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Destruction of Knowledge Centers, and Our Recover/ies

ALEXANDRIA

BAGHDAD

PHILADELPHIA

BERLIN

VANCOUVER

CANTERBURY



"Knowledge centers" are locations that concentrate human wisdom, documentation, and memory. Often based in urban areas, knowledge centers are always imperfect places, subject to the logics of exclusion, power, and dominance. But whatever their shortcomings, they are still crucial to human continuity and to the hope for a more human future. The greatest carriers of human continuity across history - religions, schools, dynasties, judicial institutions, libraries, museums - are holders of memory. When these crumble or are wrought into tatters, memories lose their frame of reference, and become like loose puzzle pieces found on the ground - scattered remnants that were once a member of a larger picture, but now are difficult, if not impossible, to re-member.


Knowledge centers are important despite their limitations. Our own era has demonstrated how the existing knowledge repositories, not merely in spite of but sometimes because of their shortcomings, can be used to piece together the lives of those the archives (and those who controlled the archives) intended to erase. Nowhere is this more true than in the history of enslavement, and in women's history. So let's start with Hypatia.


Rachel Weisz as Hypatia in the film Agora, rescuing scrolls from the Serapeum of Alexandria.
Rachel Weisz as Hypatia in the film Agora, rescuing scrolls from the Serapeum of Alexandria.

While historians debate when and how the destruction of the Library of Alexandria happened, there is no doubt that whatever remained of that institution at the time of Emperor Theodosius was destroyed around 391 CE when the Serapeum, the leading pagan temple, was destroyed. Hypatia, the daughter of Theon, a mathematician and teacher, became, as it would turn out, the last pagan teacher of philosophy in Alexandria for some time after that traumatic event, before her own murder by a mob of Christian monks in 415. The historical debates (there is a good example here) miss the point: the destruction of the knowledge center, whether a physical library, or a school, or a center for open philosophic inquiry, has a cataclysmically chilling effect. No longer would Alexandria be the center for learning in the eastern Mediterranean that it had been for the better part of a millennium. The celebration of Hypatia through the centuries is not over the minutia of whether or not the building destroyed in 391 was the Library of Alexandria in name, in spirit, or in fact. It is the triumph of mob violence over learning and inquiry. It is the victory of intolerance that is to be lamented, and that should serve as a cautionary tale.


The Siege of Baghdad (1258), in a painting from ca. 1430
The Siege of Baghdad (1258), in a painting from ca. 1430

Likewise, the Sack of Baghdad in 1258 by the Mongol forces under the leadership of Hulegu, not only ended the Abbasid Caliphate, but effectively dispersed learning away from the now-defunct capital. The emphasis on learning that the Abbasids had cultivated did not die, but the institutional centralization they had enabled died with them, and with the loss of that center, the dispersion of knowledge (and knowledge-bearers) meant that the centripetal possibilities that can further the collective creativity of people disintegrated.


Destruction of Pennsylvania Hall, May 1838
Destruction of Pennsylvania Hall, May 1838

But dispersion can serve a purpose, despite all that is lost. The destruction of the Abolitionist-funded-and-constructed Pennsylvania Hall in 1838 is an example of this. The ground floor housed archival collections, especially of the newspapers edited by Benjamin Lundy, one of the longest-publishing white editors focused on anti-slavery. When the building was destroyed in its entirety by a pro-slavery, anti-abolitionist mob, everything Lundy had preserved over decades was destroyed, along with many other Abolitionist documents. While every scholar of the Abolitionist era rues this loss, the movement continued, and, as the Burleigh Family website documents, brought the Abolitionist message into every small town and gathering in the North that they could reach. And they continued to document these actions in the lively Abolitionist press. Numerous times I have encountered notices in Abolitionist papers that ask readers to donate copies of specific issues that the editor or the anti-slavery office might have been missing. They learned (or intuitively knew) the value of archives, and encouraged that in their readers.


Nazi book-burning, May 10, 1933
Nazi book-burning, May 10, 1933

A similar example, that is especially terrifying at our current moment of increasing book-banning, is what happened to Magnus Hirschfeld's (1868-1935) library at the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft. Nazi university students sacked the institute, which had promoted a scientific and cross-cultural approach to homosexuality, before the Nazi security forces themselves came, gathered the books, and burned them in a huge bonfire a few days later (along with other scorned written works by leftists). Hirschfeld's Institute had been a nascent knowledge center, and attracted people from many areas of the world who needed support, or sought to genuinely understand human sexuality without prejudice. But the rise of a militant & violent populism ended this decisively. There can be little doubt that utterly unique resources were destroyed in the fires stoked by the fascists.


Bernhard Schapiro, Magnus Hirschfeld, Li Shiu Tong, ca. 1930
Bernhard Schapiro, Magnus Hirschfeld, Li Shiu Tong, ca. 1930

What is interesting, if little-known, is that one of Hirschfeld's partners, Li Shiu Tong (李兆堂, 1907-1993), was likewise a victim of an erasure. At the time of his death in 1993. his youngest brother threw most of his diaries, journals, and artifacts into a dumpster, in Vancouver, BC, Canada. Whether this was due to disinterest, or prejudice, is unclear. Fortunately an alert neighbor saved some of the more interesting artifacts. Yet once again we are left with the sinking certainty that utterly irreplaceable pieces of the puzzle - and key ones for understanding the navigation of race, imperialism, and privilege in the early history of the LGBTQ movement - were lost. There is a reason that "Silence = Death" is an encapsulation of LGBTQ history that reaches deeper than the AIDS crisis - it defines the very nub of LGBTQ oppression as being connected to repeated attempts to silence us.

Theophilus I, Bishop of Alexandria, Bible in hand, standing triumphantly atop the Serapeum in 391
Theophilus I, Bishop of Alexandria, Bible in hand, standing triumphantly atop the Serapeum in 391

In all of these cases - Alexandria, Baghdad, Philadelphia, Berlin, and Vancouver - the forces of destruction - i.e. those who wish to permanently silence voices inimical to their ideology - have a moment of absolute triumph. The mob rejoices as they stoke the fires that will forever gag the troublesome voice(s) of difference. But ultimately the spirit of triumphalism - illustrated here by Alexandria's bishop Theophilus at the time of the Serapeum's closure - is itself found wanting, eventually. It is unattractive in its willingness to destroy human thought through the basest spirit of human destructiveness. The spirit of the mob wants less, not more, light and growth


The book I have recently finished, Schooling the Nation: The Success of the Canterbury Academy for Black Women, looks at this dynamic microscopically, in the story of the Academy started by white Abolitionist Prudence Crandall, after her conscience was tested, and awoken, by Black women, namely Mariah Davis and Sarah Harris. This Academy in Canterbury Connecticut functioned for a year and a half from April 1833 to September 1834. It was destroyed by mob violence that broke every window in the house and terrified the students. But what I was able to demonstrate was that the trajectory started at the Academy continued long after - in the successes of the students who became teachers, activists and thinkers, and in the recognition of what the school had demonstrated, a candle of memory long-kindled in the Black community. When the Connecticut state legislature attempted to legislate the Academy out of existence with the passage of the Black Law in 1833, the white ruffians in the town greeted the news with a triumphalist celebration, as this student writes:


                                                                                                "Canterbury, May 24, 1833

Mr. -----------,

            Sir- Agreeable to your request, I write you, knowing your anxiety of the school here. There are thirteen scholars now at the school. The Canterburians are savage - they will not sell Miss Crandall an article at their shops. My ride from Hartford to Brooklyn was very unpleasant, being made up of blackguards. I came on foot from here to Brooklyn. But the happiness I enjoy here pays me for all. The place is delightful; all that is wanting to complete the place is civilized men. Last evening the news reached us that the new Law had passed. The bell rang, and a cannon was fired for half an hour. Where is justice? In the midst of all this Miss Crandall is unmoved. When we walk out, horns are blown and pistols fired." (The Liberator 3:25:99, column 3 (June 22, 1833).


The claim of my title is that, in the long run, the uncivilized savages did not win. I have asserted ultimate victory for the students, piecing together the loose pieces of their lives to form a more complete picture.


Will there be times when it feels like the mob wins? Yes, but I contend that we must remain engaged in the struggle for human freedom and human growth for the long term.



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