Book
An interdisciplinary exploration of annotation that shows how this participatory act marks public memory, struggles for justice, and social change.
“Re/Marks on Power is an innovative, interdisciplinary, and historized account of the social life of annotation. In reframing annotation as a ‘social verb,’ Kalir captures the complex and consequential nature of annotation—a process in which annotators create sociocritical literacies through engagement in civic, educational, cultural, and political activities.”
- Kris Gutiérrez, Carol Liu Chair & Distinguished Professor, Berkeley School of Education, University of California, Berkeley; Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
“Through marginalia and geoglyphs, we’ve amended texts and landscapes for millennia. But in this age of automated deception, reactionary legislation, and historical revisionism, Remi Kalir reveals, annotation offers a potent means of collective critique, resistance, and reimagining.”
- Shannon Mattern, author of "Code and Clay, Data and Dirt"
“Re/Marks on Power explores unexpected and understudied examples of annotation across cultures, historical periods, and mediums. Kalir’s compelling research is essential for those intrigued by the power and complexity of multimodal composition.”
- Amanda Licastro, Digital Scholarship Librarian and Lecturer in English, Swarthmore College; author of “The Past, Present, and Future of Social Annotation”
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Re/Marks on Power is included in MIT Press’ Direct to Open program
Annotation—the seemingly simple act of marking a text—is often diminished as a marginal practice. It is prohibited in physical objects and considered irrelevant to social and political concerns. But what if annotation were reimagined as a critical and civic literacy that can inscribe public memory, struggles for justice, and social change? In Re/Marks on Power, education researcher Remi Kalir argues that enduring traces of annotation can be read and (re)written to advance counternarratives and more just social futures. Kalir's interdisciplinary approach examines annotation in archives and libraries, on walls and in books, atop maps and monuments, and along byways and all manner of margins to describe the relevance of “re/marks.”
With a series of vivid and wide-ranging cases, Kalir describes how groups of annotators make public re/marks of resistance and creativity, often with simple tools and accessible methods. These annotations alter familiar texts, oppose hateful ideology, and broadcast solidarity and social activism. Among the book's fresh reads of annotation are considerations of how Harriet Tubman's legacy is remembered and honored, how the US-Mexico border was defined and is restoried, how problematic public monuments are contested and reimagined, and how books featuring LGBTQIA+ topics are classified, censored, and celebrated. Re/Marks on Power honors the actions of annotators, whether eminent or anonymous, and highlights how material traces have mediated justice-oriented possibility. Throughout this book, the author makes visible a new social language of annotation that can be read across time and texts.