Rogue Archives

Abigail De Kosnik has written a roguishly smart and inspiringly affirmative look at the political promise of digital archives created by fans, amateurs, hackers, volunteers, and pirates. Charting a dramatic shift between archive and repertoire, De Kosnik looks closely at the labor involved in fandom. People commonly marginalized in dominant narratives of technological development (LGBTQ, people of color, women) are innovating practices that significantly alter how cultural memory takes form at all. The implications of the shape-shifting of memory away from dominant tracks of power through new media are enormous. In De Kosnik's hands we get a fresh look at what a roguish future history 'may-be.'

Rebecca Schneider, Professor, Brown University; author of Performing Remains

In this theoretically ambitious and densely researched book, Abigail De Kosnik offers a much-needed conceptualization of the ways in which online networks have reshaped—and may yet transform further—the cultural production of memory and its relationship to the ideal of democracy. Women, queers, and people of color in no way command the means of Internet production, but their archival and creative efforts may be read, as De Kosnik does so brilliantly, as models for a fresh, politically urgent, and licentiously rogue rethinking of the relationships among embodied performance and digital media, labor and pleasure, scandal and commonness, freedom and control.

Nick Salvato, Associate Professor and Chair of Performing and Media Arts, Cornell University; author of Obstruction

Rogue Archives looks at digital cultural memory, and how those involved in creating online content (particularly fan fiction, and the resulting fan fiction archives) are changing the hegemony of culture as defined by the creative industries. This groundbreaking text details how people are working together to create a nuanced and more inclusive discussion about culture, society, fandom, and consumption and creation.

Melissa Terras, Professor of Digital Humanities and Director of UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, University College London; author of Defining Digital Humanities