trinketizationRustom Bharucha reports that the Progressive Writers Association has its origins, according to ‘its most distinguished founder- member Mulk Ray Anand’ in ‘the expatriate community of India students in London, who had charted their first manifesto as “progressive” writers in 1935 in a Chinese restaurant’ (Bharucha 1998:29)
Bharucha, Rustom 1998 In the Name of the Secular: Contemporary Cultural Activision in Inidia Delhi: Oxford UP
For the record… A drab day, in which I have been consigned to routine tasks, like updating my publications list. Gets a little sketchy towards the end because I cannot be listing all the small mags stuff (some of this can be downloaded link to the left, others I’d have to send you, still others need to be scanned by the oompa-loompas one day soon)…
Books (single authored)
1996 The Rumour of Calcutta: Tourism, Charity and the Poverty of Representation. Zed Books, London. ISBN 18649408X
2000 Critique of Exotica: Music, Politics and the Culture Industry London: Pluto Press ISBN 0 7453 1597 6
2004 Bad Marxism: Capitalism and Cultural Studies London: Pluto Press, ISBN0-7453-2266-2
Books (co-authored)
2005 Hybridity and Diaspora, (With Raminder Kaur and Virinder Kalra) London: Sage. ISBN 0-7619-7397-4
Edited books:
1996 Dis-orienting Rhythms: The Politics of the New Asian Dance Music (co-edited with Sanjay Sharma and Ashwani Sharma). Zed Books, London. ISBN 1856494705
1999 Travel Worlds: Journeys in Contemporary Cultural Politics London, (co-edited with Raminder Kaur) Zed books. ISBN 1856495620
2006 Celebrating Transgression: Method and Politics in Anthropology (with Ursula Rao) Oxford: Berghahn. ISBN 1-84545-025-6
2012 Beyond Borders London: Pavement Books ISBN: 978-0-9571470-0-3
Edited Journals:
1987 Melbourne Journal of Politics (with Nick Lane), Department of Political Science, University of Melbourne
1987-1988 Criticism, Heresy and Interpretation – Journal of the Department of Anthropology, University of Melbourne – 3 volumes as editor in chief.
1991 The Consuming Subjects of Education. La Trobe University Education Research Journal
1998 special issue – Postcolonial Studies Vol 1 No 3 – ‘Diasporic Music and politics’. ISSN No. 1368-8790
2000 special issue – Theory, Culture and Society vol 17 (3) – ‘Music and Politics’ ISSN 0263-2763
2005 special section PubliCity in the journal Left Curve USA – a samizdat style insert in this journal containing 30 articles from 19 different countries.
2006 ‘Problematising Global Knowledge, special issue (2 volumes) Theory Culture and Society Vol 23 (2-3) ISSN 0263-2764
2007 the second special section PubliCity in the journal Left Curve USA – a samizdat style insert in this journal containing 12 articles from 9 different countries.
Book Contributions
1991 ‘Strategy, Identity, Writing: An interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’, in Sarah Harasym (ed), The Post-Colonial Critic, (USA) Routledge, New York, pp 35-49. ISBN 0415901707
1996 ‘Introduction’ (with Sanjay Sharma and Ashwani Sharma) in Sanjay Sharma, John Hutnyk and Ashwani Sharma (eds) Dis-orienting Rhythms: The Politics of the New Asian Dance Music Zed Books, London, pp 1-14. ISBN 1856494705
1996 ‘Re-Sounding (Anti)Racism, or Concordant Politics? Revolutionary Antecedents’ (with Virinder Kalra and Sanjay Sharma) in Sanjay Sharma, John Hutnyk and Ashwani Sharma (eds) Dis-orienting Rhythms: The Politics of the New Asian Dance Music Zed Books, London. pp 127-155. ISBN 1856494705
1996 ‘Repetitive Beatings or Criminal Justice?’ in Sanjay Sharma, John Hutnyk and Ashwani Sharma (eds) Dis-orienting Rhythms: The Politics of the New Asian Dance Music Zed Books, London, pp 156-189. ISBN 1856494705
1997 ‘Adorno at Womad: South Asian Crossovers and the Limits of Hybridity-talk’ forthcoming in Werbner, P and Modood, T. (eds.) Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multi-Cultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism, London, Zed books, pp 106-136. ISBN 1856494241.
1999 ‘Argonauts of Western Pessimism: Clifford’s Malinowski’ in Steve Clarke (ed) Travel Writing and Empire: Postcolonial Theory in Transit, London: Zed books pp 45-62. ISBN 1856496287
1999 ‘Introduction’ (with Raminder Kaur) in Raminder Kaur and John Hutnyk (eds) Travel Worlds: Journeys in Contemorary Cultural Politics London, Zed books pp 1-13. ISBN 1856495620
1999 ‘Magical Mystical Tourism’ in Raminder Kaur and John Hutnyk (eds) Travel Worlds: Journeys in Contemorary Cultural Politics London, Zed books pp 94-119. ISBN 1856495620
1999 ‘Semifeudal Cybercolonialism: Technocratic Dreamtime in Malaysia’ in Bosma, J et al (eds.) Readme! Filtered by Nettime: Ascii Culture and the Revenge of Knowledge New York: Autonomedia,. pp 315-321
2000 ‘Capital Calcutta: Coins, Maps, Monuments, Souvenirs and Tourism’ in Bell, D and Haddour, A (eds) City Visions Longman ISBN: 0582327415
2003 ‘Musik für Euro-Maoisten: Über die richtige Behandlung der Widersprüche bei Pop-stars’ in Kunstwerk und Kritik, Jour Fixe Initiative Berling (hg), Munster: Unrast-Verlag pp 111-143
2006 ‘The Dialectics of Here and There: British Asian Communism’ in Ali, Kalra and Sayyid (Eds) A Postcolonial People, Hurst, ISBN: 1850657963
2006 ‘Deathening Silence: The Terms of (Non) Political Commentary’ Basu, D and Lamelle S Eds The Vinyl Ain’t Final: Hip-hop and the Globalisation of Black Popular Culture London: Pluto Press ISBN 978-0745319407
2008 ‘Martin Heidegger Goes to the Movies’ in David Held and Henrietta Moore eds., Culturl Politics in a Global Age: Uncertainty, Solidarity and Innovation, Oxford: One World 112-120 ISBN: 978-1-85168-550-9
2008 ‘Tourism and the Selling of Cultures’ in Robin Anderson and Jonathan Gray eds., Battleground: the Media (2 Vold) vol 2 Westport: Greenwood Press: 513-519 ISBN 978-0-313-34169-4
2009 ‘Translating Appearance: On the First Sentence of Das Kapital’ in Tom Bunyard ed., The Devils Party London CCS pp50-54 ISBN 978-1-4452-1822-9
2010 ‘Hybridity’ in Kim Knott and Sean McLaughlin Diasporas: Concepts, Intersections, Identities London Zed books pp59-62 ISBN 978-1-84277-948-4
2010 (with Laura King) ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Gaius Baltar: Colonialism Reimagined in Battlestar Gallactica’ in Arlo Kemp fed., Breaching the Colonial Contract Springer pp237-250 ISBN978-90-481-3888-3
2011 ‘Pantomime paranoia in London or, ‘lookout he’s behind you!’’ in Peddie (ed) Popular Music and Human Rights, Volume I: British and American Music, London: Ashgate
2011 ‘Undercover Transports’ in Menrath and Schwinghammer eds What Does a Chameleon Look Like? Topographies of Immersion, Cologne: Herbert Von Halem Verlag.
2011 ‘NDTV 24X7, the Hanging Channel: News Media or Horror Show’ in Batabyal, Chowdhry, Gaur et al Indian Mass Media and the Politics of Change, London: Routledge.
2011 ‘Critica de tudo’ in Tatiana Amendola Sanches ed., Estudos Culturais uma abordagem pratica Sao Paulo: Editora Senac pp99-209 ISBN 978-85-396-0141-7
Refereed Papers:
1987 ’The Authority of Style’, Social Analysis, 21:59-79. ISBN 0133977X
1988 ‘Castaway Anthropology: Malinowski’s Tropical Writings’ Antithesis, 2(1):43-56. ISSN 10303839.
1989 ‘Customs Review of Public Culture; The U.S. and Africa in Melbourne’ Public Culture 2(1)Fall: 130-136. ISSN 08992363
1989 ‘Clifford Geertz as a Cultural System’ Social Analysis 25:91-119. ISBN 0133977X
1990 ‘Comparative Anthropology and Evans-Pritchard’s African Photography’ Critique of Anthropology 10(1):81-102
1992 ‘Cinematic Calcutta: Camera Angles on the City’ Agenda Special issue, Dec:68-72 ISSN 10331115
1992 ‘Articulation and Marginalia: Making Spaces for Other Voices in Our Institutions’ New Literatures Review Winter-South:104-116. ISSN 03147495
1993 ‘Calcutta Cipher: travellers and the city’ Social Analysis 32:53-65. ISBN 0133977X
1993 ‘Noir Sociology: Can Academics Map Los Angeles’ Left Curve 17:26-33. ISSN 01601857
1994 ‘Thinking With Berger: Local/Global and Dialogue in Modernity As Exile by Nikos Papastergiadis’, New Literatures Review, 27: 91-103. ISSN 03147495
1996 ‘Media, Research, Politics, Culture’ Critique of Anthropology 16(4):417-428. ISSN 0308275X
1997 (with Virinder Kalra and Sanjay Sharma) ‘Fun^Da^Mental Politics: the New Asian Dance Music and its Revolutionary Antecedents’ Left Curve 21:54-64. ISSN 01601857
1997 ‘derrida@marx.archive’ Space and Culture 2:95-122. ISSN 12063312
1998 (with Virinder Kalra) ‘Music and Politics – introduction to the special section’ Postcolonial Studies, 1(3):335-37. ISSN No. 1368-8790
1998 (with Virinder Kalra) ‘Brimful of Agitation, Appropriation and Authenticity: Madonna’s “Asian Kool”‘ in Postcolonial Studies, 1(3):339-355. ISSN 1368-8790
1998 ‘Clifford’s Ethnographica’ Critique of Anthropology 18(4):339-378. ISSN 0308-275X
1998 ‘Adorno at Womad: South Asian Crossovers and the Limits of Hybridity-talk’ Postcolonial Studies, 1(3):401-426. ISSN 1368-8790
1999 ‘Resettling Bakun: Consultancy, Anthropologists and Development’ Left Curve 23:82-90. ISSN 0160-1857
2000 ‘Hybridity Saves: Authenticity and/or the Critique of Appropriation’ in Amer-Asia 25(3):39-58 ISSN 0044-7471
2000 (with Sanjay Sharma) ‘Music and Politics: Introduction to the Special Section’ in Theory Culture and Society 17(3):57-65 ISSN 0263-2763
2000 ‘Music for Euro-Maoists: On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among Popstars’ in Theory Culture and Society 17(3):141-163 ISSN 0263-2763
2002 ‘Jungle Studies – the State of Anthropology’ in Futures 34(1):15-31 ISSN 0016-3287/01
2002 Tales from the Raj’ in Rethinking Marxism, vol. 13(3-4):119-136, ISSN 0893-5696.
2003 ‘Bataille’s Wars: Surrealism, Marxism, Fascism’ Critique of Anthropology, 23(3):264-288 ISSN 0308-275X
2004 ‘The Chapati Story: How Hybridity as Theory displaced Maoism as Politics in Subaltern Studies’ Contemporary South Asia 12(4)481-491 ISSN 0958-4935
2004 ‘Photogenic Poverty: Souvenirs and Infantilism’ Journal of Visual Culture, 3(1):77-94 ISSN 1470-4129
2005 ‘The Dialectics of European Hip-Hop: Fun^da^mental and the Deathening Silence’ South Asian Popular Culture 3(1):17-32 ISSN 1474-6689
2005 ‘Hybridity’ Ethnic and Racial Studies 28(1):79-102, ISSN 0141-9870
2005 ‘Panoramas of Asia and the Electronic Hearth: Michael Palin’s Connection’ Journal of the Moving Image 4(Nov):32-62
2006 ‘The Dialectic of Here and There: Anthropology ‘At Home’ and British Asian Communism’ Social Identities 11(4):345-361 ISSN 1350-4630
2006 ‘Culture’ main entry for culture section in Theory Culture and Society Vol. 23(2–3): 351–375 23 ISSN 0263-2764
2007. Pantomime Terror Diasporic Music in a Time of War. Journal of Creative Communications, 2(1-2), pp. 123-141.
2011 ‘Critique of Everything’ in Soumen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 36(3)71-75
2012 ‘Beyond Television Studies’ Rountable essay in South Asian History and Culture 3(4):583-590
2012 ‘Sexy Sammie and Red Rosie’? From Burning Books to the War on Terror’, Space and Culture 15.2, pp164-176
2012 ‘Poetry After Guantanamo: M.I.A.’ Social Identities 18.5, pp. 555-572
2012 ‘Contexts for Distraction’ Journal For Cultural Research (Special issue on the August 2011 uprisings in London). DOI:10.1080/14797585.2012.756248
2013 ‘Proletarianization’ in New Formations (special issue on Bernard Stiegler)
other publications, review essays and conference proceedings, magazines etc.
1986 (journal article) ‘Go Tell it on the Mountain: Politics and Knowledge in Ethnography’, Melbourne Journal of Politics, 18:126-141.
1988 (journal article) ‘Lévi-Strauss as a Cultural System: Geertz’s Chapter on Tristes Tropiques’ Criticism, Heresy and Interpretation, vol. 1, No. 1.
1989 (journal article) ‘The Third Body: Black Art on (Re)View in London’ Criticism, Heresy and Interpretation vol. 3
1990 (conference papers) ‘Introductory Essay’ The Consuming Subjects of Education La Trobe.
1992 (journal article) ‘Photogenic Calcutta- Instamatic Anthropology’ In Media (India) July.
1992 (journal article) ‘Writing for the Space Cadets: reviewing the urban west’ Melbourne Journal of Politics 21:151-167
1992 (conference publication) ‘Value for Money: Giving the $ign to the Bourgeoisie’ IIR Higher Education Summit, Sydney, Australia.
1993 (conference publication) ‘Photogenic Calcutta’ in Postmodern Cities, University of Sydney Department of Architecture and Urban Design.
1993 (conference publication) ‘Technological Dreamtime: the advanced technology park for Redfern’ in Postmodern Cities University of Sydney Department of Architecture and Urban Design.
1994 (conference review) ‘African Research Futures: Post-Colonialism and Identity’ Anthropology Today 10(4):24-25.
1995 (journal article) ‘Writing Calcutta: Travelling with Lévi-Strauss and Gunter Grass’ Kolkata 2000, (India) June pp 31-47.
1996 (Web E-Journal) Review of Bill Martin Humanism and its Aftermath: The Shared Fate of Deconstruction and Politics New Jersey, Humanities Press 1995 in Sociological Research Online 1(4) <www.socresonline.org.uk/1/4/hutnyk.html>
1996 (book review) Martin Stokes (ed) 1994 Ethnicity, Identity and Music: The Musical Construction of Place, Anthropological Notebooks: (Društvo Anthropologov Slovenije) 11(1)146-148.
1997 (occasional paper) ‘derrida@marx.archive’ Manchester Papers in Social Anthropology No 6, 49pages
1997 (book review) Les Back 1996 New Ethnicities and Urban Culture: racisms and multiculture in young lives, Sociological Review, 45(1)
1997 (book review) Cohen, 1996 Cambridge Survey of World Migration in Race and Class, Vol 38, N0 3
1997 (book review) Spivak 1996 The Spivak Reader in Self, Agency and Society 1(2):178-180.
1998 (book review) Ang 1996 Living Room Wars: Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World in Sociological Review 46(3):594-598.
1999 (web E-journal article, with Anna Har) ‘Languid, tropical, monsoonal time?: net-activism and hype in the context of South East Asian politics’ in SASKI No. 6. http://www.saksi.com/jul99/huynyk.htm
2000 (web E-Journal article) ‘Culture Move: On Asian Dub Foundation’ in Ghadar: the Forum of Indian Leftists 4(1), May 1 2000 www.proxsa.org/resources/ghadar/v4n1/edit.html
2000 ‘Complicity’ catalogue essay for ‘Assembly’ RCA/Goldsmiths
2000 (debate publication) ‘The Right to Difference is a Fundamental Human Right: Against the Motion’ contribution to GDAT debate No 10, with Corry, S, Jean-Klein, I, Wilson, R, ed Wade, P. The Right to Difference is a Fundamental Human Right University of Manchester, pp40-52 ISBN 0-9527837-3-8. Reprinted in Left Curve No 23, 2001
2001 (journal article in translation) ‘Dog-Tribe’ – Swedish translation of a chapter from Critique of Exotica in Glanta 3. 2001.
2001 (Magazine article, with Virinder Kalra), ‘Postcolonial London’ Seminar, (India).
2005 (journal report) ‘Show Neon Fashion’ – Left Curve ‘Publicity’ section article. Volume 29: 106-107. (California)
2005 (Encyclopaedia entry) ‘Calcutta’ in Vinay Lal and Ashis Nandy eds The Future of Knowledge and Culture New Delhi: Penguin pp 20-25 ISBN 0-67-005813-0
2007 (Magazine article) ‘The politics of Cats’ in Stimulus Respond – e-journal – http://www.stimulusrespond.com
2010 Catalogue essay for Steel Sculptures – Sokari Douglas Camp, London: Douglas Camp Pubs
forthcoming books:
2013 Pantomime Terror: Diasporic Music and the Politics of Fear. 60,000 monograph,with Zero
2013-14 Colour TV: B&W Life, 45,000 word monograph on culture and film.
2013 Communists Must Write 80,000 word book of essays with Minor Compositions
2013 (?) Trinketization
2014 (?) Capital and Film
a text from 25 years ago – my first published piece on anthropology, metaphor, writing, fakery, rhetoric and circularity, and a bit about Morocco, names, and Rabinow.
just out in South Asian History and Culture – Message me to get a pdf sent (first 50 will get one):
John Hutnyk (2012): ‘Beyond Television Studies‘, South Asian History and Culture, 3:4, 583-590
With Jon Sack and Ewa Jasiewicz, authors of the graphic chapter in our Beyond Borders book – out now: pavementbooks.com/beyondborders… 
http://fb.me/Z9Ck13zL
Just found this in the 2010/1 issue of Third Text on Cinema in the Muslim World. Worth a second look:
I believe the text is free to download/read online, via this link here. Thanks for the shout out credit Ali Nobil Ahmad, gonna read the rest of the issue asap.
a piece on MIA, now available as a pre-print citable version on email request (first 50 only). Shoot me a line to get the code.
a piece on MIA, now available as a pre-print citable version on email request (first 50 only). Shoot me a line to get the code.
Book Reviews from the Big Crabapple that is NX, London.
This is a haphazard collection of reviews old and new. Of course we are not competing with any of the other fine book review rags out there from other towns like New York or London, it’s just that…
We will accept contributions where they are by our friends and comrades, where they are really good and so long as they are approved by the unbiased (non parliamentary, ultra-leftist, no touching faith in reformism or the State) editors. We reserve the right to reject (and hunt down, huff and puff, and burn your house etc.) any sexist, racist or pro-capitalist comments or contributions. You know the drill.
We are for reading, for reading in context, for making reading a part of the struggle to transform lives and life – looking for ways to transmute the nasty slime of Capital into something else, something better, whatever it takes. If it takes book reviews too, then here we go. Culture Industry Reconsidered! Film reviews too people – high-brow elitist theory-heavy auto-reflexive hyper-critique inclusive.
Email the editor-ish (you will see, editorial here is a self-organising collective process) John.Hutnyk [at] gold.ac.uk
Three near overlapping events in thee next 10 days for Centre for Cultural Studies people at Goldsmiths:
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Write Now! BER-CPH-LON PhD Symposium (Feb 9-11 2012)
You have to, you want to, you need to Write Now!
But how do you publish?
In an atmosphere of loneliness, alienation, rejection, competition, anxiety, hierarchy, nepotism and jealousy, how does the “early career scholar” (re)negotiate the imperative to produce? Given the increases demands of the academic publishing industry, how can we avoid labouring under illusions, false promises and unrealistic expectations?
And yet the pleasures of the text, new platforms and opportunities for publishing and sharing, are there before us.
Open to Goldsmiths PhD candidates of all departments.
Practical aspects of working towards a book publication will be a core part of the symposium.
Bring your ideas, texts, criticism.
no charge (supported by the Goldsmiths Annual Fund).
.
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Deleuze, Philosophy, Transdisciplinarity
Goldsmiths, 10th-12th February
http://deleuzetransdiscipline.wordpress.com/
Plenary Speakers: Jean-Claude Dumoncel, Eric Alliez, John Mullarkey, Laura Cull, Anne Sauvagnargues
Invited Speakers: Giuseppe Bianco, Andrew Goffey, Marjorie Gracieuse, Tatsuya Higaki, Christian Kerslake, Iain MacKenzie, Stamatia Portanova, Nathan Widder
Organised by the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths University of London (Masa Kosugi) and the Faculty of Humanities and School of European culture and Languages, the University of Kent (Guillaume Collett)
We are now entering a new phase of Deleuze studies which seeks to understand the specificity of Deleuze’s mode of philosophising. This is necessary, firstly in order to establish an account of his work’s developments and ruptures which is neither reductive nor partisan and secondly, to be able to better situate Deleuze within the context of contemporary thought. While the concept of immanence has recently been seized upon as the way of measuring Deleuze’s philosophical development (Kerslake, 2009; Beistegui, 2010), this conference would like to shift the focus to another yet closely interrelated problematic, which is the concept of philosophy and its essential relation to transdisciplinarity.
What precisely does Deleuze understand by the term ‘philosophy’? In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze states that ‘Philosophy merges with ontology, but ontology merges with the univocity of Being’ (p. 205, Continuum, 2004). Does philosophy have privileged access to a univocal Being that is itself non-philosophical, and which subsumes not only philosophy but also philosophy’s preconditions – what The Logic of Sense refers to as the ‘sciences’ of logic, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis, as well as art? Does Deleuze and Guattari’s re-formulation of this problematic in What is Philosophy? contradict the earlier Deleuze when it appears to posit a more extrinsic relation – or interference – between philosophy, science, and art, all three of which open up to Chaos, which they claim is equally distinct from the preconditions of philosophy, science and art (nonphilosophy, nonscience, nonart)? Are we to understand Deleuze’s concept of philosophy as essentially and inherently transdisciplinary, and if so, how? What is at stake here is the possibility of establishing a ‘common ethico-aesthetic discipline’ (Guattari, Continuum, 2000) and the role of philosophy in such a project.
We aim to have a wide range of papers converging on the concept of philosophy found in Deleuze’s work and dialoguing with the problems we have alluded to. Suggested paper topics include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Deleuze and the history of philosophy: his methodology, his conception of the history of philosophy, his readings of specific philosophers and thinkers
- The place of science and logic in Deleuze’s philosophy
- The place of art in Deleuze’s philosophy
- Deleuze and non-philosophy, and the role of the pre/post-philosophical in his philosophy
- Shifts in Deleuze’s readings of particular philosophers, and more generally in Deleuze’s own concept of philosophy, throughout his career
- The critical assessment of Guattari’s influence on Deleuze’s philosophy
Registration is free but please contact us (masakosugi@gmail.com, guillaume.collett@hotmail.co.uk) early if you would like to attend the conference.
**The event is supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the School of European Culture and Languages and Faculty of Humanities, the University of Kent, the Centre for Cultural Studies Goldsmiths, and the Graduate School, Goldsmiths, University of London **
Anthropologist Michael Taussig talks about the relationship between writing, culture and time.
“I began began doing fieldwork in 1969. I have returned every year” says Mick Taussig. His writing has spanned a wide range of issues ranging from the commercialization of peasant agriculture to a study of exciting substance loaded with seduction and evil, gold and cocaine, in a montage-ethnography of the Pacific Coast of Colombia. His most recent book ‘I Swear I Saw This’ (University of Chicago Press, 2011) records reflections on the fieldwork notebooks he kept through forty years of travels in Colombia. Taussig considers the fieldwork notebook as a type of modernist literature and the place where writers and other creators first work out the imaginative logic of discovery.
http://www.gold.ac.uk/calendar/?id=5053
Location: LG02, New Academic Building
Cost: Free – all are welcome, no booking required
Website: Part of the Real Time Research project
Department: Sociology
Time: 27 January 2012, 18:00 – 19:30
Two quotes from Theories of Surplus Value Vol 1.
‘a writer is a productive laborer not insofar as he produces ideas, but insofar as he enriches the book-seller who publishes his work, or insofar as he is a wage-labourer of a capitalist entrepreneur’
This article is one in an issue becoming quite the popular. Having published a commissioned (unpaid) article with Elsevier – it was called ‘Jungle Studies’, and after proofreading they replaced the phrase ‘For fuck’s sake’ with ‘For God’s sake’ – I know, there are several levels of gah! – I am keen to point out that many publishers are not scum and open access is making some headway, but…
Good material for our forthcoming workshop on publishing and alternative formats for ‘Early Career Researchers’, and I’ve something else coming out on the topic soon.
Read the comments on this piece too – here.
The obscene profits of commercial scholarly publishers
January 13, 2012
In an article that many of you will now have seen, Heather Morrison demonstrated the enormous profits of STM (Scientific, Technical and Medical) scholarly publishers. The figures are taken from her in-progress dissertation which in turn cites an article in The Economist. It all checks out. I emphasise this because I found the figures so hard to believe. Here they are again: profits as a percentage of revenue for commercial STM publishers in 2010 or early 2011:
- Elsevier: £724m on revenue of £2b — 36%
- Springer‘s Science+Business Media: £294m on revenue of £866m — 33.9%
- John Wiley & Sons: $106m on revenue of $253m — 42%
- Academic division of Informa plc: £47m on revenue of £145m — 32.4%
So it’s evident that profits on the order of 35% are pretty typical for commercial STM publishers, and that Elsevier’s figures are not an aberration. Not only that, but all four of these companies’ profits as a proportion of revenue are still increasing — by 2.4%, 4%, 13% and 3.3% respectively. The U.K. Office of Fair Trading noted back in 2002 that “the overall profitability of commercial STM publishing is high, not only by comparison to ‘non-profit’ journals (which is not surprising), but also by comparison to other commercial journal publishing”.
I wanted to be sure that I was assessing this fairly, so I looked through Elsevier’s annual reports for the last nine years — happily, they make them available, if not particularly easy to find. What I found is that they have been consistently bringing in profits in the region of 33% throughout the last decade. Specifically:
- 2002: £429m profit on £1295m revenue – 33.18%
- 2003: £467m profit on £1381m revenue – 33.82%
- 2004: £460m profit on £1363m revenue – 33.75%
- 2005: £449m profit on £1436m revenue – 31.25%
- 2006: £465m profit on £1521m revenue – 30.57%
- 2007: £477m profit on £1507m revenue – 31.65%
- 2008: £568m profit on £1700m revenue – 33.41%
- 2009: £693m profit on £1985m revenue – 34.91%
- 2010: £724m profit on £2026m revenue – 35.74%
(I have not been through the same exercise for Springer, Wiley or Informa, but there is no reason to expect that the results would be any different.)
What does it all mean?
Yes, publishers have a right to make a living. Not only that, but they have a right to make as big a profit as the market can bear (though of course when they form a cartel that distorts the market monopolistically, that changes things).
But here’s what it means to scientists that Elsevier’s profit is 35.74% of revenue:
- When you pay $37.95 to download a PDF from an Elsevier journal, $13.56 of that goes straight into the pockets of Elsevier shareholders.
- When you pay $3000 to have your submission to an Elsevier journal appear as open access, $1072.20 of that goes straight into the pockets of Elsevier shareholders.
- When your library pays $1.7m for a bundle of Elsevier-journal subscriptions, $607,580 of that goes straight into the pockets of Elsevier shareholders.
- When you or your library pays Elsevier $23783 for any reason, that is enough for them fund Representative Caroline Maloney’s $8500 bribe to co-sponsor the evil Research Works Act, out of their profits alone.
You just have to ask yourself whether that’s where you want your money going.
And though this workshop is open only to Goldsmiths Berlin FU and Copenhagen Doctoral School PhDs (its a training workshop) we’d not be adverse to hearing from interested persons. So here is the cfp:
Turning our lives into sausage factory grunt work and mere value extraction. This is all too common. Before electronic rights became a standard in publishing contracts I used to scratch out that part (eg for my Calcutta book, and for ‘Dis-Orienting Rhythms’ – only the latter is online for free – see sidebar to download – since scanning the typeset pages of ‘Rumour of Calcutta’ is so far beyond me. Later books other people have made available, and I point to them where I can – also sidebar). Increasingly the clumsy copyright assignment thing seems an issue to fight since there is something truly obscene about making people who work for free for large journals, where those journals are owned and run as sausage factory style conglomerates. Having to sign away ‘rights’ – as if that really was the key concern (not all journals are like this and open access is a real boon) is something tenured profs can take or leave, but anyone else in need of a publication for validation and employment prospects, ever diminishing, has to swallow it whole. Or do they? Sometimes I’ve just forgotten on purpose to send in the rights form – but then some poorly paid staffer, or even unpaid intern, has to chase it up. So I am watching this little episode, described by Steve Shaviro below, since it is a further fold on the sorry tale. Follow the post to the original at the Pinocchio Theory site and watch the comments to see if there is a resolution. Good luck Steve.
Work for Hire?
Here we go again. I was asked to sign a contract for an essay I have written, which is scheduled to appear in an edited collection. Let’s leave aside the fact that I wrote the essay — it was solicited for this collection — in summer 2010, and yet it will not appear in print until 2013. I think that the glacial pace of academic publishing is a real problem. But that is not what is bothering me at the moment. The contract that I was asked to sign, so that my essay could appear in an edited volume published by Oxford University Press, contained the following clause:
WORK-FOR-HIRE. The Contributor acknowledges that the Publisher has commissioned the Contribution as a work-for-hire, that the Publisher will be deemed the author of the Contributior as employer-for-hire, and that the copyright in the Contribution will belong to the Publisher during the initial and any renewal or extended period(s) of copyright. To the extent, for any reason, that the Contribution or any portion thereof does not qualify or otherwise fails to be a work-for-hire, theContributor hereby assigns to the Publisher whatever right, title and interest the Contributor would otherwise have in the Contribution throughout the world.
I found this entirely unbelievable, and unacceptable. Since when has original academic writing been classified as “work-for-hire”? It is possible, I suppose, that things like writing encyclopedia essays might be so categorized; but I have never, in my 30 years in academa, encountered a case in which primary scholarship or criticism was so classified. Is this something widespread, but which I simply haven’t heard about? I’d welcome information on this score from people who know more about the academic publishing situation than I do. But it seems to me, at first glance, that the Press is upping the ante in terms of trying to monopolize “intellectual property,” by setting up an arrangement that both cuts off the public from access and denies any rights to the henceforth-proletarianized “knowledge worker” or producer. I am unwilling to countenance such an abridgement of my ability to make the words that I have written more freely available.In any case, I wrote back to the Press as follows:I am unwilling to sign the Contributor’s Agreement for my submission to the Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics as it is currently worded. In particular, I find section 2, defining my contribution as work-for-hire, completely objectionable. I entirely reject the notion that original academic work of this sort can be defined as work-for-hire. I think that this is demeaning to academic scholarship and disrespectful of intellectual labor.
Section 2 of the contract further stipulates that even if “the Contribution or any portion thereof does not qualify or otherwise fails to be a work-for-hire, the Contributor hereby assigns to the Publisher whatever right, title and interest the Contributor would otherwise have in the Contribution throughout the world.” I find this objectionable as well. Even if my contribution to the volume is exempted from being considered work-for-hire, I am unwilling to sign over my own rights to the publisher in this unlimited way. In particular, I insist upon retaining, among other rights, the right to make my contribution available for download on my own website and the right to include this contribution at some later date as part of a self-authored publication.
I guess we will see what happens. I hope the Press backs down and offers more reasonable terms. If that doesn’t happen, I will simply have to withdraw my contribution from the edited volume. At some point, the essay will appear on my website for free download — whether because the publisher backs down and permits me to do this, or whether I give up on print publication.Not getting the essay into print will mean that I won’t get the credit (or a line in my Vita) for the publication of an article that I am, in fact, rather proud of. This kind of credit matters in academia — salaries, among other things, are based on it. But as a full Professor with tenure I am in a rather privileged position: I can afford to lose the credit. The same is not the case for academics in more precarious positions — who might well be forced to sign away their rights in cases like this, because their jobs heavily depend upon their publication record, and one additional line on their Vita might make a major difference.This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 11th, 2012 at 11:37 am and is filed underPersonal, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
The fine folk at the Finnish Anthropology Society asked me to respond to Jason Toynbee’s piece ‘The Critical Accomplice’ (issue 3/2011) where he started out by saying: ‘In this piece I focus upon anthropology’s close ally in the contemporary social sciences, cultural studies. I argue that its core concepts and drives – some increasingly shared by anthropologists are in need of serious critique’ (p60). Jason’s text is well worth a read, but I suspect it would be a copyright violation to repost it here. I will write him to see. In the meantime, you can read my response, which is an oblique one – a re-versioning of a piece written for Tarcisco and previously only available in Portuguese.
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A text on NDTV 24×7.
NDTC x 24 Hanging Channel - click for pdf scan.
* A study of 24 hour Delhi based news channel NDTV’s reporting of the case of Mohammed Afzal Guru, framed for the Dec 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament and sentenced to hang. This chapter is 9000 words and was published at the start of 2011. Based on substantial television research, viewing and reading or reports, screen analysis of station idents etc. Was originally a conference keynote at a Asian Media conference at SOAS and given once as a talk at the prestigious National Indian Research Institute Shimla.
