Considering the Beinecke Library

Yale University’s Beinecke Library holds over six thousand items related to the Middle East and North Africa, ranging from individual leaves and manuscripts to large archival collections. Often, these substantial holdings designate Yale as one of the largest repositories of ‘Islamic’ material in North America, if not the continent. Beyond geographic origin, which is not always available for many of these materials, the designation of ‘Islamic’ stems from the language used: most often Arabic, Persian, or Turkish.

This presentation will consider the practice of using nomenclature such as ‘Islamic’ as an overarching category for these materials, and its ramifications for understandings of racial and ethnic identities represented in these archives. It will show how using language as the determining factor for the ‘Islamic’ categorization sometimes obfuscates cultural representation and discussions of racial belonging and the challenges it poses for discoverability by an audience that extends beyond the library’s scholarly users.

Lastly, it will examine opportunities for reparative description that takes these concerns into account, and explore opportunities to highlight racial considerations and positionality not just through highlighting the identities of the author, collector, or dealer, but also by further contextualizing provenance information, historic collecting practices, and using language throughout archival description that are more recognizable to the communities represented.