Nathan Snaza, Animate Literacies: Literature, Affect, and the Politics of Humanism (Duke University Press, 2019); Jack Halberstam, Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire (Duke University Press, 2020); Julietta Singh, Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements (Duke University, 2018)

Abstract

When people think of academic libraries, they don’t usually think of them as wild places, or <em>de</em>humanizing institutions. Quite the opposite, in fact. The disciplinary order of the library is generally considered to be, along with higher education itself, an expression of the highest form of humanist discourse and ideals. Not only do these books bear an intellectual kinship with one another, but they are also all published by Duke University Press, and in their writings, the authors have each acknowledged one another as friends. The lessons offered by Nathan Snaza, Jack Halberstam, and Julietta Singh are useful to academic librarians because they call into question some of the metaphors, objectives, and stated values of our profession—things we tend to take for granted like mastery, discipline, universality, and order—and describe some of the ways in which these concepts are derived from colonial projects. Together, these books provide insight into what queer desire and decolonization have to do with each other, calling some of librarianship’s foundational principles into question and expanding the range of what can be thought in our own field.