Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2024. 290 pages. ISBN-13: 978-1-68571-190-0. DOI: 10.53288/0466.1.00. OPEN-ACCESS e-book and $39.00 in print: paperbound/7 X 10 in.

A wonderful book exploring how texts, and living interactions, too, leave matters unsaid, concoct effective misunderstandings, hide and reveal. Reaching far beyond the topic of state censorship, Redacted uses innovative literary forms and brilliant graphics to address anthropological practice and its relation to writing in contexts of risk and danger.

~ Caroline Humphrey, author of On the Edge: Life Along the Russian-China Border and The Unmaking of Soviet Life

Moving in agile ways across media and creative forms, this stimulating and provocative book probes the dense character of redaction as a governmental practice. Unsettling facile distinctions between secrecy and openness, authoritarianism and democracy, the contributors show powerfully that the act of blacking out is more textually ambiguous than ever.

~ Margaret Hillenbrand, author of On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China and Negative Exposures: Knowing What Not to Know in Contemporary China

Upon reading this volume of museful interrogations of redaction across disciplines and nation states, one might ask if there are any human endeavors and artifacts that are not in some way redacted. The protean capacity of redaction is amply represented by the contributors. The word has metamorphosed from its 15th-century meaning of “to combine” to its 19th-century meaning “to edit” to Redacted’s present-day focus on its parallels with censorship and surveillance. Visually, the process of redaction (as illustrated by the pictorial figures and liberal inclusion of blacked out text), involves a dialectical figure-ground relationship. As indicated by the subtitle, Writing in the Negative Space of the State, the contributors earnestly accentuate the more nefarious and anti-social aspects and consequences of redaction.

~ Jennifer Robertson, author of Robo Sapiens Japanicus: Robots, Gender, Family and the Japanese Nation

This fascinating collection explores the unprecedented challenges facing ethnographic research today. Some of these have been around for a while, but many are new. Brought about by major changes in our world – from the end of the Cold War, to the rise of social media, to the global spread of authoritarianism – these challenges call into question the basic ethical principles and methods of our research. The authors of these essays demonstrate that addressing such challenges requires new approaches to ethnographic practice and new understandings of the ethical relationship between the researcher and the people among whom they conduct research. The result of this collective exploration is as intellectually rigorous and timely as it is poetic.

~ Alexei Yurchak, author of Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation

 

Redacted: Writing in the Negative Space of the State

Edited by Lisa Min, Franck Billé, Charlene Makley

Contributors Franck Billé, Darren Byler, Shane Carter, ChatGPT, Joshua Craze, Dondrup Donyol, Rachel Douglas-Jones, Trine Mygind Korsby, Charlene Makley, Annie Malcolm, Carole McGranahan, Lisa Min, David H. Price, A. Marie Ranjbar, Alessandro Rippa, Rune Steenberg, Kären Wigen, Emily T. Yeh, Umut Yıldırım

Published: 10/27/2024

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When it comes to the political, acts of redaction, erasure, and blacking out sit in awkward tension with the myth of transparent governance, borderless access, and frictionless communication. But should there be more than this brute juxtaposition of truth and secrecy?

Redacted: Writing in the Negative Space of the State brings together essays, poems, artwork, and memes – a bricolage of media that conveys the experience of living in state-inflected worlds in flux. Critically and poetically engaging with redaction in politically charged contexts (from the United States and Denmark to Russia, China, and North Korea), the volume closely examines and turns loose this disquieting mark of state power, aiming to trouble the liberal imaginaries that configure the political as a left–right spectrum, as populism and nationalism versus global and transnational cosmopolitanism, as east versus west, authoritarianism versus democracy, good versus evil, or the state versus the people – age-old coordinates that no longer make sense. Because we know from the upheavals of the past decade that these relations are being reconfigured in novel, recursive, and unrecognizable ways, the consequences of which are perplexing and ever evolving.

This book takes up redaction as a vital form in this new political reality. Contributors both critically engage with statist redaction practices and also explore its alluring and ambivalent forms, as experimental practices that open up new dialogic possibilities in navigating and conveying the stakes of political encounters.

About the Editors

Lisa Min is an anthropologist based in Seoul, teaching courses on politics and visuality at Yonsei University. She is currently working on two book projects that begin with north Korea, opening up the “place called north Korea” as a question and provocation for doing and writing anthropology.

Franck Billé is a cultural anthropologist/geographer based at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is program director for the Tang Center for Silk Road Studies. His core research focus is on borders, space, sovereignty, and materiality. More information about his current research is available at www.franckbille.com.

Charlene Makley is Professor of Anthropology at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Her work has explored the history and cultural politics of █████-building, █████-led development, and Buddhist revival among Tibetans in China’s ███████ ████████ ████ since 1992. Her second book, The Battle for Fortune: █████-Led Development, Personhood and █████ among Tibetans in China (Cornell, 2018) is an ethnography of state-local relations in the historically ███████ region of ███████(██ ███████ ████████) in the wake of China’s Great Open the West campaign and during the  ████████  █████████ on ███████ ██████.