New Books Network Lisa Min et al. eds., "Redacted: Writing in the Negative Space of the State" (punctum books, 2024)
Feb 3, 2026
Charlene Makeley, an anthropologist of Tibetan politics and state-building; Frank Biet, a cultural anthropologist-geographer of borders and sovereignty; and Lisa Min, an expert on visuality and North Korea. They explore redaction as method and form. They discuss multimodal experiments, workshops that shaped the book, visual design and printing challenges, ethical anonymization, and how censorship reshapes research and everyday life.
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Redaction As Method And Aesthetic
- Redaction can be an aesthetic and methodological tool, not just state censorship.
- The editors expanded the concept to include poems, maps, memes, and multimodal experiments.
Redacted Letters From Fieldwork
- Lisa Min describes writing letters after North Korea fieldwork and redacting them with Sharpie to capture unsayable experiences.
- The redacted letters render grainy, corridor-like impressions faithful to politically constrained visuality.
The Third Space Of Redaction
- Redaction produces a 'third space' that is neither pure censorship nor full transparency.
- That space opens new political and poetic possibilities beyond Cold War binaries of authoritarianism vs democracy.
