Redaction Inverted: Erasure Poetry and the Intent to Reveal

What would redaction look like as an act of revelation? In this contribution, I lay out an engagement with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) through erasure poetry, framing the results as a form of public anthropology of policy and bureaucracy. The GDPR came into force in Europe in 2018, affording newly created ‘data subjects’ new relations with their data. Using events in the UK and Denmark as examples, I put forward erasure poetry of policy, regulation and legislation as anaesthetic, practical and political intervention that seeks the inverse of what redaction is – in its legal intent – created for. Erasure poems leave behind only what the new author wishes to leave, revealing only words that are already there. It can make those words betray themselves, to reveal the meaning they had all along or given them a new inflection entirely opposite to their intended weight. I suggest that such capacities offer powerful means for managing voice, anonymity and creativity in charged ethnographic situations. I also view the deceptive simplicity of the act of erasure poetry as a means by which ethnographers and those with whom they work can speak with and through official wor(l)ds.