Description: Anjali Nath considers the paper worlds made and destroyed by US imperialism, offering a pre-history of the redacted visions of the Homeland Security age.
Review Quotes: "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
"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 "A Thousand Paper Cuts is a strong buy for readers who want a deeper, more original view of the U.S. empire than standard foreign policy books usually provide. Its main strength is the way it treats documents as instruments of power, not just as evidence left behind after political decisions have already been made."--Edmarverson A. Santos, Diploma & Law