A Thousand Paper Cuts

US Empire and the Bureaucratic Life of War

By: Anjali Nath

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Hardcover | 11 November 2025

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216 Pages

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In A Thousand Paper Cuts, Anjali Nath considers the paper worlds made and destroyed by US imperialism. From the slogans of anti-Communist Cold Warriors against a spectral "Paper Curtain" to the scuttled efforts of activists who sought to document America's surveillance regime amidst the US war on Vietnam, Nath offers a pre-history of the redacted visions of the Homeland Security age. Nath shows how declassified documents tell the story of American counterinsurgency at home and abroad, revealing the imperial grammar beneath of the abundant redactions of contemporary visual culture. Tracing the liberal political rhetoric that inspired the Freedom of Information Act in the 1960s, through to the Bush-era's exuberant secrecy, to the contemporary artists who subversively repurpose redacted documents in collage and critique, Nath maps the formation of the security state, its bureaucratic regimes of surveillance, and the racial logic of transparency.

Industry Reviews

"A Thousand Paper Cuts is an important, original, and timely investigation of how the politics of information, documentation, and redaction have been constitutive of US imperialism from the Cold War to the present. Accessibly written, compellingly argued, and meticulously researched, it dwells on the political contradictions of the project of freeing paper and develops a methodology for reading redaction as integral to countering racial and imperial violence. This book will open new lines of thinking in media and cultural studies, critical race and ethnic studies, and the study of US militarism and empire." - Neda Atanasoski, coeditor of Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen "In this unique and urgent book on how transparency emerged as a late twentieth-century American value through the Freedom of Information Act, Anjali Nath presents a novel theorization of the relationships between transparency, liberalism, paper media, and US imperialism and state violence. By offering new analyses of paper and the political and artistic aesthetic of redaction, she shows how secrecy and transparency shape paper's documentary effects and prompts readers to consider how thinking beyond the censor's frames might be grounds for glimpsing a demilitarized horizon." - Cait McKinney, author of Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian

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