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WHOSE PEN, WHOSE SWORD? Discovery Narratives of America, Archival Power, and the Silencing of Indigenous Pasts

      The Sword Behind the Pen   I want to begin today not with a date, not with a map, and not with the name Christopher Columbus. I want to begin with a sword. Specifically, I want to begin with a particular kind of sword — Toledo steel, the finest blade manufacture in sixteenth-century Europe, forged in the workshops of a city in central Spain that had, only decades before the conquest of the Americas, been a meeting place of Islamic, Jewish, and Christian artisans working side by side. Toledo steel was the weapon of choice of the conquistadors. It caught the light. It was terrifying. And it was entirely inseparable from the documents, the chronicles, the legal instruments, and the archives that we students of history and anthropology spend our lives reading and interpreting. Subhadra Das, in her recent book Uncivilised: Ten Lies that Made the West, puts it this way: There is a power, a value inherent in the written word, so much so that it has b...
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Knowledge is Power: A Critical Genealogy of Epistemic Power in Colonial and South Asian History

    I want to begin today not with an argument, not with a theory, and not with a date. I want to begin with a phrase. Three words. Five syllables.   "Knowledge is power."   You have heard it before. You have probably said it yourself. Perhaps a teacher wrote it above a blackboard. Perhaps a parent offered it as consolation when you were struggling at school. Perhaps you have seen it printed on a motivational poster, stitched onto a tote bag, hashtagged across social media. It is one of those phrases so thoroughly absorbed into the furniture of modern life that we have stopped noticing it.   And that, precisely, is the problem.   Because a phrase that everyone agrees with and no one examines is not a truth. It is an ideology. It is a story about the world so thoroughly naturalised that it has stopped looking like a story at all. And when stories stop looking like stories — when they pass themselves off as simple, obvious facts — they bec...
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