Re:The Brontë archive needs to be secured for public use and...
by tablespoon on Tuesday July 20, 2021 @11:48AM
(#27895206)
> In this case, the author is using "decolonize" to mean to liberate the work from private ownership and make it available to the public.
If that's the case, it seems like jargon for jargon's sake. IMHO that sense would have been much more clearly communicated by using a word like "democratize."
The situation kind of brings to mind slang, where people often invent unneeded new words mainly as a way to signal being fashionable or being part of a group.
The issue here is that these works have been in a private library, inaccessible to the public, since the 1930s.
In this case, the author is using "decolonize" to mean to liberate the work from private ownership and make it available to the public.
When "decolonize" is used in the context of e.g. education, it refers to restructuring an education system to be more equitable to all students. As such, the idea of providing access to everyone is a default implication of the term, even if its origin more specifically relates to dismantling the colonial baggage that led to structural inequality.