Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom by Abigail De Kosnik (review)

In 2006, as a doctoral student just entering the rapidly expanding world of fan studies, I read for the first time Abigail Derecho's 2006 essay "Archontic Literature: A Definition, a History, and Several Theories of Fan Fiction" in Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson's Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet. It wouldn't be much of an exaggeration to say that it helped shaped my thinking on fan studies for the next decade. Seeing fan fiction as part of a great archive, an ever-expanding corpus that doesn't just copy original texts but augments them, helped to illustrate that "every text contains infinite potentialities, any of which could be actualized by any writer interested in doing the job" (p. 76). I was transfixed by her theories of literature as a vast, open geography, incorporating them into my dissertation and later book, Digital Fandom (2010).

It's been a decade (and she has a new name), and I'm equally transfixed by De Kosnik's new book Rogue Archives, a work that, in my opinion, will revolutionize fan studies. With a fluid writing style and an extremely detailed and thorough investigation of digital fan fiction, Rogue Archives brings Big Data to micro-ethnographies; it is a much-needed and expansive work of scholarship that brings quantitative and qualitative methodologies together. Seeking to tie performance studies with fan studies, De Kosnik draws on her own experiences as a new media researcher in a department of theater, dance, and performance. To do this, she brings to the archive (as a thing) the notion of repertoire (as an act), writing that "every actual and virtual archive in the digital age depends … on repertoire—by which I mean physical, bodily acts of repetition, of human performance" (p. 2). No archive can be separated from the act of creating it, and De Kosnik wants us to see digital fandom through the same light: "by urging archive users to become archive contributors, archivists seek to realize, at least partially, the promise of democratization and difference inherent in rogue digital archives" (p. 161). Archives beget acts, beget creation.

Of course, performance is often part of fan production today; Francesca Coppa reminds us that fan fiction is often more dramaturgical than literary. But De Kosnik takes her analysis one stage further to examine not just the way archives are created and grown through particular acts of fandom, but how fandom itself depends on the queer, alternate, and nonhegemonic capabilities of the archive. In one of the strongest (and most important) chapters, "Female and Queer Archival Cultures," she notes that "fan archives must be regarded as having consequence and relevance for both fans and for larger society, in the way that community archives—particularly queer archives—do, because they are 'safe spaces' for nonhetero-normative practices … that are not documented anywhere else" (p. 153).

Other chapters (she splits the book between longer, more scholarly explorations and shorter think pieces she calls "breaks") explore additional elements of archives; De Kosnik fills each chapter with enough research from diverse disciplines and methodologies to please researchers from a variety of areas, including library science, data analysis, and technology studies. Chapters run the gamut from Big Data analysis to political action: in "Repertoire Fills the Archive," she argues that "participants in media fandoms often use their 'fan repertoires' of communal discussion and collective action for real-world, political, and even revolutionary causes and goals" (p. 178). The point is that Rogue Archives itself becomes an archive—an organized corpus of information and repertoire that each reader can put into practice in a variety of ways and across scores of fields.

As with any archive, Rogue Archives is incomplete (the archive can, as Derrida reminds us, never actually be finished). As much as De Kosnik concentrates on fan fiction (sites like Archive of Our Own and The Gossamer Project, among many others, are often cited...