Fall Harvest

Over the weekend I went through the fall 2016 catalog of every publisher belonging to the Association of American University Presses. Or at least I tried -- a number of fall catalogs have not been released yet, or else the publishers have hidden the PDFs on their websites with inexplicable cunning. (It seems as if savvy publicists would insist that catalogs be featured so prominently on the homepage that it’s almost impossible to overlook them. Perhaps half my time went to playing “Where’s Waldo?” so evidently not.) A few sites hadn’t been updated in at least a year. At one of them, the most recent catalog is from 2012, although the press itself seems still to be in existence. Let’s just hope everyone there is OK.

After assembling roughly 70 catalogs, I began to cull a list of books to consider for this column in the months ahead, which now runs to 400 titles, give or take a few, with more to be added as the search for Waldo continues. When you take an overview of a whole season’s worth of university-press output in one marathon survey, you can detect certain patterns or themes. A monograph on the white-power music underground? Duly noted. A second one, publishing a month later? That is a bit more striking. (The journalistic rule of thumb is that three makes a trend; for now, we’re left with a menacing coincidence.)

Some of the convergences seemed to merit notice, even in advance of the books themselves being available. Here are a few topical clusters that readers may find of interest. The text below in quotation marks after each book comes from the publisher’s description of it, unless otherwise specified. I have been sparing about the use of links, but more information on the books and authors can be readily found online.

“Whither democracy?” seems like an apt characterization of quite a few titles appearing this autumn and early winter. Last year, Jennifer L. Hochschild and Katherine Levine Einstein asked, Do Facts Matter? Information and Misinformation in American Politics, published by the University of Oklahoma Press and out in paperback this month, concluding that “citizens’ inability or unwillingness to use the facts they know in their political decision making may be frustrating,” but the real danger comes from “their acquisition and use of incorrect ‘knowledge’” put out by unscrupulous “political elites.” By contrast, James E. Campbell’s Polarized: Making Sense of a Divided America (Princeton University Press, July) maintains that if the two major parties are “now ideologically distant from each other and about equally distant from the political center” it’s because “American politics became highly polarized from the bottom up, not the top down, and this began much earlier than often thought,” meaning the 1960s.

Frances E. Lee sets the date later, and the locus of polarization higher in the body politic, in Insecure Majorities: Congress and the Perpetual Campaign (University of Chicago Press, September). She sees developments in the 1980s unleashing “competition for control of the government [that] drives members of both parties to participate in actions that promote their own party’s image and undercut that of the opposition, including the perpetual hunt for issues that can score political points by putting the opposing party on the wrong side of public opinion.”

Democracy: A Case Study by David A. Moss (Harvard University Press, January 2017) takes fierce partisanship as a given in American political life -- not a bug but a feature -- and recounts and analyzes 19 episodes of conflict, from the Constitutional Convention onward. Wasting no time in registering his dissent, the libertarian philosopher Jason Brennan comes out Against Democracy (Princeton, August) on the grounds that competent governance requires rational and informed decision making, while “political participation and democratic deliberation actually tend to make people worse -- more irrational, biased and mean.” The alternative he proposes is  “epistocracy”: rule by the knowledgeable. Good luck with that! Reaching that utopia from here will be quite an adventure, especially given that some voters regard “irrational, biased and mean” as qualifications for office.

Fall, when the current election cycle ends, is also be the season of books on the Anthropocene -- the idea that human impact on the environment has been so pronounced that we must define a whole phase of planetary history around it. There is an entry for the term in Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment (Fordham University Press, January), and it appears in the title of at least three books: one from Monthly Review Press (distributed by NYU Press) in September and one each from Princeton and Transcript Verlag (distributed by Columbia University Press) in November. Stacy Alaimo’s Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times (University of Minnesota Press, October) opens with the statement “The Anthropocene is no time to set things straight.” (The author calls for “a material feminist posthumanism,” and it sounds like she draws on queer theory as well, so chances are “straight” is an overdetermined word choice.)

The neologism is tweaked in Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Duke University Press, September) by Donna J. Haraway, who “eschews referring to our current epoch as the Anthropocene, preferring to conceptualize it as what she calls the Chthulucene, as it more aptly and fully describes our epoch as one in which the human and nonhuman are inextricably linked in tentacular practices.” Someone in a position to know tells me that Haraway derives her term from “chthonic” (referring to the subterranean) rather than Cthulhu, the unspeakable ancient demigod of H. P. Lovecraft’s horror fiction. Maybe so, but the reference to tentacles suggests otherwise.

A couple of titles from Columbia University Press try to find a silver lining in the clouds of Anthropocene smog -- or at least to start dispersing them before it’s too late. Michael E. Mann and Tom Toles pool their skills as atmospheric scientist and Pulitzer-winning cartoonist (respectively) in The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics and Driving Us Crazy (September), which satirizes “the intellectual pretzels into which denialists must twist logic to explain away the clear evidence that man-made activity has changed our climate.” Despite its seemingly monitory title, Geoffrey Heal’s Endangered Economies: How the Neglect of Nature Threatens Our Prosperity (December) is actually an argument for “conserving nature and boosting economic growth” as mutually compatible goals.

If so, it will be necessary to counter the effects of chickenization -- which, it turns out, is U.S. Department of Agriculture slang for “the transformation of all farm animal production” along factory lines, as described in Ellen K. Silbergeld’s Chickenizing Farms and Food: How Industrial Meat Production Endangers Workers, Animals and Consumers (Johns Hopkins University Press, September). Tiago Saraiva shows that the Germans began moving in the same direction, under more sinister auspices, in Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism (The MIT Press, September): “specially bred wheat and pigs became important elements in the institutionalization and expansion of fascist regimes …. Pigs that didn’t efficiently convert German-grown potatoes into pork and lard were eliminated.” A different sociopolitical matrix governs the contemporary American “pasture-raised pork market,” of which Brad Weiss offers an ethnographic account in Real Pigs: Shifting Values in the Field of Local Pork (Duke University Press, August).

And finally -- for this week, anyway -- there is the ecological and biomedical impact of the free-ranging creatures described in Peter P. Marra and Chris Santella’s Cat Wars: The Devastating Consequences of a Cuddly Killer (Princeton, September). Besides the fact that cats kill “birds and other animals by the billions” in the United States, the authors warn of “the little-known but potentially devastating public health consequences of rabies and parasitic Toxoplasma passing from cats to humans at rising rates.” The authors also maintain that “a small but vocal minority of cat advocates has campaigned successfully for no action in much the same way that special interest groups have stymied attempts to curtail smoking and climate change.” I write this while wearing a T-shirt that reads “Crazy Cat Guy” but will be the first to agree that the problem here is primarily human. There’s a reason it’s called the Anthropocene and not the Felinocene.

A number of other themes and topics from university-press fall books offering might bear mentioning in another column, later this summer. With luck, the pool of candidates will grow in the meantime; we’ll see if any new trends crystallize out in the process.