This image, with women at the center of the Database as Book project, puts "the question of gender" into play as part of decolonizing knowledge. My reading here comes in the context of preparing some remarks for the 8-9 December 2025 "Database as Book" workshop. I was thinking with Ngugi wa Thiong'o's "Adventures in Translation" as I was putting together my slides, where he writes: "For imperial reason, hierarchy is the essence of being. It was the logic behind colonialism and now globalization...Languages and culture can and should relate in terms of network, not hierarchy. And a network is really a system of give-and-take between equals. Translation is central to this entire system. But translation can only achieve the role of enabling conversation if it's based on an assumption of equality between competing languages."
I put this image under the heading of
Translation←(As)→ “(women)”
I did everything I could to put "women" under erasure on my slide: quote marks, parentheses, italics, strike-through -- "(women)" -- to mark it as a question but one that has to be responded to. Woman as the in-between, the movement, the great equalizer.
Five snappily dressed women--and Francois in t-shirt and sneakers at one end. That's the data. The data that was given when the photo was taken. But give-and-take is between equals, Ngugi reminds us; the data here is already interpreted, already taken as its been given, even if it is still in the process of becoming data as I give my take on it. A take that's really only a question: what can the fact that "Database as Book" can be translated into, made equal to, "five women"--what can this data come to mean? How is decolonizing knowledge gendered, engendered, n-gendered?
So now I join Francois as part of this data, even further to the side, outside the frame altogether. Well, not altogether...
