Undoing Time, the Rebel Archive, and Counter-Archives of Imprisonment
Digital archives are changing the way we understand the history and current realities of the carceral state, and forms of resistance against it. Here’s an excerpt from my review of Sharon Daniel's Undoing Time archive which just came out in the Journal of American History:
“... Digital technologies are being used to produce new forms of e-carceration, what Michelle Alexander recently called “the newest Jim Crow.” Yet projects like Undoing Time show us how they can also be used to build new terrains for historically grounded critique and alternatives to the current crisis. Historians would do well to attend to this kind of documentary new media in the way they have other sources, and especially to the kinds of collaboration between scholars, artists, cultural organizers, and activists that defy barriers like on/off campus, and inside/outside of prison. These projects push conversations about online archives beyond access, or even engagement, asking how best to cocreate work that acknowledges asymmetries of institutional power and devises ways of undoing them...”
...
Read the whole review here: