I just got the Fall/Winter 2008 catalog from a major university press. "Oh good," thought I, "let's see what's coming out so I can plan some editorial features for the second half of the year."
It was like reading a dispatch from Cloud Cuckooland. Here are some of their titles:
Territories of Difference: Place, Movements, Life, Redes
Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity
Big Ears: Listening for Gender in Jazz Studies
Fixing Sex: Intersex, Medical Authority, and Lived Experience
CT Suite: The Work of Diagnosis in the Age of Noninvasive Cutting ["an ethnographic account of how a particular diagnositc technology, the computed tomographic (TC) scanner, shapes social relations and intellectual activities, blah blah blah..."]
Global Indigenous Media: Cultures, Poetics, and Politics
Native Men Remade: Gender and Nation in Contemporary Hawai'i
Liberated Territory: Untold Local Perspectives on the Black Panther Party
and perhaps my favorite
The Wandering Signifier: Rhetoric of Jewishness in the Latin American Imaginary
I understand that academic titles will necessarily be more abstract and even arcane than mass market books. I get that. And I understand this is only one catalog. Still, reading it made me wonder if scholars in leading universities ever consider whether or not their work actually influences the society of which they are a part. Does it even matter to them whether or not their work gets read and discussed beyond the narrow confines of the academy? Because I get the idea from catalogs like this that scholars carry on like a holy priesthood in a mystery religion that has little or no relevance to the culture of which they are ostensibly a part.
But that's just me. Maybe the world really needs to hear untold stories of Black Panther derring-do in Winston-Salem. Perhaps CT scans revealed amazing things in the testes of intersexed Hawaiians (and can offer extraordinary insights into the secret life of the late Don Ho). Could be. Doubt it.
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Why am I not naming the university press? It's Duke. As Scott figured out.
"Ok, cool, Rod; I'm a scholar at a leading university in one of the areas I mentioned (philosophy) and I don't think any of the books you mentioned well-represent anything like what goes on in mainstream academia"
Do you walk to work in a hermetically sealed tunnel? I too work in universities - albeit without tenure as I have thus far failed to "queer" even one "discourse" - so my boomer lords and masters get tenure and benefits and I get two grand a class. On the other hand, I actually teach students instead of stacking up sabbaticals and 1/1 loads "queering discourses" and "gendering differences."
The humanities departments of major universities do not deserve public support - not from Rod, not from anyone else. The mission of humanities departments at our major schools is endless, pointless, naval-gazing and self-indulgent "criticism." The contempt for the students is palpable. Contempt for Western Civilization earns tenure. These ivy-covered bastions of hatred and malcontent ought to be burned to the ground and the professors retrained in a federal "tenure to work" program. This is the only way I can think of to break the cycle of pathological dependency on handouts which has developed among the smug overclass.
Bitter much?
"Contempt for Western Civilization earns tenure."
All I can do is quote Gandhi, who, when asked by a wiseguy reporter what he thought of Western civilization, said, "I think it would be a very good idea."
And Maurice Samuel, in "The Gentleman and the Jew," who pointed out that, to the extent that Christianity and Christian civilization are not Jewish, they are pagan.
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