alonso-can journals make difference

CARLOS J. ALONSO

Can Journals Make a Difference?

The proposal that academic departments do away with thebook as the required unit of measure in tenure and promotion cases andthat the candidate produce a collection of significant articles as the cor-pus to be evaluated instead has been widely disseminated as a workablesolution to the current crisis in scholarly publishing. For instance, in aseries of two opinion pieces, Lindsay Waters argued forcefully for theend of what he terms the "tyranny of the monograph," and he averredthat "The best way to end the current system is to initiate a renaissanceof the scholarly article—the article is an endangered species—and tohave the publication of two or three high-impact essays count in mostcases for tenure" (317).

Waters's opinion pieces were followed by an open letter sentto all members of the MLA by Stephen Greenblatt in 2002, the yearin which he was the association's president. In his "Call for Action onProblems in Scholarly Book Publishing," Greenblatt asked faculty mem-bers, promotion committees, and deans to reconsider whether the bookshould continue to be the requirement for tenure and promotion.

Philip Lewis, former Dean of Arts and Sciences at CornellUniversity, sounded a cautionary note about the proposed move towardarticles as the preferred unit of productivity for tenure consideration.About journals in the humanities, he said:

we have too many, few of them are thriving, many older journals havelost their sense of identity and mission, many newer ones suffer from adearth of institutional subscriptions and from inadequate support forbeleaguered editors, and all are caught up in the same system of produc-ing and disseminating knowledge that generates too many books for toofew readers. Don't we, then, face an eventual shakedown in the spheresof both book and journal publication? (1223—24)

Notwithstanding Lewis's warnings, if the current crisis contin-ues unabated, it is still likely that journals will be increasingly pressured

Revista de Estudios Hispdnicos 39 (2005)

552 Carlos J. Alonso

to assume a weightier role in the credentialing of candidates for profes-sional advancement. If departments, administrators, and promotioncommittees eventually turn to the publication of a series of articles asa determining criterion for tenure, we should think seriously about thelong- and short-term implications of that possibility for our role as edi-tors of academic journals. For in the discussion about making articlesplay a bigger role in the awarding of tenure and promotion, it has beenassumed all along that the operation, production, and conceptualizationof academic journals will remain essentially unchanged. My conten-tion is that, contrary to that assumption, if journals are going to havean increased influence in our professional lives, we must engage in aredefinition of the paradigm of the academic journal as we now knowit. Without such a reconceptualization, journals will never be able toshoulder fully the responsibilities they will be required to fulfill underthis new state of academic affairs.

There is, as we are all aware, a multi-layered continuity betweenthe editing and production of a journal and the publishing of scholarlybooks. Journals already have an infrastructure and engage in a set ofoperations that are indistinguishable from those of a commercial or uni-versity press, excepting considerations of scale, of course: the handlingof manuscripts, their assignment to readers and reviewers whose special-ties we know better than any press editor, copyediting, the preparationof final copy, dealings with printers, etc. If, as it is being contemplated,articles are going to have a weightier role in academic life, we musttranslate that infrastructure continuity into an intellectual continuity aswell. We must rethink the category of the academic article as well as thetraditional concept of the journal in order to reflect that novel role wewill avowedly play in the professional life of our fields. In other words,the question of my title, "can journals make a difference?," should notbe interpreted simply as referring to the possible contribution thatjournals can make to mitigate the contemporary crisis in scholarly pub-lishing; it should also be construed to ask whether journals can differfrom themselves, whether they can make themselves different from theway they currendy are to assume the demands imposed on them by thisputative solution to the publication crisis.

The following are some considerations along these lines that donot intend to be exhaustive by any means, but which may give us anidea of the scale of the transformation that will be required. If I use a

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Strong hortatory mode below, it is because I want to impress upon all ofus the need to address sooner rather than later the issues and concernsdetailed in my list:

1. Journals must increase substantially the length of the manuscriptsthey accept for publication. They must be able to accommodate longerarticles that can be more representative of an author's overarching ar-gument, and which allow for a better sense of its presentation, scope,and significance. They may even consider devoting most of an issue toa single long monograph. Articles—and by extension journals—havetraditionally seen themselves as essentially tied to the here and now ofacademic research, as conveying an etat present of the field. This at-titude only made sense as an adjunct to a concept of the book as theweightier, more substantive, and permanent intellectual contribution.Current word limits of journals are inadequate to modify this percep-tion of transitoriness attached to journals and to the scholarship theytransmit.

2. Journals must stop thinking of themselves and their ongoing produc-tion as constituted by a succession of individual issues, each of which isan autonomous, self-contained unit. It should be possible for a journalto offer space in successive issues for the publication of a long study ona given topic or problematic.

3. Review essays in which a number of works of scholarship are con-sidered, or in which the review is the starting point for addressinglarger issues in the field should be the preferred format for reviews.Furthermore, review essays should be treated as full-fiedged articles; inother words, critical pieces that interpret and analyze other significantcritical works and topics should be given the same status and lengthallowances as more conventional articles that interpret literary or othercultural objects.

4. The present system of conscripting recipients of a journal by meansof yearly subscriptions is a dependable source of income, but it is notreflective of the desires and needs of subscribers. We should exploreways to make single articles or individual issues of a journal readilyavailable for purchase.


5. Journals should stop considering the reproduction and incorporationof illustrations and graphics in their pages as a nuisance and an expenseto be avoided if at all possible. As scholarship moves increasingly tocultural studies—and is therefore not necessarily or exclusively text-based—the need to reproduce material of this kind will only increase.

6. Clearly, a number of the issues described above could be addressedmore easily and more eflFectively through electronic publication. In fact,every journal should explore seriously the viability of its publication indigital form and should be expected to justify w hy it does not have aplan to switch to digital mode within the next five years.

Implementing most of these suggestions will require increasedfunds, and that at a time in which production costs are at an all-timehigh. Most academic journals already depend on subsidies from theuniversities that house them, and the number of personal and insti-tutional subscriptions has either leveled or decreased. But if our fiscalsituation is so dire that it will not make possible the new outlays andinvestments required to shoulder our new responsibilities, then we areback to Philip Lewis's warnings, and journals are assuredly not the solu-tion to our professional woes.

I have left for last the discussion of another way in which jour-nals may help alleviate the present crisis in scholarly publishing, onethat involves the leveraging and furthering of the continuity that existsbetween the operation of journals and university presses. I will put forththis proposal as starkly and directly as I can: it is my belief that, if theyhave not done so already, all journals should contemplate entering intonegotiations with a university press, with a view to having the journalappear under that press's rubric. My contention arises from the fact thatwe must find a way to link tightly the editorial enterprise of our jour-nals with those entities responsible for the production of the book, stillthe most important and prestigious intellectual object in academia.' Wealready possess the infrastructure and the editorial expertise to producebooks; what we need is a newly forged partnership with someone whoactually does.

The shape that this partnership will take, as well as the dis-tribution of responsibilities, will, of course, be specific to the partiesinvolved; but the point is to involve a university press intimately in thepublishing ventures of our journals in order to create the sort of hybrid


publication space that will better allow us to fulfill our new editorialresponsibilities. The goal is to release university presses from some ofthe tasks and consequently the costs associated with publishing books,while enjoying and making accessible to others the benefits of associat-ing with the weighty imprimatur of university presses.

Acting on such a belief, I urged my departmental colleaguesone year ago to consider approaching a university press to explore allavailable options. After we researched the idea, the Hispanic Review, ajournal published by the Department of Romance Languages at theUniversity of Pennsylvania since 1933, entered into an agreement withthe University of Pennsylvania Press for the latter to assume publicationof the journal beginning with the spring 2004 issue. For us, this entailedsevering our links with a private publisher with which the journal hadhad a long-standing connection; but it also meant the establishment ofa working relationship with a respected university press. Our ultimategoal was not to increase the journal's prestige, though, but rather tocreate the possibility of using the Press's very standing as a universitypress to fiirther other publication projects we initiated that would havea wider impact on the profession.

Once the financial implications of the Press's takeover of thejournal were clear—that is, once we arrived at a projection of thesurpluses that would accrue to the journal over time—we approachedthe press's Director and Humanities Editor with a proposal to havethe University of Pennsylvania Press create a book-publishing series inHispanic Cultural Studies, using the projected profits as a way to offsetthe costs associated with publishing books in the series. Of course, theprofits from publishing the journal cannot offset those publishing costscompletely; but it gave us a base from which to make the compellingmoral argument that is at the root of our proposal: that at a time inwhich university presses are scaling back the publication of books in ourfield, and when the number of series that address Hispanic subjects hasdwindled to a precious few, we should do everything possible to createnew venues in which the scholarly work produced in our midst canfind its way to print. Since publication series are the standard categoryon which university presses conduct their business, it makes sense forus academics to apply pressure on presses to create publication series;the single most common argument by a university press for decliningconsideration of a book manuscript is that it does not have a series forwhich it is a proper fit.


The result, I can happily report—and announce—to you, isthe creation of a new publication series titled "Diferencias: CulturalStudies in Hispanism." The press is pleased to assume publication ofthe Hispanic Review because, as you know, publishing journals is one ofthe ways in which presses enhance their standing and prestige. We, inturn, have managed to create a new venue for the publication of threeto four books in our field every year. Furthermore, the formulationof the intellectual rationale for the series also forced our departmentto engage in an extremely profitable and sharp discussion about ourdiscipline and its future.

Since one of the topics of this gathering is how recent intellec-tual developments have affected the kinds of work that we now considermost compelling from a publication perspective, I would like to sharewith you some portions of the document that we presented to the Uni-versity of Pennsylvania Press as a prospectus for this new publishingventure, "Diferencias: Cultural Studies in Hispanism."

The idea that Spanish historical and social development hasbeen anomalous with respect to the rest of Europe is a critical tru-ism that has determined until quite recently the nature of academicknowledge produced about Spain as well as the institutional locationof that knowledge both in Europe and the United States. This idea isfounded on a number of seemingly unimpeachable historical facts:while other areas of Europe were participating in the Crusades and lay-ing the foundations for a mercantile revolution, Spain's attention wasturned inwards to fight the Moor within; Spain closed its borders andisolated itself from the West at the precise time in which expansionismand increased cultural intercourse solidified the modern States and theascendance of capitalism; when other European nations were achievingimperial status, Spain managed to lose a large majority of its possessionsin an anticolonial war. By extension, the former colonies of Spain inthe New World have been tainted by the same brush and characterizedas anarchic, inchoate, and incapable of bringing to birth the modernnations depicted in constitutions whose principles are derived from anEnlightenment in which they—^just as their former metropolis—neverreally participated.


Nevertheless, this narrative of general failure to achieve conso-nance with other European nations is predicated on the authority ofthe paradigm of Modernity as the normative explanation for Westernhistory—a paradigm that has been challenged pointedly by severalscholars in the last thirty or so years, and which has been marked by theadvent of more encompassing concepts such as "vernacular modernities"and the questioning of the usefulness of interpretive schemas based ona center/periphery dichotomy. When the normativity of this historicaland cultural perspective is challenged, a number of equally compellingand less vitiating characteristics of the Hispanic historical and politicalexperience become visible, as it were: Spain achieved national unityand constituted itself into a modern imperial State long before any ofthe other European countries attained that status, deploying practicesof containment aimed at several national groups—both ethnic andregional—through the use of strategies similar to those later employedin other imperial contexts that Michael Hechter has subsumed underthe term "internal colonialism"; the first grammar of a modern lan-guage was published in 1492 in Salamanca by the scholar Antonio deNebrija; the important yet hardly acknowledged revolt of the comunerosin 1519-21 marked the first European revolution of the Third Estate;the former colonies of Spain in Spanish America entered their postco-lonial period in 1826, more than a century before their counterpartsthroughout the world; the imperial "contact zone" in the New Worldhas existed for more than five hundred years; and "the Border" as aplace of contradictory contestation has been an enduring feature ofthe Hispanic experience in the United States long before it acquiredthe epistemological significance that it possesses nowadays as a usefulcategory to understand the complexities of cultural exchange.

One could go even further and propose that the examinationof the specificity of the Spanish and Spanish American historical cir-cumstance can be used as leverage to nuance—^when not simply to putin check—the paradigms that have been traditionally employed to un-derstand the metropolitan phenomena of modernity, nationalism, andpostcoloniality. It is significant, yet not remarked upon enough, thatBenedict Anderson begins his influential study of nationalism. ImaginedCommunities, with a two-chapter analysis of the formation of nationalidentities in the erstwhile Spanish colonies in the New World. Andersonargues that a detailed understanding of that case lays bare the mecha-nisms at work in the templates used by proponents of nationalism in


the European metropolis. Similarly, Santiago Colas and Jorge Klor deAlva have each argued decisively that in the early nineteenth-centuryexperience of postcoloniality in Spanish America, one can diagnose thesubsequent difficulties and contradictions that characterized the postco-lonial phase that followed the waves of decolonization in the twentiethcentury. For these scholars, the Spanish American case oflFers a prolepticdiagnostic framework to understand postcolonialism not simply as thethrowing off of the yoke of colonialism, but rather as an entrance intoa different world-historical system of subjection and dependence. In allof these instances, the particularities of the Spanish and Spanish Ameri-can situation become a useful prism with which to refract the receivedideas concerning the critical narratives used to explain the most salientmetropolitan historical developments.

The monograph series that we are proposing—titled "Diferen-cias: Cultural Studies in Hispanism"—endeavors to provide a space forthe exploration of these broad issues as they are infiected by the particu-larities of cultural production in the Hispanic context. The series willseek to explore the place of the Hispanic world in the ongoing debatesabout the articulation between Medieval and Early Modern, colonialismand postcoloniality, modernity and postmodernity, and metropolis anddiaspora. Ideally, the issues that it will highlight will revolve in scopearound two related yet importantly distinct questions: to what extentis the Hispanic cultural experience continuous with the paradigms thathave been advanced to explain cultural production both in Europeand by extension in the developing world? Conversely, what aspects ofthat experience are sui generis and therefore discontinuous with thoseinterpretive schemes? The overarching intention of the series is not toreclaim a fetishized Hispanic difference that the prevailing paradigmswould be very happy to acknowledge, but to engage in a dialogue withreceived scholarly conceits from the newly complicated perspective in-augurated by a radical reconceptualization of the Hispanic world. Thepractice of underscoring either the continuity or the distinctness of theHispanic experience vis-a-vis metropolitan enclaves has led in each caseeither to a denial of substantive difference in or to an unproductivereification of the Hispanic world. Our goal is to maintain a produc-tive tension between the two perspectives that allows simultaneouslyfor a refiguration of the Hispanic case, and a questioning engagementwith the critical tradition that is made possible precisely by that novelunderstanding of the Hispanic cultural experience. To my knowledge.


no Other extant publication series has defined such a project as its over-riding concern. "Diferencias" would be articulated around a CulturalStudies paradigm, thereby moving away from the formalistic study ofliterary phenomena and aiming to publish research that looks for in-tersections between the textual (broadly conceived) and the social. Wewould aim to promote provocative interventions in all historical periodsof cultural production in the Spanish and Latin American fields.

Journals appear to be headed toward a situation in which theywill be required to take on more significant intellectual and professionalresponsibilities in our disciplinary contexts. We must realize that withthese responsibilities comes the need to look inward with a view torethinking from the ground up every aspect of our operations, so thatwe may reinvent ourselves to facilitate the assumption of those newroles. But we should also look outward to explore strategic alliances thatwill help us create ever new venues for the dissemination of scholarlywork.

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

NOTE

' I have argued elsewhere about the need to do everything in our power to ensure theviability of the book as the primary object of scholarly publication on account of thesingular intellectual value of the experience of writing an academic book:

Anyone who has written a manuscript, submitted it for consideration toa press, and seen it through to publication can attest to the intense andcompelling intellectual experience that the entire afFair represents: thechoice of texts, the marshaling of sources and evidence, the constructionof an argument that spans several chapters, the bibliographic research,the engagement with the readers' reports, the reading of proofs, thechoice of journals for review, and so on. Writing a series of articles—ir-respective of the taut links that may connect them—does not measureup in the aggregate to the experience of conceiving and writing a book.The reader of a book also receives its argument in a condensed and


organic manner that a series of related articles published seriatim cannever hope to match. Hence, before we counsel our younger colleaguesto give up on writing a book and to direct their efforts exclusively tothe publishing of articles, we should exhaust all other options available.For instance, why not continue the practice—where applicable—ofconsidering the book manuscript of a candidate for promotion ortenure but uncouple the manuscript's worth as determined by internaland external reviewers (and therefore its author's tenure prospects)from its fortunes in search of a publisher? Under this arrangement, acandidate's attempts to place a manuscript with a press would not bebound by the frantic deadlines imposed by tenure consideration, andthe author would have time to make any requested revisions. Movingaway from "the book" and toward a series of articles as the minimumcorpus for a tenure review presumes that scholars may as well not evenwrite books but should concentrate instead on producing what has thegreater chance of seeing the light of day, even at the price of sacrificingan intellectually molding experience (220).

WORKS CITED

Alonso, Carlos J. "Having a Spine: The Crisis in Scholarly Publishing." PMLA 118(2003): 217-23.

Lewis, Philip. "Is Monographic Tyranny the Problem?" PMLA 117 (2002): 1222-224.

Waters, Lindsay. "A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Books of the Members ofthe MLA from Being a Burden to Their Authors." PMLA 115 (2000):315-17.

. "Rescue Tenure from the Tyranny of the Monograph." Chronicle of HigherEducation 20 April 2001: B7-9.

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