Report From The Ohio State University: “Surfacing Misrepresentations in University Libraries Collections Through Graduate Research”

From The Ohio St. University Libraries:

Graduate student Lucía Aja López recently completed an examination of unique Latin American holdings in University Libraries’ Special Collections to help surface inaccurate representations of indigenous languages and cultures.

“Our understanding of indigenous culture has been distorted by a colonialist lens, since the materials that we have about the first contacts were written by colonizers for colonizers,” says Aja López, a PhD candidate in Iberian Studies in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. “My purpose was to point to where, how and why those distortions occurred.”

Aja López’s graduate fellowship is an extension of the K’acha Willaykuna project, an interdisciplinary Andean and Amazonian Indigenous Arts and Humanities Collaboration that affirms Ohio State’s commitment to the study of and critical engagement with Indigenous cultures of Abiayala (the indigenous denominator for the American continent in its entirety). Funded through the Ohio State University Global Arts and Humanities Discovery Theme, the collaborative seeks to meaningfully connect students, researchers and the Ohio community to the Andean and Amazonian region and its present indigenous communities. The fellowship, sponsored by the Center for Latin American Studies, provided the opportunity for Aja López to work with materials in the Rare Books & Manuscripts Library (RBML) during Summer 2021.

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