This is the thirteenth in our current series of short essays by participants in the Open Knowledge Fellowship coordinated by the Mina Rees Library, these from Fellows in the Spring 2022 cohort. Fellows share insight into the process of converting a syllabus to openly-licensed and/or zero-cost resources, as well as their experiences teaching undergraduate courses at CUNY.

Inma Naïma Zanoguera is a Ph.D. student in English at the CUNY Graduate Center. Spanning academic, creative, and journalistic genres, her writings explore humanity’s resilience, particularly in the face of colonial oppression, and its manifestations in the literary arts. Her aim is to understand and amplify historical and contemporary instances where the (seemingly) totalizing influence of colonialism and liberalism falters and leaks, foretelling possibilities of otherwise living, knowing, and being. Based between Brooklyn and Mallorca, she sporadically works on projects related to sports and activism/community, primarily around the Sahrawi diaspora. Despite all the books, she can trace most of what she’s learned to the creative, spiritual, and embodied practices of running on the trails or swimming endless laps at your local swimming pool.

In the context of present-day France and Algeria, Naima, the protagonist of my current read, is faced with the paradigmatic postcolonial silence that often stands in for a family history where war and colonialism have uprooted an entire generation. Naima says that her dad, after going through the horrors of the Algerian Revolution, will “never be able to see his life story in terms of […] something bigger, the history of a colonized country,” an unwillingness to historicize that frustrates Naima’s efforts to locate herself coherently within the larger forces of History and Fate. For this reason, she says, “fiction and research are all that remains to fill the silences handed on with the vignettes from one generation to the next.”

I was at my most ambitious when I decided that the OKF would be an occasion to create a repository of Open Access sources, scholarly and otherwise, around the topic of Blackness in the Early Modern to present-day Iberian context—my version of Naima’s Algerian Revolution. In purely conceptual terms, this project poses two main challenges that may be thought of as epistemological in nature: Who is entitled to have access to, and partake in, the shaping of knowledge? And: what counts as legitimate knowledge-making practices? While the project of Open Access writ large poses a challenge to notions of knowledge-making as the exclusive province of the privileged, the project of “Blackening” Iberian and Early Modern studies aims to shake the foundations of humanism/the humanities through transforming how racialized subjects relate to historical, humanistic, and pedagogical inquiry.   

The aspiration to build such a Creative Commons site is an extension of what I am trying to do generally in my research: much of what motivates my scholarly pursuits is in fact just a desire to overwrite how I (have been taught to) relate to my “self,” by which I mean, to understand in historical terms my location in the world. So I tend to think of my academic endeavors as multifaceted, life-long projects, one of many epicenters in a web of personal desires where not only knowledge acquisition, but spiritual growth, reach for the ancestors, and a need to find more and better ways of enacting communal care, propel me ever onward into the unsettled/unsettling realm where academic rigor meets personal growth.

As a first gen, (there it goes!)—as a first gen, black woman from a working class family, there is no tablet up in the heavens prophesizing my ascendancy in academia—as a kid, my mom didn’t take me to libraries because her vision of good parenting simply did not include libraries (it did include long, arduous summer mornings picking almonds under the scorching Mediterranean sun, because that’s our family tradition and that, mind you, taught me a few things also); similarly, I did not visit museums except for in school trips, and though I am grateful for the many educational opportunities I had, I simply was not encouraged to pursue knowledge except to graduate from college.

Owing, I think, to an internalization of the privileged status of knowledge acquisition, I have for a long time held an unconscious belief that, if something (in this case, knowledge) isn’t easily available to me—if nobody is taking the time to encourage me into something—it must be because it’s not for me, and therefore, that I don’t deserve it. I must confess, then, that I am among those (those few, luckily) who did not really think too deeply about Open Access before the fellowship, a fact which stands uneasily next to an acknowledgement of what the pursuit of historical knowledge and the tools humanistic inquiry have meant for me, specially since I began graduate school.

It is only now, after the fellowship, that encountering a paywall on my way to some piece of scholarship prompts me into critically questioning the systems of power that keep people in and out of the spaces where knowledge circulates and is transformed and grows, and in/out of the borders of peer-reviewed research in the various fields of specialized knowledge.

Though this may seem self-evident, it bears mentioning because it has been at the center of my experience during the fellowship: by delving deeply into the configurations of Open Access and Open Knowledge, I have become more aware and increasingly critical of the corrupted and predatory logics that orchestrate the uneven circulation of and access to knowledge, specifically peer-reviewed knowledge that allows researchers to build a career in academia.

It is in this context, and for these reasons, that it became important to me to build an openly accessible, free-of-cost website hosting a wealth of sources that, I believe, contribute to a larger project of turning upside down the epistemic heritage of the Euroamerican tradition. It would do so, as an intellectual project, by amplifying efforts to decolonize, de-White, and Blacken (Blackify?) domains of specialized research that have, for so long, not only assumed an unproblematic equation of History and Knowledge as the heritage of White Europe via ancient Rome and Greece, but that in our current-day academic practices remain the conditions of possibility for racism, capitalism, and the various afterlives of colonialism from which none of our institutions can be said to be detached.

Earlier I made an analogy between the inside and outside of knowledge-making practices and their borders. This was not undeliberate: as I think I have hinted at, knowledge is an alive phenomenon, and its reach is planetary. Words, it is said, are Worlds. I firmly believe that the conditions we are willing to accept regarding what knowledge means, who it serves and who it doesn’t, and most importantly, how we relate to ourselves as subjects of a given history and episteme, are all questions whose answers ripple scalarly: from the individual to her community, from community to institutions and public spaces, and from there to policy, politics, and dynamics at the local, regional, and geopolitical levels.

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