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5 books match the query 'Official secrets'

cover of A Thousand Paper Cuts: US Empire and the Bureaucratic Life of War

A Thousand Paper Cuts

US Empire and the Bureaucratic Life of War

Anjali Nath

Duke University Press, 2025

In A Thousand Paper Cuts, Anjali Nath considers the paper worlds made and destroyed by US imperialism. From the slogans of anti-Communist Cold Warriors against a spectral “Paper Curtain” to the scuttled efforts of activists who sought to document America’s surveillance regime amidst the US war on Vietnam, Nath offers a pre-history of the redacted visions of the Homeland Security age. Nath shows how declassified documents tell the story of American counterinsurgency at home and abroad, revealing the imperial grammar beneath the abundant redactions of contemporary visual culture. Tracing the liberal political rhetoric that inspired the Freedom of Information Act in the 1960s, through to the Bush-era’s exuberant secrecy to the contemporary artists who subversively repurpose redacted documents in collage and critique, Nath maps the formation of the security state, its bureaucratic regimes of surveillance, and the racial logic of transparency.
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cover of Negative Exposures: Knowing What Not to Know in Contemporary China

Negative Exposures

Knowing What Not to Know in Contemporary China

Margaret Hillenbrand

Duke University Press, 2020

When nations decide to disown their troubled pasts, how does this strategic disavowal harden into social fact? In Negative Exposures, Margaret Hillenbrand investigates the erasure of key aspects of such momentous events as the Nanjing Massacre, the Cultural Revolution, and the Tiananmen Square protests from the Chinese historical consciousness, not due to amnesia or censorship but through the operations of public secrecy. Knowing what not to know, she argues, has many stakeholders, willing and otherwise, who keep quiet to protect themselves or their families out of shame, pragmatism, or the palliative effects of silence. Hillenbrand shows how secrecy works as a powerful structuring force in Chinese society, one hiding in plain sight, and identifies aesthetic artifacts that serve as modes of reckoning against this phenomenon. She analyses the proliferation of photo-forms—remediations of well-known photographs of troubling historical events rendered in such media as paint, celluloid, fabric, digital imagery, and tattoos—as imaginative spaces in which the shadows of secrecy are provocatively outlined.
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cover of Secret Power: WikiLeaks and Its Enemies

Secret Power

WikiLeaks and Its Enemies

Stefania Maurizi

Pluto Press, 2022

An uncovering of the terrifying depths of authoritarian power that hide behind the infamous story of WikiLeaks

*Winner of the European Award for Investigative And Judicial Journalism 2021*
*Winner of the Premio Alessandro Leogrande Award for Investigative Journalism 2022*
*Winner of the Premio Angelo Vassallo Award 2022*

'I want to live in a society where secret power is accountable to the law and to public opinion for its atrocities, where it is the war criminals who go to jail, not those who have the conscience and courage to expose them.'

It is 2008, and Stefania Maurizi, an investigative journalist with a growing interest in cryptography, starts looking into the little-known organisation WikiLeaks. Through hushed meetings, encrypted files and explosive documents, what she discovers sets her on a life-long journey that takes her deep into the realm of secret power.

Working closely with WikiLeaks' founder Julian Assange and his organisation for her newspaper, Maurizi has spent over a decade investigating state criminality protected by thick layers of secrecy, while also embarking on a solitary trench warfare to unearth the facts underpinning the cruel persecution of Assange and WikiLeaks.

With complex and disturbing insights, Maurizi’s tireless journalism exposes atrocities, the shameful treatment of Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, on up to the present persecution of WikiLeaks: a terrifying web of impunity and cover-ups.

At the heart of the book is the brutality of secret power and the unbearable price paid by Julian Assange, WikiLeaks and truthtellers.
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cover of Sovereign, Settler, Leaker, Lie: Forms of the Secret in US Political Rhetoric

Sovereign, Settler, Leaker, Lie

Forms of the Secret in US Political Rhetoric

Atilla Hallsby

The Ohio State University Press, 2026

In Sovereign, Settler, Leaker, Lie, Atilla Hallsby argues that secrets play a pivotal role in organizing political discourse in the United States. Hallsby takes up contemporary case studies—ranging from the Valerie Plame scandal during the George W. Bush presidency, to the use of Saul Alinsky’s name as a partisan codeword for politicizing Obama’s Blackness, to Chelsea Manning’s public naming and outing—to show how dramatic revelations increasingly fail to produce meaningful change and instead reproduce entrenched racial, gendered, and colonial hierarchies.

The core feature of these interlinked moments of crisis is the secret: a rhetorical patterning of political life organized by specific forms, each one lending a familiar shape to the shadows of American empire. These forms, theorized here as tropes, connect decades of secrets, linking the George W. Bush administration’s War on Terror to the Trump-era reemergence of “deep state” conspiracy theories. As an extension of secrecy and surveillance studies, and with the aim of attaining a more accountable and just form of US governmentality, Sovereign, Settler, Leaker, Lie explains how still-unfolding political realities in the United States emerged, transformed, and regenerate.

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cover of The Invisible World

The Invisible World

John Smolens

Michigan State University Press, 2017

The Invisible World portrays how a remarkable family is indelibly marred by one of the darkest conspiracy theories in American history: the gunman on the grassy knoll. Boston journalist Sam Adams suspects that his father may have been the unidentified gunman in the JFK assassination. True or not, Sam is certain that his father, the elusive John Adams, is responsible for his sister Abigail’s tortured life of drugs, prostitution, and the conviction that she is a descendant of Salem witches, as well as the strange circumstances that surround his mother’s final hours.
 
After Sam's mother dies and is cremated, her ashes are stolen. Believing that his father is responsible, Sam pursues the man he has not seen in years. He discovers that he is not the only one searching for his father—federal agents, a disgraced politician, a retired Boston cop, and several journalists join the chase.
 
“The Invisible World is more than a first-rate political thriller,” says The Boston Globe. “It’s an absorbing tale of alienation and loss, and the ramifications of a rootless, troubled family.” What Sam Adams ultimately discovers is that the shadowy realm of conspiracies conjures a world of hidden truths and intrigue in which the familiar is the most mysterious force of all.
 
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