Shifting the Centre by Orsod Malik

Shifting the Centre a special featured blog by Sudani Digital Archivist, Orsod Malik

“These are my ancestors, these are my people. They are yours too, if you want them.”
— C.L.R. James, from ‘The Making of the Caribbean People’ (published 1980)

Popular forms of storytelling tend to rely on protagonists. They are the readers’ eyes and ears, guiding us through the worlds they move through. We see what the protagonists allow us to see, giving them power over how we interpret the narratives placed before us. The stories told through historical texts – such as books, archival materials, museums and statues – function similarly. They rely on the experiences of protagonists – particular groups of people, political leaders, artists and scholars – to communicate the significance of past events to present-day readers. 

But not all stories are deemed significant.

Over the past five-hundred years, Europe and its settler colonies have monopolised economic, military, and ideological power over the world. Positioning themselves, their leaders and their scholars at the very centre of history – carefully selecting the protagonist we’re permitted to see the world through. Eurocentric stories mirror Europe’s benevolent conception of itself: World War heroics are pasted over imperial atrocities, colonial ventures are presented as humanitarian initiatives, the genocide of native peoples are celebrated by memorialising European explorers and their ‘discovery’ of ‘new’ lands.

What kinds of stories are produced when we decentre Europe and its settler colonies? What occurs when colonised people are the protagonists of world history?

BSWN’s Decolonial Working Group is dedicated to building a space where heritage workers, cultural practitioners, and community members can experiment with ways to shift the centre towards the experiences of African and Asian peoples and their diasporas.

Shifting the centre away from Europe to expand our understanding of the world is fundamental to developing a decolonial practice. This doesn’t mean ignoring or muting Europe’s influence, or attempting to form separatist histories that are independent of the European encounter. Rather, acknowledging Europe’s impact on the world, and contrasting it against the long traditions of radical politics championed by colonised people exemplifies our contributions to world history and present-day liberatory politics.

BSWN’s Decolonial Working Group came together a year after the largest protests for Black lives in history, and during our government’s blatant erosion of civil rights through the ‘Police, Crime and Sentencing Bill’ and the ‘Nationality and Borders Bill’. The importance of learning from the ways we have resisted oppressive systems to guide us towards emancipatory futures cannot be understated. But Eurocentric stories – formed by silencing or peripheralising dissident protagonists – are incapable of nurturing such learning. BSWN’s Decolonial Working Group has taken on the task of locating a new centre to amplify that which has been silenced, and to reassert the political and cultural agency of colonised people.

Bio

Orsod Malik is a UK-based Sudani digital archivist, curator, editor, content producer and strategist. He is the founder of @code__switch, an archive/continuum of radical internationalism. His research focuses on shifting peripheral histories to the centre by drawing links between anticolonial struggles and thought across space and time. He is currently the Archivist-in-Resident at the Library of Africa and the African Diaspora (LOATAD) and a curator at the Stuart Hall Foundation and International Curators Forum. Orsod’s archival and curatorial practice focuses on developing methods to arrange audio and visual materials from anticolonial movements in ways that make sense of present-day political and cultural formations.