A Thousand Paper Cuts: U.S. Empire and the Bureaucratic Life of War

Anjali Nath
American Studies
UC Davis

“A Thousand Paper Cuts: U.S. Empire and the Bureaucratic Life of War” offers a cultural and visual history of transparency in America. Using the 1966 passage of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) as a fulcrum, it historicizes the Right-to-Know movement within the Cold War and visually analyzes censored documentary materials procured under FOIA. The project reveals how advocates of transparency paradoxically espoused profoundly racialized and imperial sentiments in their movements to pass, amend, and enforce FOIA. I further show how Anti-communist paranoia produced new bureaucratic regimes of surveillance, particular aesthetics of paper secrecy, and new revolts against state optics. “A Thousand Paper Cuts” takes readers on a papered tour that begins with congressional revolts against McCarthyism, cruises the radical anti-surveillance literature of the 1970s and arrives, finally, at redacted texts from the Guantanamo Bay prison. The story of documents—how they weave in and out of classification, which administrative apparatuses manage them, and whose eyes are cleared to see them—reveals a new texture to racialized statecraft.