“Explicit!: The Banned Book List Database and Epistemic Supremacy in United States Prison Censorship”
Now under review
Abstract: Social practice artist Sue Jeong Ka’s ongoing digital database, Banned Book List: A Monument of Injustice and Intellectual Freedom (BBL) (2019-), charts the United States carceral system’s publication censorship. Ka made data categories to track the knowledge production that US prison book bans target and why. Concentrating on the most common justification for this censorship, sexual explicitness, her initial data analysis reveals restrictive penal trends that devalue women’s and East Asian sexual speech via romance literature and manga bans, respectively. These patterns reflect how national white cis-hetero-patriarchal values play an outsized role in determining which knowledge systems the government protects and prioritizes. Our article argues that through its capacity to identify such under-examined censorship patterns, BBL underscores Digital Humanities’ (DH’s) potential to intervene in and interpret the prison industrial complex’s epistemic supremacy. As a political ideology, epistemic supremacy upholds the monopoly of a dominant group’s knowledge systems and suppresses knowledge systems that the dominant group does not control. BBL’s data indicate that US prison bans enact epistemic supremacy through disproportionately barring content by and about marginalized groups, thereby impeding incarcerated people’s access to knowledge production that represents marginalized social perspectives. We also consider how Ka’s critical making approach to information architecture animates such epistemic concerns. In framing BBL as both critically made DH and part of Ka’s socially engaged art, we further suggest that her database illuminates how DH and socially engaged art practices can be mutually enriching.
