The Eyes of Radio Free Europe: Regimes of Visibility in the Cold War Archives

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract (may include machine translation)

This article investigates on the basis of letters to Radio Free Europe how the ersatz coupling of sensory data streams impacted the political imagination before and after 1989. While reconstructing the medial configuration of a clandestine information flow and reflecting on the micro-powers involved, the article follows the case through its own archival visibility, thus capturing the very tension between seeing and hiding. Going both "along the archival grain" to capture the epistemic anxieties of governance, and "against the archival grain" to retrieve from the hermetic tectonic of archival layers the story of a Cold War trickster, offers a better understanding of the epistemic limits of the Cold War archives and thus to map and transgress them.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)99-127
Number of pages29
JournalEast Central Europe
Volume44
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - 2017

Keywords

  • Cold War
  • Radio Free Europe
  • archives
  • media
  • secret services

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'The Eyes of Radio Free Europe: Regimes of Visibility in the Cold War Archives'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this