FROM THE MIMEOGRAPH TO THE PDF

The Mimeograph in action. Via the Civil Rights Movement Archive.

Sonia Sanchez taught a Black literature course in the English department. “At that time,” she said, “it was a revolutionary idea to insert into the English Department the study of African-American literature.” Many of the texts were out of print, so she often read aloud from her copy and reproduced excerpts, using mimeograph machines with messy ink. “My hands were always blue and purple,” Sanchez recalls “I thought they would never get clean again.” 

— Martha Biondi, The Black Revolution on Campus (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012), 47. 

C.L.R. James was the only person I knew in those days who had a copying machine in his apartment, and they were big in those days. That machine was crucial to his working methods then.

— Aldon Nielsen quoted in Jeremy Matthew Glick, The Black Radical Tragic: Performance, Aesthetics, and the Unfinished Haitian Revolution (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 216. 

At Birmingham, where we had no resources, the very first day we arrived, they taught us all how to use the mimeograph machine, because they said "everything you write, everyone else is going to want to read, so you have to type it on a stencil and mimeograph it off." So every morning you got there, and in your pigeonhole would be these one- or two- or three-page manifestos that people had written. I remember someone read The History of Sexuality in French when it was first published, and immediately wrote up a four-page single-spaced precis of the book for those who didn't read French.

— Michael Denning, “The Cultural Commons: An Interview with Michael Denning,” Reconstruction 8:1 (2008).

 

In a world where books have long lost all likeness to books, the real book can no longer be one. If the invention of the printing press inaugurated the bourgeois era, the time is at hand for its repeal by the mimeograph, the only fitting, the unobtrusive means of dissemination. 

— Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1978), 51.

Predicament and Routes, after a period of existence as "books," have enjoyed a second life in the form of photocopies and PDF files. Some of this "publication" has occurred within the rules of copyright, some not. Knowledge transmitted this way cannot, nor should it, be legally contained. In any event, it has become all too clear that the academic book, as a physical object, does not travel very well. Disassembled and modular, the text gets around.

— James Clifford, Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 10.

NO DISCIPLINE

1.

Abd-al Hakimu Ibn Alkalimat, "Common Problems, Common Solutions: Toward a Pan-African Ideology," Journal of Black Poetry 1:14 (1970-71)

My first reaction is to have our tribal governments establish research protocols and to ban people like this from writing about our tribes. 

— Delphine Red Shirt, “A Review of our ‘New History’: Part III,” Lakota Times (December 19, 2019). 

One of the members had explained to the natives (the report naturally refers them “sauvages”) that the high mortality rate was caused by the wines and liquors, which they did not know how to consume in moderation. “Why don’t you write to your great King,” one of the natives asked, “to prohibit the transporting of these beverages which are killing us?” “The French,” the Jesuit answered, need them to help them stand the sea voyages and the freezing temperatures of these places.” “Well then,” the other said, “arrange that they be the only ones to drink them.” At this point, a second native stood up: “No, it is not these beverages which kill us, it is your writings. As soon as you started to describe our country, our rivers, our lands, our forests, we all began to die, in a way that was not happening before you came.” 

— Carlo Ginzburg, “The Europeans Discover (or Rediscover) the Shamans,” in Threads and Traces: True False Fictive (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012), 87.

In contrast to tortuous attempts throughout the Arab world to reconcile nascent academic social sciences with Western Orientalist anthropology, at least on the official level, Algerian authorities said no. Ethnology was banned outright at the twenty-fourth International Conference of Sociology in Algiers in March 1974. 

— Susan Slyomovics, “‘The Ethnologist-Spy Was Hanged, at That Time We Were a Little Savage’: Anthropology in Algeria with Habib Tengour,” b2o: an online journal (December 10, 2018) 

2. 

The Asiatic Society of Bengal, center. William Wood, A Series of Twenty-Eight Panoramic Views of Calcutta (1833).

Anyone who still thinks of interdisciplinarity as the key to a new world should consider that it has been a working principle for World Bank teams on the ground in Africa since the Bank’s inception. The same goes for the concept of area studies – interdisciplinary scholarship focused on different regions of the world – which emerged in the US after 1945, with support from the Ford Foundation, and eventually spread across the Atlantic. 

— Mahmood Mamdani, “The African University,” London Review of Books 40:14 (July 19, 2018) 

The institutionalization of the nominal divisions of the social sciences is extremely strong today, despite all the genuflection before the rosy glow of “interdisciplinarity.” Indeed, I would argue that interdisciplinarity is itself a lure, representing the greatest support possible to the current list of disciplines, by implying that each has some special knowledge that it might be useful to combine with some other special knowledges in order to solve some practical problem. 

— Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Heritage of Sociology, the Promise of Social Science,” in The End of the World as We Know it: Social Science for the Twenty-First Century (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 246. Originally delivered at Fourteenth World Congress of Sociology, Montreal, July 26, 1998. 

I have always been slightly bemused by the constant celebration or dismissal of interdisciplinarity within queer studies, particularly when it comes to the diversified holdings of queer archives. To return to a point I made earlier about periodization and geopolitics, such questions of interdisciplinarity often seem beside the point within histories of colonialism and sexuality. If one were to take the case of colonial India, for example, interdisciplinarity emerges more as a ruse of the colonial state, rather than a disruptive reading practice. What we need, now more than ever, is a genealogy of interdisciplinarity as concept and practice within and without Euro-American archival forms. For me, queer archival forms demand reading practices that are meandering, ragged, and unfamiliar; no blueprints here for a studied interdisciplinarity! 

— Anjali Arondekar, “Queering Archives: A Roundtable Discussion,” Radical History Review 122 (2015), 228-229.

Further reading: Joyce A. Lander, ed., The Death of White Sociology (New York: Vintage, 1973), especially Dennis Forsythe’s chapter, “Radical Sociology and Blacks,” 213-233; Vine Deloria, Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (New York: Macmillan, 1969); Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978); Irene Gendzier, Managing Political Change: Social Scientists and the Third World (Boulder: Westview Press, 1985); Partha Chatterjee, ed., Texts of Power: Emerging Disciplines in Colonial Bengal (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995); Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Omnia El Shakry, The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007); Mayssoun Sukarieh and Stuart Tannock, “On the Problem of Over-Researched Communities: The Case of the Shatila Palestinian Refugee Camp in Lebanon,” Sociology 47:3 (2013): 494-508; Durba Mitra, Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020).