News/Research

Rogue Archives Reviewed in S-USIH

14 Oct, 2021

Rogue Archives Reviewed in S-USIH

BCNM director Abigail De Kosnik's Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom, published in 2016 by MIT Press, was reviewed by Michael J. Kramer of The Society for U.S. Intellectual History!

From the article:

[Abigail de Kosnik] combines approaches from media and performance studies to explore how fans appropriate, collect, reorient, reorganize, remix, transfigure, and share with each other and the world mass consumer media forms digitally. In the process, they create new kinds of archiving styles, “rogue” ones according to De Kosnik. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s theories of outlaw “rogue” states and Diana Taylor’s distinction between archive and repertoire, by which Taylor meant the difference between embodied knowledge conveyed through performance and written knowledge fixed in archives, De Kosnik believes that “Rogue archivists explore the potential of digital technologies to democratize cultural memory” (p. 1-2).[9] Although she grants that digital technologies and even rogue cultural memories themselves are not automatically revolutionary, and may even “serve the interests of dominant classes and groups,” hers is a mostly hopeful perspective. Fan-built digital archives, she contends, improve “the positions and fuel the activities of subordinated individuals and collectives” (p. 10).

Read the full review here!