archiving the absences: tracing censorship as a productive force of racial-capitalist empire

Abstract

Censorship denotes the suppression of knowledge; black boxes over text, archival absences, administrative denials and dead ends. However, through my work as a collective member and archivist for a books-to-prisons project over the last ten years, I have come to understand censorship as much a production of knowledge as its repression. It generates knowledge not only of the content being censored (e.g., that it is immoral, threatening, or abnormal), but of the incarcerated patron requesting the item, the sender, the prison system, and, perhaps most significantly, the nation-state itself. Carceral epistemology attests to the material power of discourse in manufacturing violent realities out of statist imaginations. This power relies on the abstraction of words like “rights, justice and freedom” that we so often appeal to within a juridical framework that ultimately serves racial-capitalist accumulation. Instead, I wonder how we might radically revise the scope and potentiality of our demands for the present and future. How might an archive of censorship fragment what we have come to consider reality, so that we might imagine otherwise?