10 Theological librarianship • Vol. 12, No. 1 april 2019

as “Congo,” “Kimbanguism,” and “Catholic”—yet there remains a large selection of periodicals I simply did not have the margin to uncover or were not located in the “Sub-Saharan African Collection.” For instance, ethnomusicology journals that included such gems as the music and lyrics for the first Messe Katangaise by a Congolese composer from the Katanga region, or Shona Methodist hymnody from Zimbabwe, along with Swahili hymn books, are not cataloged as held within the specific collection. The issue at stake then was not one of what Pitts holds, but the more epistemically complex problem of how North American libraries organize data and set the perimeters of collections.

Second, in the work of curating African content within a North American space, how does one recognize and navigate the double white gaze—a collection generated under white eyes and curated according to my white analysis? Racialized positionality and histories continue to inflect the ways in which we see and know, and who and how we know. Since troubling the white gaze is an enduring epistemic and social process, curating this project felt initially problematic to me. In my quiet discomfort, I turned to comparative voices writing or speaking on “Africa” within global frameworks. I wanted to augment my gaze and trouble the epistemological waters of visitors, even if only fractionally. To do so, we adopted several strategies such as using the physical display to draw attention to race as a structuring and aesthetic category or to how “Africa” is conceived from within and outside of the continent. Within drawers under display cases, for example, we inserted panels with quotes and excerpts contrasting the ways in which African scholars and white, Western scholars and politicians speak of “Africa” within a global consciousness. Hegel’s “Unhistorical” Africa fades as agency and cultural plurality animates the intellectual resources of communities and countries, such as Nigerian philosopher Olúfẹ́mi Táíwo underscores in his discussion on African knowledge production.22 While highlighting voices such as Táíwo and others does not remove or alter the white gaze(s), it can bring into focus the ways structurally, historically constructed whiteness erases, dehumanizes, and diminishes African histories as possessing global and local import.

Third, numerous periodicals were printed in languages that require either native fluency or sustained study and use by non-native speakers. I was able to work in English and French sources, as well as skim Portuguese for relevance to selected themes. Africanist colleague in Emory’s History Department Madelyn Stone provided translations of Afrikaans, and a friend of the library provided translations of Amharic. The shortcomings and losses of local insights and contributions due to inability to work in the array of languages in the collection should not be underestimated. Yet, this limitation of the exhibition does not necessarily inhibit use of the collection. Instead, it invites a more significant set of questions requiring sustained reflection and response: What is the role of the theological library in North American seminaries in widening and deepening reflection and analysis beyond global north sources? How does a theological library make resources held in a North American institution, possessing power, prestige, and financial resources to relocate knowledge away from its community of creation, available to those for whom these materials are living documents? Who become the custodians of knowledge and how does this inform the politics and economics of theological and historical knowledge production?

Conclusion

Strategic initiatives directed toward keeping theological institutions viable within a competitive marketplace of options, wherein the church and religion appear as disappearing and inutile consumables, undermine perceiving questions about collection accessibility and utilization as first theological questions. I would suggest, however, that the Sub-Saharan African Collection at Pitts presses us to recognize that access to and use of a library’s resources is connected to the flourishing of human communities who live with remnants

22 See Olúfẹ́mi Táíwo, “Why Africa Must Become a Center of Knowledge Again,” TEDGlobal, August 2017, https://www.ted.com/talks/oluf_mi_taiwo_why_africa_must_become_a_center_of_knowledge_again.