Abigail De Kosnik's Rogue Archives Reviewed on A&M
Abigail De Kosnik, BCNM ExComm member and assistant professor at the UC Berkeley Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, had her book reviewed in Archives & Manuscripts! Her work, Rogue Archives, delves into fan-fiction community's relationship to mass online culture.
De Kosnik studies how these fans respond to the original source material by actively engaging with it, contrasting the narratives perpetuated by mainstream media by reconfiguring the canon for their own purposes.
John Willsteed, a faculty member at the Queensland University of Technology, writes in his review:
It’s like opening the door of the Tardis: the inside is bigger, wilder and more full of stories than you would have thought. Abigail De Kosnik’s Rogue Archives cracks into a fascinating and richly complex world, alive with creativity and strongly bound by an abiding sense of community. The ‘community of affinity’ considered within Rogue Archives are the writers of fan-fiction, whose realms are the wide open spaces of the digital rather than the site-bound structures of the past, and whose inhabitants are more likely to be users and producers rather than consumers. A community in which workers are volunteers: ‘ghosts’, whose invisible labour produces a seamless experience for the user.