Quilting Bibliodiversity: North Carolina Knowledge in Piecework and Appliqué Wylie and Sammie // INLS 737
The production of local knowledge is critical, particularly in our current era where technology has made dispersed networks of global information readily available. As the publishing industry grows increasingly consolidated, there is less room for diverse, local scholarship to thrive. This quilt is an effort to visualize the past and inspire the future of local knowledge production in North Carolina. The quilt prompts viewers to reflect on the importance of local scholarship and storytelling, both highlighting the need to support diverse and robust local publishing, and other forms of knowledge, such as those conveyed in vernacular crafts.
By supporting the research of scholars who amplify the voices, cultures and lives of marginalized communities we hope to build a stronger community catalog and ensure the continued distribution of locally and regionally relevant scholarship.
One well-known consequence related to the consolidation of the scholarly publishing industry is sky high journal prices. Less often explored is the lack of diversity in the products of the publishing industry itself. Not only has the variety of content decreased but scholarship published in various languages and from diverse perspectives have also diminished. Marginalized communities are less likely to have work published about them because it is viewed as bad for profit margins. Data provided by UNC Press was used to analyze North Carolina specific scholarship published over the last ten years which we sorted by regional affiliation. We noticed inequity among geographic locations represented in the scholarship, finding areas such as Coastal Carolina and the Piedmont were far more common than Eastern North Carolina or Appalachian literature.
Local scholarship inherently challenges traditional narratives by highlighting regional cultural histories, addressing systemic racism and inequity in this state. While advocacy for local scholarship is ostensibly apolitical, this type of scholarship is historically targeted and censored by academic arbiters of scholarly information, as pluralities of perspectives challenge established historical narratives. Embracing bibliodiversity means strengthening and building upon regional communities' understanding of their own history.
The form of the quilt is intentional for this project as well, as North Carolina was the first state to systematically record quilts from all counties of the state in the 1980s. From 1985 to 1986, over 10,000 quilts were documented by the North Carolina Quilt Project. Quilts represent a highly localized form of knowledge, that historically have been made through communal craft practices. The fact that quilts have historically been relegated to the realm of "women's work" is also relevant to the critical orientation of this project. We seek to understand how non-hegemonic forms of knowledge-production can provide new ways of understanding issues of race, class, and region in this state.
While our project has focused on scholarship produced in a higher academic setting, we want to stress that this is not the only avenue where it is appropriate to share and study these stories. This call to action can and should be applied more broadly. We encourage all outlets, such as archives and newspapers, to also consider and reflect on how to elevate communities' stories by bringing them to the attention of a wider audiences.
Support for community-oriented scholarship that highlights regional struggles is indispensable to the fight against intentional historical erasure of marginalized communities.
A Call to Action
In an increasingly consolidated publishing industry those who benefit from the power derived from institutions of academia should not ignore their local communities. While we utilize data from UNC Press, we encourage UNC Press to continue to commit to this type of scholarship. We also call on other local presses like Duke University Press to increase their output of regionally relevant scholarship. By leaning into their geographic identity, it is possible to create a more diverse scholarly publishing industry. By bringing to the table voices and histories which have long been silenced or forgotten, both universities, libraries and their affiliated publishing houses can bridge the relationship between university and community. We further encourage presses which pride themselves on their prestige to consider what types of scholarship their local community holds and to use their resources to highlight their own community so as to contribute to the effort by other University Presses to create a more diverse ecosystem of scholarship. Profit seeking over the elevation of local stories is a result of a capitalist driven society which seeks to maximize profit over the lives it has historically marginalized.