“I was actually trying to find books by African authors. The content in this library are from the views of specifically white men, which is super problematic.” -Kenyan artist during a tour of the library.
“When it was opened in 1931, this library was never intended for African users. So when it was handed over to the city, there was never an attempt to decolonize that quite purposefully. It is something that we are thinking quite deeply about, and it is a phenomenal amount of work.” – Book Bunk co-founders
Meet Book Bunk. 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaITRjXBf5I.
Book Bunk, "Decolonizing the library", contributed by Angela Okune, STS Infrastructures, Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography, last modified 8 August 2019, accessed 25 December 2024. https://stsinfrastructures.org/content/decolonizing-library
Critical Commentary
AO: These quotes from the Book Bunk promotional video raises decolonizing the library as one of the key tasks they have ahead of them. Conversations with the co-founders raised some of the ongoing decisions they are grappling with such as what to re/member and what to back-ground about the library's colonial history and founder, for example.