Introductory Remarks
The digital exhibit "Reframing the Colonial Library: Equatorial Guinea Archives in the Museum" engages with the country's colonial library. Following the approach of Benita Sampedro Vizcaya, the re-evaluation of the colonial library demands “dislocating the traditionally central and privileged role of metropolitan texts and neo-colonial discourses in order to engage, instead, with the cultural and intellectual production of Guinean intellectuals themselves (341).” The project embraces her emphasis on re-locating canonical texts and privileged categories of analysis such as race, capitalism, empire, or nation. This way, the exhibit attempts to reconfigure, appropriate, transform, and transgress the colonial, historical, and linguistic inheritance of which 'the local' is also a conduit, as explained by Sampedro Vizcaya. The revision of the colonial library requires “awareness of the power of those sites, not only in terms of the day-to-day functioning of the empire-colony relationship but also in regard to the epistemic and representational weight they carry in broader cultural and political practices and projects, both colonial and neocolonial (343).” This way, the exhibit turns “to the potential of the archive and the colonial library as sites from which the seemingly irreversible power of colonialism can simultaneously be enacted and contested (343).”
This exhibit is divided into three parts, chronologically interconnected, that cover Equatorial Guinean colonial and neocolonial history. The sections are: "The Temptation of Empire", “Neocolonial Politics in the Museum and Conflicting Identities in Eguatorial Guinea" and “Alternative Conservation and Heritage Practices in Equatorial Guinea. The Case of the Museum Felipe Osá Angüé." This organization aims to deconstruct visitors' perception of the colonial archive and its uses from a transhistorical and global angle. Each section addresses the ideological uses of the archive both in the metropolis and the former colony, questioning the Spanish civilizational mission that still persists beneath the language of institutional collaboration and modernization in cultural spaces.
The completion of this digital project has been made possible through the 2024 Mellon Doctoral Summer Fellowship awarded by the Price Lab for the Digital Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. The exhibition portal will be available indefinitely thanks to the support of Van Pelt Libraries.
Bibliography:
Sampedro-Vizcaya, Benita. "Rethinking the Archive and the Colonial Library: Equatorial Guinea." Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, vol. 9, no. 3, 2008, pp. 341-363.