Margaret Galvan‘s In Visible Archives explores the political power of archival material in shaping feminist and queer futures. Applying archival studies and comics scholarship to work from the 1980s by visual artists including Alison Bechdel and Nan Goldin, Galvan’s timely book underscores the importance of visibility in ongoing activism and community-building, writes Max Shirley.

In Visible Archives: Queer and Feminist Visual Culture in the 1980s. Margaret Galvan. ‎University of Minnesota Press. 2023.

Archive fever has hit the UK. Tate Britain’s exhibition, Women in Revolt! – which opened in late 2023 and will soon be relocated to Scotland, followed by Manchester – has brought second-wave feminist posters, pamphlets and other radical paraphilia out of the storeroom and into public view. In displays like this, archival material – some of which has gone unseen for over 40 years – is imbued with new life as visitors, activists, and community groups imagine how these items can be (re)used in the ongoing fight for a more equitable future.

Galvan examines how several American visual artists, including the cartoonist Alison Bechdel and photographer Nan Goldin, incorporate activism in their work and create a sense of collectivity.

The political and transformative potential of feminist and queer archives is centre stage in Margaret Galvan’s debut monograph, In Visible Archives: Queer and Feminist Visual Culture in the 1980s. Across five concise chapters, Galvan examines how several American visual artists, including the cartoonist Alison Bechdel and photographer Nan Goldin, incorporate activism in their work and create a sense of collectivity. “All these women’s artworks shaped feminist futures,” Galvan writes, “but how they mobilized image and text together to plant the seeds for future community to bloom has been overlooked” (4).

Galvan locates her monograph in the fields of both archival studies and comics scholarship. Building on the work of Hilary Chute and Ramzi Fawaz, among other theorists, Galvan considers the “multilayered relationships between image and text” and examines how “publication venues frame our readings” of images (6-7). Specifically, Galvan pays close attention to the sequencing of comics, photographic slideshows, exhibition guides and other visual materials. How these cultural artefacts are produced, sequenced, displayed and stored contributes to their political and affective power, as well as their potential to build new communities.

Against a backdrop of the 1980s’ sex/porn wars, the phobic Reagan administration, and the AIDS epidemic, these feminist and queer visual practitioners were alert to ‘the hard-won and narrowly kept conditions of visibility for diverse sexual identities’.

The book’s title, In Visible Archives, embodies the tenuous and paradoxical nature of visibility, which Galvan seeks to underscore. For example, the scholar analyses art that is held in both accessible, established spaces and more precarious locations – some in university archives and campuses, while volunteers in community-based and grassroots spaces tend to other items. Indeed, the women artists featured in the text question the heightened visibility of some bodies over others through their aesthetic work. Against a backdrop of the 1980s’ sex/porn wars, the phobic Reagan administration, and the AIDS epidemic, these feminist and queer visual practitioners were alert to “the hard-won and narrowly kept conditions of visibility for diverse sexual identities” (1-2). Ensuring the continued visibility of minoritarian lives and identities is further echoed in the text’s structure, as Galvan closes each chapter with a short reflection titled “Archives and Afterlives”. These cumulative sections examine the contemporary resonances of queer and feminist art from the late twentieth century and allow Galvan to attend to the important but unfinished business of community-building and political activism.

In the opening three chapters of the book, Galvan focuses her investigation on the work of graphic artists and cartoonists. The first chapter explores the enduring legacy of the 1982 Barnard Conference on Sexuality and the beginning of the Feminist Sex Wars. Galvan considers three graphic artists  – Hannah Alderfer, Beth Jaker, and Marybeth Nelson  – who designed the Barnard Conference’s accompanying handbook, Diary of a Conference on Sexuality. Focusing on its collage aesthetics, Galvan begins to underscore the centrality of the image to her analysis and argues that these three artists empowered women’s sexual identities through a visual form that “embraced rather than censored erotic representations” (49).

Reading across several grassroots and community-based archives […] Galvan demonstrates the importance of archival practices in ensuring the visibility of queer and queer-adjacent communities.

Chapter Two offers a series of close readings of the comics of two formative cartoonists: Lee Marrs and Roberta Gregory. In clear, straightforward prose, Galvan explores the pairs’ foundational and pioneering work in the lesbian comics scene and demonstrates how queer communities and subcultures were built through the publication and circulation of grassroots newspapers and zines, such as Gay Comix. At times in this chapter, the close reading and analysis verges on description, but this is a minor complaint. Alison Bechdel’s long-running series Dykes to Watch Out For is the primary concern of the third chapter – one of the book’s strongest. In this section, Galvan offers an adroit analysis of how Bechdel incorporates activism into her modes of artistic production. Reading across several grassroots and community-based archives – in addition to the collection of Bechdel’s papers at Smith College – Galvan demonstrates the importance of archival practices in ensuring the visibility of queer and queer-adjacent communities.

For the final two chapters of In Visible Archives, Galvan moves away from cartoons to survey the work of the writer Gloria Anzaldúa and the New York-based photographer Nan Goldin. The penultimate chapter attends to the drawings and sketches of Chicana feminist scholar Anzaldúa. Galvan argues for a renewed consideration of how Anzaldúa utilised visual storytelling as part of their educative practice. The final chapter contends with Goldin’s curatorial work in her seminal photobook, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, and her 1990 exhibition, Witnesses: Against our Vanishing. Here, Galvan provides an inciteful analysis of how Goldin sequences her photographs and curates the work of others in order to “guard against loss” and preserve communities in the face of the AIDS epidemic (198).

The radical potential of art and the archive is unquestionable. What Galvan ultimately illustrates is the need to keep making art and to keep building community.

As the rights of those most vulnerable in society are unceremoniously stripped in the name of culture wars stoked by right-wing parties and politicians, visibility continues to be of the utmost importance. In Visible Archives is a timely intervention which continues Goldin’s project of guarding against loss. Galvan lucidly demonstrates the importance of community-based archives, activism and art and provides an accessible introduction to the work of several women visual artists of the 1980s. The radical potential of art and the archive is unquestionable. What Galvan ultimately illustrates is the need to keep making art and to keep building community.

Note: This review gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Image credit: Susan Sermoneta on Flickr.

In Tactical Publishing: Using Senses, Software, and Archives in the Twenty-First Century, Alessandro Ludovico assembles a vast repertoire of post-digital publications to make the case for their importance in shaping and proposing alternative directions for the current computational media landscape. Although tilting towards example over practical theory, Tactical Publishing is an inspiring resource for all scholars and practitioners interested in the critical potential of experimenting with the technologies, forms, practices and socio-material spaces that emerge around books, writes Rebekka Kiesewetter.

Tactical Publishing: Using Senses, Software, and Archives in the Twenty-First Century. Alessandro Ludovico. The MIT Press. 2024.

Working at the intersection of art, technology, and media, Alessandro Ludovico is known for his contribution to shaping the term “post-digital” through his book Post-Digital Print: The Mutation of Publishing Since 1894. Ludovico’s notion of the post-digital, in brief, challenges the divide between digital and physical realms by exploring the normalisation and ubiquity of the digital in contemporary culture and urges for a nuanced perspective beyond its novelty, as boundaries between online and offline experiences blur.

Tactical Publishing is presented as a sequel, evolving and updating Ludovico’s concept for the concerns of a contemporary computational media landscape shaped by technologies and platforms (social media, algorithms, mobile apps and virtual reality environments) owned by large multinational corporations. Through discussing a wide variety of antagonistically situated experimental and activist publishing initiatives, Ludovico discovers fresh roles and purposes for books, publishers, editors, and libraries at the centre of an alternative post-digital publishing system. This system diverges from the “calculated and networked quality of publishing between digital and print … to promote an intrinsic and explicitly cooperative structure that contrasts with the vertical, customer-oriented industry model” (8).

Ludovico develops this argument around a captivating array of well and lesser known examples from the realms of analogue, digital, and post-digital publishing stretching the prevalent boundaries of what a book was, is, and can be. Ranging from Asger Jorn’s and Guy Debord’s sandpaper covered book Mémoirs (1958), to Nanni Balestrini’s computer generated poem “Tape Mark 1” (1961), to Newstweek (2011), a device for manipulating news created by Julian Oliver and Danja Vasiliev. Tactical Publishing also ventures into the complex relationships, practices, socio-political and economic contexts of the production and reception of books. It draws on these relational contexts to explore their disruptive potential. For example, through forms of “liminal librarianship” practiced by DIY libraries, networked archiving practices of historically underrepresented communities, and custodianship in the context of digital piracy.

Ludovico develops this argument around a captivating array of well and lesser known examples from the realms of analogue, digital, and post-digital publishing stretching the prevalent boundaries of what a book was, is, and can be

As in Post-Digital Print, Tactical Publishing offers an abundantly rich resource for scholars interested in exploring the ways in which experimenting with the manifold dimensions that make up books, can be a means for creative expression, intellectual exploration, and social change in the digital age. Ludovico dedicates considerable attention to these case studies, allowing them ample space to shine and speak by themselves in support of his argument.

The book is divided into six chapters, each mixing illustrative instances of practical application with theoretical reflection. Chapter one explores how reading is transformed by digital screens. These, as the author explains, tend to enforce industrially standardised experiences, while neutralising cultural differences and leading to a potential loss of sensory involvement. Ludovico proposes to reclaim enriched and multisensory reading experiences by combining digital tools and physical qualities. He illustrates this proposition by discussing a series of publishing experiments in music publishing that have used analogue and digital technologies to integrate text and music media.

Chapter two examines the transformation of the role of software in writing. Here, Ludovico presents a transition from an infrastructural to an authorial function that blurs distinctions between human and artificial “subjectivities”. The latter being a simulation of human-like experiences, characteristics, and behaviours often associated with human subjectivity, such as learning, decision-making, or emotional responses. This simulation Ludovico argues increasingly obstructs the ability to distinguish between actions and expressions originating from humans and those generated by technological systems. Ludovico contends that the “practice of constructing digital systems, processes, and infrastructures to deal with these new subjectivities can become a political matter” (89). One that requires initiatives intertwining critical and responsible efforts in digitising knowledges, making digital knowledge-bases accessible and searchable, and developing and maintaining machine-based services on top of them. However, the origin and nature of these institutions, and what their efforts might entail remain unspecified.

Ludovico presents a transition from an infrastructural to an authorial function that blurs distinctions between human and artificial “subjectivities”.

Chapter three explores how post-truth arises from a constant construction and deconstruction of meaning in transient digital spaces, and through media and image manipulation. Ludovico emphasises that, in this context, it is important to build “an information dam … to protect our minds from being flooded with data, especially emotionally charged data” (123). Chapter four, “Endlessness: The Digital Publishing Paradigm”, makes the case that the fragmented short formats characteristic of digital publishing underscore the importance of the archival role of print publications and the necessity of networks of “critical human editors” (130). These can act as a counterbalance to this flood of information and foster a more focused and collaborative exchange of information.

Chapter five proposes a transformation of libraries from centralised towards distributed and networked knowledge infrastructures in which librarians strategically contribute to the selection and sharing of “relevant collections” (197). Chapter six concludes Tactical Publishing synthesising the previous chapters by proposing the strategic integration of analogue and digital realms within an “open media continuum” rejecting a calculated, networked approach in favour of a cooperative structure sustained by “responsible editors” (212), publishers, librarians, custodians, and distributors. Last but not least, a useful appendix offers a selection of one hundred publications, encompassing both print and digital formats.

Tactical Publishing sits within a well-established canon of critical media studies, digital humanities, and cultural studies, focusing on the materiality of media, historical dimensions of technology, media ecology, politics of information, and socio-cultural implications of post-digital communication. However, its theoretical contributions are at times subdued by the host of examples presented. Some readers may also be left wanting a more pronounced engagement with recent theoretical works discussing the concept of post-digital publishing and its interventionist potential into dominant publishing systems, norms, and cultures from cultural hegemony critical, post-Marxist, various feminist, post-hegemonic, and ecologically-minded perspectives. Such an engagement might have helped clarify questions about the politics and ethics related to the alternative post-digital publishing system and the “comprehensive liberatory attitude” (4) Ludovico advocates for, beyond the motivation to counter the alienation of the current computational media landscape.

Tactical Publishing sits within a well-established canon of critical media studies, digital humanities, and cultural studies, focusing on the materiality of media, historical dimensions of technology, media ecology, politics of information, and socio-cultural implications of post-digital communication.

Similarly, Tactical Publishing also leaves unresolved related questions of positionality, accountability, and agency. For example: Who is the “we “Ludovico addresses, not least in the final chapter titled “How we Should Publish in the 21st Century”? What drives “the critical human editors” (130) whose role is to “filter the myriad of sources, to preserve their heterogeneity, to … include new sources, but to keep their final number limited, and to confirm them, transparently acknowledged, in order to strengthen trusted networks” (211), and what legitimises their activity? And where, in a post-digital world, is “the personal trusted human network” situated that, according to the author, can be “resistant to mass manipulation by fake news and post-truth strategies” (123)?

However, despite (or exactly because) the theoretical argument occasionally takes a backseat to numerous meticulously selected and well-arranged examples, Tactical Publishing is an inspiring resource for all scholars and practitioners in design, the arts, humanities, and social sciences that are interested in the ways in which experimental publishing can help question, challenge and rearrange dominant publishing systems.

Note: This article was initially published on the LSE Impact of Social Science blog.

This post gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Image credit: Dikushin Dmitry on Shutterstock.

In an excerpt from the preface to Speak Out!: The Brixton Black Women’s Group, editor Milo Miller shares context about the group and the impetus for the book which brings together, for the first time, the writings of one of Britain’s pioneering Black radical organisations of the 1970s.

Speak Out!: The Brixton Black Women’s Group. Brixton Black Women’s Group; Milo Miller (ed.). Verso. 2023.

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The Brixton Black Women’s Group (BBWG), which formed in 1973 and lasted until 1989, was a Black socialist feminist organisation based in Brixton, south London. It is thought to be the first autonomous Black women’s group of its kind to be established in London, and to be among the first in Britain more broadly (indeed, it was initially known simply as ‘the Black Women’s Group’).

The [Brixton Black Women’s Group] was central to radical struggles against racism, fascism, sexism and class oppression in London and beyond

The group was central to radical struggles against racism, fascism, sexism and class oppression in London and beyond, organising extensively around the policing and criminalisation of Black people, reproductive justice, housing, labour, legislation on immigration and nationality, education and more. The BBWG worked closely with other community groups and organisations; it was also actively part of networks of women’s groups nationally and internationally. It was instrumental in establishing the Organisation of Women of Asian and African Descent (OWAAD), which existed between 1978 and 1983 and was the first national Black women’s organisation in the UK.

Political Blackness […] was understood as encompassing all those exploited in Britain through historical and modern forms of colonialism, imperialism and racism. “Blackness”, in this sense, functioned as a site of active and relational re/articulation; as a site of resistance, of solidarity and of coalition.

Crucially, the BBWG organised on the grounds of political Blackness. “Blackness”, in this formulation, was not understood as a descriptive category referring, for example, to “race” or skin colour; rather, it was understood as encompassing all those exploited in Britain through historical and modern forms of colonialism, imperialism and racism. “Blackness”, in this sense, functioned as a site of active and relational re/articulation; as a site of resistance, of solidarity and of coalition. This conceptualisation of Blackness was prevalent (though far from settled or uncontested) in Britain’s Black Power movement in the 1970s and 1980s, and the BBWG’s members, accordingly, included women from and with ties to the Caribbean, Asia and Africa. This approach was central to – and further developed by the BBWG’s critical involvement in – OWAAD, which explicitly marked it by referring to women of Asian and African descent in its name.

Along with the Mary Seacole Craft Group, the BBWG established the Mary Seacole House, later renamed the Black Women’s Centre, in 1979. For much of its existence, the centre was managed by the BBWG. It became a focal point for the meeting of women’s groups and political organisations working across London. The centre hosted a regular legal and welfare rights information and referral service; a craft workshop; a health group providing, among other services, advice on contraception and pregnancy; a crèche; children’s activities during school holidays; and a library and resource centre specialising in women’s literature and Black history. In the aftermath of the April 1981 Brixton Uprising, the centre also functioned as the headquarters of the Brixton Defence Campaign’s Legal Defence Group.

The BBWG’s newsletter, Speak Out […] contained reports on the BBWG and other grassroots groups’ work on a variety of fronts, in-depth political position statements, analyses of proposed legislation, explainers on health issues and accounts of liberation struggles across the Global South.

The BBWG’s newsletter, Speak Out, detailed all of this. It contained reports on the BBWG and other grassroots groups’ work on a variety of fronts, in-depth political position statements, analyses of proposed legislation, explainers on health issues and accounts of liberation struggles across the Global South. Alongside these, there were poems and illustrations by BBWG members, as well as reviews of plays, films and novels – emphasising the group’s understanding of culture and political struggle as inseparable, and of art and self-expression as integral to movements for liberation. Collectively written pieces – on, for example, the issues the group organised around, the coalitions the group was part of, and the group’s political positions – appeared in publications such as Race Today, Spare Rib, Red Rag and Feminist Review.

This book brings together, for the first time, all of the issues of Speak Out as well as statements, articles and book chapters written by the Brixton Black Women’s Group.

Over the years, many individuals and groups have devoted a considerable amount of effort to honouring the BBWG’s work – not least the writers of the landmark 1985 book The Heart of the Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain. The first sustained account of Black women’s history in Britain written by Black women, The Heart of the Race was written by BBWG members Beverley Bryan and Suzanne Scafe with OWAAD co-founder Stella Dadzie, and features an extended section on the BBWG. Elsewhere, Dadzie’s personal papers, held at the Black Cultural Archives in Brixton, have long included the most comprehensive collection of BBWG documents available. Despite efforts by a great many people, however, the wealth of writing produced by the BBWG has remained scattered and often difficult to access. This book brings together, for the first time, all of the issues of Speak Out as well as statements, articles and book chapters written by the Brixton Black Women’s Group. It also contains other hard-to-access archival material essential to understanding the group’s work and trajectory.

Why wasn’t the group’s trailblazing work as celebrated as it deserved to be and available as a resource in combatting current, seemingly intractable and ever-intensifying crises?

The research culminating in this book began in 2016, as part of my work on my PhD thesis, which focused on squatting in Brixton from the 1970s to the 2010s. During my PhD, I began compiling as much of the BBWG’s writings as I could find, in addition to writing by individual members of the group. I visited archives and typed up issues of Speak Out, as well as leaflets produced by the group; I tracked down out-of-print books and journals, typing up chapters and articles written by the group or by individual members. Initially, this was solely so I could easily revisit this writing and quote from it as needed in my thesis; over time, however, this gathering of the BBWG’s writing became a project in its own right, as the group’s visionary work speaks urgently to the conditions we face in the present. I began to share the material I was collecting with friends, whose excitement was palpable. Many of them had never heard of the group; some had but had never encountered the group’s writings. My own excitement was beginning to be mixed with frustration: Why wasn’t this material more widely known and accessible? Why was the Brixton Black Women’s Group so absent from accounts of any number of key political issues, campaigns and events in 1970s and 1980s Britain to which they were central? Why wasn’t the group’s trailblazing work as celebrated as it deserved to be and available as a resource in combatting current, seemingly intractable and ever-intensifying crises? It became very clear: the collected writings of the Brixton Black Women’s Group had to be published.

With this in mind, from 2017 onwards I worked on this collection whenever I could. I continued typing up articles and chapters; I tracked down an elusive Speak Out issue; I found photos of the Black Women’s Centre; I carefully removed photocopier static from images in issues of Speak Out. In November 2020 I contacted members of the BBWG and sent them what I had put together, with the offer to take this forward should they be willing. Meticulous discussions then took place between us: What should the scope of the book be? What material was perhaps beyond that scope, and what material had yet to be included? Members looked to their personal archives and sent me more material to include, from leaflets and statements to photographs.

The year of this book’s publication – 2023 – marks fifty years since the Brixton Black Women’s Group was founded.

The year of this book’s publication – 2023 – marks fifty years since the Brixton Black Women’s Group was founded. As fascism sees a resurgence around the world, as the struggle against police brutality and racism must continue unabated, as attacks on reproductive rights and bodily autonomy rage on and as border regimes and capitalism continue to exact their deadly toll, the work and legacy of the Brixton Black Women’s Group remain as vital and necessary as ever. This book is offered in the hope that it might provide tools to not only understand and confront this current conjuncture but also prefigure and enact practices of mutual aid, solidarity and resistance so urgently needed to overcome it. It is offered in the hope that it might provide tools to imagine a radically different world; a world beyond the brutal entanglement of conquest and empire.

Note: This excerpt from the introduction to Speak Out!: The Brixton Black Women’s Group by the Brixton Black Women’s Group, edited by Milo Miller, is copyrighted to Verso Books, and is reproduced here with their permission.

This post gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science. The LSE RB blog may receive a small commission if you choose to make a purchase through the above Amazon affiliate link. This is entirely independent of the coverage of the book on LSE Review of Books.

Image Credit: Some members of the BBWG in 1979, courtesy of Milo Miller/Verso.