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READING HISTORY AGAINST THE STATE SECRET

Abstract This paper reads Carlos Soto Román’s “Chile Project: [Re-classified],” a documentary poem that remediates declassified state documents as an ambivalent form of witnessing bureaucracy and state violence. Soto Román “re-classified” – that is, redacted – a forty-five-page selection of documents from the CIA dossier on Chile that was nominally declassified by the US Government in the wake of Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship. Soto Román’s intervention renders the documents almost entirely unreadable, a gesture which refuses to grant the archival records the status of official history. This gesture denies the witnessing contained in the documents while also witnessing the documents on behalf of a reader who cannot. In this unusual configuration of poem-as-witness, the paper argues, Soto Román instructs a reader elsewhere, to counter-histories of survival and resistance which are incommensurable with the version of history claimed by the US state. The paper further claims that the redaction can be read as an invitation to consider the “document” as a particular cultural object and media format in which history is written and unwritten, forged and contested, filled with noise and silence. To conclude, the paper posits that poetry, defined as a specific readerly approach to the conditions in which a text is made, provides a critical framework for considering the document as a dynamic interface and therefore history as an ongoing site for both domination and resistance.