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A Thousand Paper Cuts
US Empire and the Bureaucratic Life of War
Language:
English
Published/Copyright:
2025
About this book
In A Thousand Paper Cuts, Anjali Nath considers the paper worlds made and destroyed by US imperialism. From the slogans of anti-Communist Cold Warriors against a spectral “Paper Curtain” to the scuttled efforts of activists who sought to document America’s surveillance regime amidst the US war on Vietnam, Nath offers a pre-history of the redacted visions of the Homeland Security age. Nath shows how declassified documents tell the story of American counterinsurgency at home and abroad, revealing the imperial grammar beneath the abundant redactions of contemporary visual culture. Tracing the liberal political rhetoric that inspired the Freedom of Information Act in the 1960s, through to the Bush-era’s exuberant secrecy to the contemporary artists who subversively repurpose redacted documents in collage and critique, Nath maps the formation of the security state, its bureaucratic regimes of surveillance, and the racial logic of transparency.
Reviews
“In this unique and urgent book on how transparency emerged as a late twentieth-century American value through the Freedom of Information Act, Anjali Nath presents a novel theorization of the relationships between transparency, liberalism, paper media, and US imperialism and state violence. By offering new analyses of paper and the political and artistic aesthetic of redaction, she shows how secrecy and transparency shape paper’s documentary effects and prompts readers to consider how thinking beyond the censor’s frames might be grounds for glimpsing a demilitarized horizon.”
-- Cait McKinney, author of Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies
-- Cait McKinney, author of Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies
“A Thousand Paper Cuts is an important, original, and timely investigation of how the politics of information, documentation, and redaction have been constitutive of US imperialism from the Cold War to the present. Accessibly written, compellingly argued, and meticulously researched, it dwells on the political contradictions of the project of freeing paper and develops a methodology for reading redaction as integral to countering racial and imperial violence. This book will open new lines of thinking in media and cultural studies, critical race and ethnic studies, and the study of US militarism and empire.”
-- Neda Atanasoski, coeditor of Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen
-- Neda Atanasoski, coeditor of Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen
Topics
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Frontmatter
i -
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Contents
vii -
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Introduction
1 -
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01 Secrecy Is for Losers: Freedom of Information and Cold War Politics
28 -
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02 How t o Free Information: Counterinsurgency and Radical Transparency
58 -
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03 On Red acted Document s and the Visual Politics of Transparency
89 -
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04 Paper and the Art of Censorship
123 -
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Epilogue
151 -
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
161 -
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NOTES
165 -
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
187 -
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INDEX
205
Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
October 3, 2025
eBook ISBN:
9781478061601
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook ISBN:
9781478061601
Keywords for this book
critical ethnic studies; militarism; visual culture; transnational American Studies; Freedom of Information Act FOIA; redaction; Cold War; John Moss; Daniel Patrick Moynihan; Edward Shils; critical information studies; social movements; paperwork; War on Terror; Guantanamo; John Yoo Torture memos; detainee interrogation videos; permanent war; government transparency; Mohamedou Ould Slahi; Guantanamo Diary
Audience(s) for this book
For an expert adult audience, including professional development and academic research
