Re/Marks on Power: How Annotation Inscribes History, Literacy, and Justice

An interdisciplinary exploration of annotation that shows how this participatory act marks public memory, struggles for justice, and social change.

Annotation—the seemingly simple act of marking a text—is often diminished as a marginal practice. It is prohibited in physical objects and considered irrelevant to social and political concerns. But what if annotation were reimagined as a critical and civic literacy that can inscribe public memory, struggles for justice, and social change? In Re/Marks on Power, education researcher Remi Kalir argues that enduring traces of annotation can be read and (re)written to advance counternarratives and more just social futures. Kalir’s interdisciplinary approach examines annotation in archives and libraries, on walls and in books, atop maps and monuments, and along byways and all manner of margins to describe the relevance of “re/marks.”

With a series of vivid and wide-ranging cases, Kalir describes how groups of annotators make public re/marks of resistance and creativity, often with simple tools and accessible methods. These annotations alter familiar texts, oppose hateful ideology, and broadcast solidarity and social activism. Among the book’s fresh reads of annotation are considerations of how Harriet Tubman’s legacy is remembered and honored, how the US-Mexico border was defined and is restoried, how problematic public monuments are contested and reimagined, and how books featuring LGBTQIA+ topics are classified, censored, and celebrated. Re/Marks on Power honors the actions of annotators, whether eminent or anonymous, and highlights how material traces have mediated justice-oriented possibility. Throughout this book, the author makes visible a new social language of annotation that can be read across time and texts.

Remi Kalir is Associate Director of Faculty Development and Applied Research within Learning Innovation and Lifetime Education at Duke University. His scholarship examines how annotation facilitates social, collaborative, and justice-directed learning. He is a coauthor of Annotation (MIT Press).