Epistemicide refers to knowledge destruction and is perpetuated through epistemic injustices, which are the ways we harm knowers in the process of their epistemological development. Within acts of commemoration, epistemic injustices can influence the prioritization and politicization of memory, thus shaping our shared understandings of cultural heritage. This paper situates epistemicide within discussions of cultural heritage and collective memory by drawing from existing literature on archival silences. This framing allows us to articulate and define commemorative injustices– memorial injustice, performative injustice, and documentary injustice– expanding the previously established epistemicide framework. Naming commemorative injustices promotes the development of a meta‐language to connect related concepts of knowledge destruction, silencing, and absence across disciplines in cultural information studies. While commemorative injustices are not necessarily committed out of individual mal intent, this paper notes that they are byproducts of culturally constructed historical precedents and social norms. Beyond a theoretical expansion, we explore the designation of evidence of cultural heritage as manifestations of information, name enforced archival silences as instances of commemorative injustice, identify how multiple epistemic injustices may act concurrently to inflict harm, and provide critical theory to inform interventions by drawing on examples of epistemic injustice inflicted by U.S. cultural heritage institutions.

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Our paper explores the relationship between Edward Edwards’s Memoirs of Libraries: Includinga Handbook of Library Economy (1859) and 19th-century Britain’s Public Library Movement,especially the Public Library Acts of 1850 and 1855. Focusing on the instrumentalization oflibrary history for the movement’s agenda, we show how Edwards projects the roots of thismovement deep into antiquity and rhetorically creates a narrative of British deficiency setpurposefully at odds with British patriotic and colonial sentiments, deriving from this verticaland horizontal comparison his arguments and advice for the establishment of municipal publiclibraries.

This book is the slightly extended version of H.'s dissertation defended in 2020 at the Universität Bamberg. After an introduction and literature review (Part 1), it breaks down into four main parts: 'Der historisch-geographische Rezeptionskontext', 'Afrikaeine literarische Landschaft als Bühne in Vergils Aeneis', 'Afrikanische Motive in den Dichtungen des Horaz und Properz' and 'Die Präsentation Afrikas in Epos und Lyrikein Vergleich', followed by 'Ergebnisse und Perspektiven' and the usual backmatter.The study's premise is thatgeographically speakingthere were two Africas from the Roman perspective: an almost unknown middle and southern part and the narrow northern strip that, through experience, became a historic space (p. 1). It also stresses the difference between a historic-geographic mode of description and the poetic one. The Augustan period was marked by heightened Roman engagement in Africa, and H.'s study charts its echo in the works of three of the most influential Augustan poets, inquiring whether there was indeed a distinct view of Africa from the Roman perspective (p. 3).The text-and work-immanent perspective ('das text-und werkimmanente Verfahren', p. 4) adopted is strictly philological and seeks to understand the geographic, ethnographic and historical components of this poetic perception solely within the text. Drawing on studies on nature symbolism and perspective (R. Heinze, H.-G. Hölsken, V. Pöschl, G. Schönbeck, R. Jenkyns, E. Leach), the study focuses on three main aspects of space: geography, nature and landscape. Such a lens has rarely been applied to Africa.Unsurprisingly, the study's major finding is a mostly fictional construction of Africa informed more by textual intentionality than by geographic and ethnographic reality. As dominant themes in Virgil's epic as well as in Horace's and Propertius' lyrical poetry, H. identifies the continent's general hostility, expressed in geographic tropes of mountains (the Atlas), the desert and the Syrtes, the treacherous sandbanks off the North African coast as well as dangerous fauna and a warlike nomadic indigenous population (pp. 222-3).In the Aeneid this fictional construction is closely tied to a semantic charge of Africa as a space ('Semantisierung des Raumes'): the characters' subjective perception turns the spatial experience into information about their mental state. H. shows how the desert as space becomes an emotional reflection of Aeneas' and Dido's respective identity crises as part of a drama that Virgil quite literally 'stages' through his metaphorical borrowings from theatre terminology (pp. 57-67, 122; Aen 1.164 and 4.471). In the teleological conception of the epic with the Augustan Age as the ultimate purpose of Aeneas' quest, Africa becomes a mediated 'anti-space' whilethrough the proleptic interweaving of mytho-historical time and the contemporaneous reality of the poet's audiencethe 'domestication' and integration of this mythical locus horribilis into the Augustan world order is celebrated by the poet as a significant accomp...