Moving from print to digital means less paper is being used and that way less trees are being cut down. So that’s one way to help in saving the environment.

Adeline also tells us that the internet represents the worst possible changes to the state of knowledge to some extent. She continues on by saying how it breaks our attention and spells the end of reflective, long-form thought and the naysayers see the internet as being an unedited mishmash of rumour, gossip and lies. I would like to think that everyone would know that not everything they read online is factual and true. One should able to distinguish between useful and useless information found on the internet. As my digital humanities lecturer stated in a previous class, the World Wide Web (www) is where one can upload credible looking information and links just to get the most hits, so we must be very careful when doing online research.

I have only mentioned a few points from this article. There’s a lot more interesting reasons that Adeline Koh speaks about as to why the colonial library should be moved from print to digital publication.

"The colonial map vividly embodies the contradictions of colonial discourse. Map-making became the servant of colonial plunder, for the knowledge constituted by the map both preceded and legitimized the conquest of territory. The map is a technology of knowledge that professes to capture the truth about a place in pure, scientific form operating under the guise of scientific exactitude and promising to retrieve and reproduce nature exactly as it is. As such, it is also a technology of possession, promising that those with the capacity to make such perfect representations must also have the right of territorial control.                    

        Yet the edges and blank spaces of colonial maps are typically marked with vivid reminders of the failure of knowledge and hence the tenuousness of possession. The failure of European knowledge appears in the margins and gaps of these maps in the forms of cannibals, mermaids and monsters, threshold figures eloquent of the resurgent relations between gender, race and imperialism. The map is a liminal thing, associated with thresholds and marginal zones, burdened with dangerous powers. As an exemplary icon of imperial "truth", the map, like the compass and the mirror, is what Hulme aptly calls a 'magic technology', a potent fetish helping colonials negotiate the perils of margins and thresholds in a world of terrifying ambiguities.