Extending recent media archaeological preoccupations, this essay examines the Argentine excavation project and art book, La Biblioteca Roja: Brevísima relación de la destrucción de los libros (2017), and suggests the particular importance of such comparative “(an)archaeological” inquiries into the technical systems essential to knowledge cultures and their evidential power regimes today. Combining multiple media and interdisciplinary methods—from visual drawings, essays, personal reflection, interviews, cultural analysis, forensic science, photographic documentation, and small press publishing—La Biblioteca Roja is a compelling experiment in dissident memory, as well as artifactual storytelling. The essay stresses its relevance as a rupture and intervention in current digitally informed, bioinformatic technical systems and knowledge cultures, and inquiries into continuities as well as differences between the technical systems of book cultures and more contemporary digital knowledge cultures, particularly with regard to their efforts to secure and territorialize knowledge and power through technical means that erase, destroy, and dismiss other knowledges and through them, other modes of life.
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March 2019
Research Article|
March 01 2019
Reading Forensics: La Biblioteca Roja: Brevísima relación de la destrucción de los libros
Laura Shackelford
Laura Shackelford is an associate professor in the Department of English and director of the Center for Engaged Storycraft at Rochester Institute of Technology. Her research and publications, such as Tactics of the Human: Experimental Technics in American Fiction (2014), focus on literary media studies, feminist science studies, narrative theory, and digital cultures.
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Laura Shackelford is an associate professor in the Department of English and director of the Center for Engaged Storycraft at Rochester Institute of Technology. Her research and publications, such as Tactics of the Human: Experimental Technics in American Fiction (2014), focus on literary media studies, feminist science studies, narrative theory, and digital cultures.
Afterimage (2019) 46 (1): 35–46.
Citation
Laura Shackelford; Reading Forensics: La Biblioteca Roja: Brevísima relación de la destrucción de los libros. Afterimage 1 March 2019; 46 (1): 35–46. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2019.461005
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