Podcast Episode Summary

Podcast: New Books Network
Episode Title: Lisa Min et al. eds., "Redacted: Writing in the Negative Space of the State" (punctum books, 2024)
Air Date: February 3, 2026
Host: Jolin
Guests: Dr. Lisa Min, Dr. Frank Bille, Dr. Charlene Makley

Overview

This episode explores the recently published anthology Redacted: Writing in the Negative Space of the State (punctum books, 2024). Host Jolin interviews editors Dr. Lisa Min, Dr. Frank Bille, and Dr. Charlene Makley about the origins, intentions, forms, and political implications of the book. The conversation examines how redaction, typically perceived as a statist tool for censorship and control, can also function as an artistic, affective, and generative practice within scholarship and activism—particularly in politically charged or authoritarian contexts. The editors reflect on their fieldwork in North Korea, Russia, China, and Tibet and discuss the messy realities of self-censorship, complicity, and the creative possibility of “writing in the negative space.”

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Origins & Inspiration for the Anthology

[04:37–08:16]

• The idea for the book emerged from a 2019 Berkeley workshop focused on the ethics and challenges of fieldwork in Russia, China, North Korea, Tibet, and Central Asia.
• Dr. Lisa Min brought attention to writing and researching in—and about—North Korea, highlighting the limits of vision and the difficulties of bearing anthropological “witness” in such spaces.
• Redaction arose as a resonant metaphor—not simply as a practice of concealing information for safety but also as an aesthetic and intellectual strategy for navigating censored and ambiguous realities.
• Dr. Frank Bille described how the project expanded from a narrow anthropological focus to a multidisciplinary exploration, ultimately embracing poems, maps, memes, experimental forms, and visual elements.
• The project was further shaped by remote collaboration during the COVID-19 pandemic and a follow-up virtual workshop where participants experimented with “erasure poetry” and other acts of creative redaction.

Notable Quote

“Redaction was an interesting modality for me because upon my return from fieldwork, each time I would be writing these notes...of all the things that I wanted to say that I had thought to say, but could never manage to do so.”
— Lisa Min [08:23]

2. Expanding the Concept of Redaction: Beyond State Secrecy

[11:14–24:56]

• Redaction, in this anthology, is redefined as a broad, multimodal practice that transcends its typical association with state secrecy and FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) blackouts.
• The editors asked contributors to experiment with form; for example, white pages and AI-assisted pieces (sometimes running afoul of print-on-demand algorithms), redacted indices, and poetics.
• Redaction is considered not merely an act of hiding, but of highlighting, revealing, and generating meaning in “negative space.”
• The book's structure (essays from anthropologists, geographers, artists, activists, interspersed with visual art and epigraphs) embodies this notion.

Notable Quote

“Redaction...is a form that is faithful to that kind of politically charged context, not only in North Korea, but...it can be formalized in other places as well.”
— Lisa Min [10:47]

• On the ‘index’ of the book:

“It’s not really usable as an index because a lot of it is kind of blacked out or whitened out...the index is another contribution in the form of...an erasure poem, I guess.”
— Frank Bille [21:37]

3. Politics & Ethics of Redaction: Who Redacts? Why?

[28:29–39:11]

• Redaction is both a statist tool and a survival strategy for individuals; it is something “everyone is engaged in,” not just authoritarian states.
• The contributors avoid framing redaction solely as an obstacle to transparency or democracy, instead mining its generative potential for new political and ethical “third spaces.”
• The act of redaction is fraught: it can be subversive or complicit, protective or revealing, highlighting what it tries to obscure.

Notable Quotes

“If we’re already engaged in [redaction] anyway, perhaps we could enlarge the scope in which that happens...to create another kind of space, a third space, where we have new possibilities for thinking about politics in general.”
— Lisa Min [28:32]

“So in these contexts, there are always dissidents, activists, artists who are playing with redaction practices in a kind of deadly cat and mouse game.”
— Charlene Makley [33:42]

• On the IRB and institutional forms:

“Self-censorship...forced upon me by the institution...The open secret...if you're doing research on statist practices or the state...then you’re not doing human subjects research. In order to pass as somebody who has been verified, you have to self-censor, you have to just speak the language of that statist practice.”
— Lisa Min [61:06]

4. Redaction as Method, Form, and Aesthetic

[40:03–57:02]

• Redaction permeates both ethnographic practice and academic writing: anthropologists must weave together field data in ways that both protect interlocutors and inevitably subtract or occlude truth.
• “Third space” emerges as the zone where affect, uncertainty, and creativity thrive, rather than frontal truth-seeking.
• The editors describe "self-redaction" and "self-censorship" as necessary skills both under overtly authoritarian regimes and within Western institutions.
• Several moving examples—including Dr. Min’s “Letters from the Depthless Deep” and Makley’s redacted season’s greetings from Tibetan officials—are shared.

Notable Quotes

“In anthropology, we use redaction all the time…you remove the names of people…you merge two informants into one fake person...You even kind of recreate a narrative. You redact all the kind of the messiness. You kind of smooth it out and make it look like…there was all this strategy, but very often there wasn’t.”
— Frank Bille [41:03]

“The greatest possibility for [my book] lies in the dispersal of its mode of reading, not in her writing of it.”
— (quoting Solmaz Sharif), Lisa Min [43:48]

• Dr. Min reads a redacted letter (see Memorable Moments below).

5. Self-Redaction & Complicity in Knowledge Production

[54:37–65:16]

• Contributors reflect on the ambiguity and ethical bind of self-redaction—in fieldwork, writing, and even publication. For some, redaction is protective; for others, it is imposed, erasing even the right to authorship.
• The practice is widespread, as both a survival tactic and an ethical necessity, and is complicated by institutional requirements (e.g., IRBs) as much as by authoritarian states.
• Surveillance, predictive technology, and future-proofing research (anticipating censorship or risk for participants) are now global, not just “over there.”

Notable Quotes

“You expect people to tell you about their lives, but at the same time you have to be secretive about your own. So you break that sense of trust because people understand that you’re hiding things.”
— Frank Bille [57:02]

“So as ethnographers, we’re always already redacting and we're always already pivoting among various politics and...duplicitous maybe also.”
— Charlene Makley [65:04]

6. Moving Forward: Resonance and Future Work

[70:02–80:44]

• Dr. Min is editing a companion volume, North Korea Seen and Unseen, exploring similar themes of partial vision, sight, and ambiguity.
• Dr. Makley is working on an Annual Review of Anthropology article about the impossible possibilities of ethnography under new authoritarianisms, as well as a deeper historical project on the Panchen Lama.
• Dr. Bille reflects on switching to more open or “safer” sites for fieldwork, but notes that restriction and the need for redaction is everywhere. The book inspired him to experiment with more personal and hybrid forms of academic writing.

Notable Quotes

“The way this book has inspired me was to try to write in a different way…it’s been more like a personal journey...to write differently. So not so much about the topic, but the form. The form has been very inspirational.”
— Frank Bille [78:44]

Memorable Moments & Quotes (with timestamps)

• On Artistic Experimentation and Algorithms
  “We wanted like a series of white pages...it was basically not possible because it was triggering the system. We had to trick it by adding a little gray dot somewhere on the page so that the machine would not see it as white and then we'd be able to print it…We were kind of redacted by the machine as well.”
  — Frank Bille [17:24]

• On the Materiality of Redaction
  “Even in this podcast, the thing I think we're struggling with is, well, how to convey...the sensuous immediacy with which certain images come to you from the page...this visibility that is always partial can't quite be conveyed in certain forms.”
  — Lisa Min [15:57]

• Redacted Letter Reading [excerpt]:
  “Dear comrade. Years since we saw one another. The Laibach concert. A blurry photograph. A book, our faces. You, I missed you. Bullshit. Not a possible thing to say. How I'm sorry, Dear comrade. Midnight, drank too much Pyongyang, lost track of time. The guard, the gate, the yelling, the van, a curfew. You didn't tell me and I didn't ask smoke.”
  — Lisa Min (reading) [43:48]

• On the Perils and Paradoxes of State Power
  “Before you'd have the sense of, this is redacted, we need to uncover it. But then...the Trump administration...actually unable to do that, and people kind of making fun of it...You expect that to be a mark of proper rule...So there's really kind of a mark of power, I guess, that you fight against, but also expect from the rulers.”
  — Frank Bille [34:15]

• On Critique of Liberal Transparency
  “There’s a critique of Western liberalism that’s built into our approach…radical Black theorists, Native American theorists…they’ve all been arguing about…the bankrupt nature of Western liberal arguments about democracy and transparency.”
  — Charlene Makley [39:11]

Structure of the Book & Contributors

[18:40–20:36]

• 16 short essays by anthropologists, geographers, artists (some experimental, some co-authored, some anonymous for safety)
• Interspersed human artists/activists: poets, photographers, performance artists
• AI-generated art and playful interventions (Trump’s windmill speech “redacted” as a poem, for example)
• Objects addressed: FOIA documents, redacted letters, censored/digital texts, erased poems, hidden internet profiles, visual art interventions
• Index-as-erasure poem, “redacted” or “whitened out”

Final Notes & Access

• The book is open access and can be downloaded for free online, though print copies offer a more tactile engagement ([81:01]).

For Further Engagement

• Dr. Min’s forthcoming edited volume: North Korea Seen and Unseen
• Dr. Makley’s work on ethnography under authoritarianism; historical research on the Panchen Lama
• Dr. Bille’s exploration of hybrid, personal-academic writing forms

This episode is a vital listen for scholars, artists, and anyone interested in the paradoxes of knowledge, politics, vision, and the power and poetics of what is left unsaid.