Thousand Paper Cuts

Anjali Nath is Assistant Professor in the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology at the University of Toronto Mississauga.

“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 “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

• Introduction. Paper Tigers and Imperial Secrets1. Secrecy Is For Losers: Freedom of Information and Cold War Politics2. How to Free Information: Counterinsurgency and Radical Transparency3. On Redacted Documents and the Visual Politics of Transparency4. Paper and the Art of CensorshipEpilogue. Letters from GuantánamoAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex