It’s like opening the door of the Tardis: the inside is bigger, wilder and more full of stories than you would have thought. Abigail De Kosnik’s Rogue Archives cracks into a fascinating and richly complex world, alive with creativity and strongly bound by an abiding sense of community. The ‘community of affinity’ considered within Rogue Archives are the writers of fan-fiction, whose realms are the wide open spaces of the digital rather than the site-bound structures of the past, and whose inhabitants are more likely to be users and producers rather than consumers. A community in which workers are volunteers: ‘ghosts’, whose invisible labour produces a seamless experience for the user.
The book examines mass online culture and the remaking of the notion of the canon. De Kosnik aims to clarify the role of the self-designated archivists who maintain this expanding terrain, especially in relation to digital democracy, free culture and diversity in mass culture-making, and would be of great interest to anyone interested in participatory models of archival activity.
According to De Kosnik, members of the fan-fiction community are engaged in an archival activity; to read, comment, write and respond is to perform the archival. De Kosnik shines a light on queer and feminist fan-fiction, and the many offshoots and variations that stream from this creative core – a home to millions of participants, where community, connection and safety are the very real products of this shared culture. These fictions – with myriad variations and changing points of view, reversals of role and stretching of boundaries, contextual layers of review and commentary – are generated in direct contrast to the white, male dominance of mainstream media.
The data presented within Rogue Archives is jaw-dropping. An example: more than 1.2 million Harry Potter fan-fiction stories have generated reviews whose word count is a staggering 6 billion. The numbers legitimise the interest, and there is supporting data around writer/reader demographics. But the most memorable revelation is the existence of femslash (female–female) fan-fiction whose core notion is the relationship between Star Trek: Voyager’s Captain Janeway and the Borg, Seven of Nine. De Kosnik elegantly claims this as an example of the community in transition – the characters representing the relationship between old members and new, and the journey from hand-printed zines to massive online forums, and it is a memorable and touching example of the affective aspects of the creative work and the emotional truth at the centre of the fan-fiction community.
De Kosnik, whose expertise is in dance/performance and gender studies, uses an innovative technique in the structure of the book, by alternating ‘breaks’ and chapters. Written breaks (echoing hip-hop breaks) can be tangential and more loosely written – an alternative or complement to the more formal academic tone of the chapters. The breaks contain more freedom of movement and style. In truth, it was in these breaks that I found myself drawn more comprehensively into the text – the ideas were more organically grown, and De Kosnik’s natural voice appeared. This was intensified by the occasional quotes from fan-fiction writers, whose voices immediately ground the text, and were an essential and successful expression of this very personal creative practice.
Tracking the predictable stretching pains that occurred in the years between print and Net, and the waves of centralisation/decentralisation that have swept through the last 20 years or more, de Kosnik found the fans to be inventive, agile and progressive. They have grasped new tech, inventing what was needed if nothing was (freely) available, and made archives functional and responsive in a digital environment increasingly restrictive and rights-oriented. In fact, this remixed/borrowed/versioned archive also represents the slow and inexorable dismantling of the copyright and licensing culture of the last 50 years, as the culture of copyleft and similar notions of free sharing were adopted.
With this book, Abigail De Kosnik makes a thoughtful and enlightening contribution to the scholarly literature on digital archives, with an approach that is steeped in her experience as a creative performer, and the ability to inventively bind the varied aspects of this immense enterprise.
Queensland University of Technology
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© 2017 John Willsteed
https://doi.org/10.1080/01576895.2017.1374157