Locating the Library in Regimes of Extraction

The Logics of Property in Modern Academic Libraries

Abstract

Academic libraries are capitalist institutions. This is not metaphor, analogy, or recent development but structural reality: libraries operate as technologies for transforming land, labor, and knowledge into property, facilitating the accumulation and circulation necessary for racial capitalism and settler colonialism to persist. This article refuses the fantasy that libraries are benevolent institutions compromised by external forces (neoliberalism, austerity, corporatization) and instead analyzes libraries as deliberate participants in regimes of extraction. We trace how property relations organize library operations across registers—spatial conquest through displacement of Black and Indigenous communities, epistemological violence through collection and classification, labor exploitation through precarity and vocational awe, among others. These mechanisms interlock to form total systems resistant to reform. The article challenges LIS scholarship and librarianship's tendency to treat extraction—if it is even acknowledged at all—as something libraries have fallen into or accidentally reproduce, instead positioning libraries as deliberately constructed technologies of accumulation and dispossession that we must name in order to contest.