This is the second in a three-part series about Duke University Press.
“Brodhead sounds like the new Spencer Bassett.”
After the events of the past couple of weeks, few people on campus would bat an eyelid at this comparison, proposed by Grant Farred, associate professor of literature, in response to President Richard Brodhead’s handling of the controversy over the Palestine Solidarity Movement conference. It has been said before: of Brodhead, of former President Nan Keohane and of many others in the long line of administrators that came before them.
Although the celebrated Bassett Affair is continually dragged out into public consciousness, buffed to a shine and refitted for battle with every specter of a threat to academic freedom on campus, the controversy’s original medium remains largely unacknowledged by such ritual.
Yet the South Atlantic Quarterly has quietly sustained the tradition of Bassett’s famous daring. Founded by Professor of History John Spencer Bassett in 1901, the Duke University Press journal has been a bit radical since its inception. Bassett launched it just two years later into a flurry of controversy when he printed a challenge to Southern complacency in the face of racial injustice. “There’s always been a cool edge to the journal,” said Farred, the current general editor.
Farred lounges precariously among books and posters of Muhammad Ali and overgrown plants, feet varyingly perched up on chairs or desk edges, shifting and spinning restlessly as he talks. The casual jocularity with which he converses in his office gives little warning of the dense tangle of technical terminology and abstruse allusions that make his introduction to SAQ’s latest issue, “After the Thrill Is Gone: A Decade of Post-Apartheid South Africa,” a challenging read for a layman.
The journal itself closely resembles its artistic director in character. For a publication with an editorial board composed almost entirely of literature department professors, SAQ at times leans heavily on theory. Yet the journal—allowed a little more edge because it is not peer-reviewed—manages to cover a much wider spectrum than postmodern narratology.
Published only in special issues with a rotating crop of one or two editors per issue, the publication emulates its parent department in wide interdisciplinary interest. “It has this amazing origin-myth story [which] gives it a mystical and powerful history,” said John Jackson, assistant professor of cultural anthropology and editor of a forthcoming issue, “Racial Americana.”
Setting its radar to the analysis of cultural phenomena of all sorts and sizes, SAQ continues to focus often on discourse about race and ethnicity, from an issue entitled “Palestine America” and one concerning the dual nature of Turkish culture to broader expositions on human rights. Occasionally, however, the journal allows itself an inquiring divergence or two into enchantment and the afterlife of romanticism—art for art’s sake. Yet Farred takes pride in the fact that only one “general issue” has been published during his tenure as general editor.
“I’ve worked really hard to make sure that it becomes more a national and international journal,” he said.
SAQ strives to reach a readership equally diverse in background. Though the journal is certainly a valuable resource for professionals in the field, for the most part, it is accessible to any astute, well-educated reader—for example, a Duke undergraduate, said Mandy Dailey-Berman, Duke Press advertising and sales coordinator. She noted the drastic student discount offered by the Press on all of its journals.
“[We are] actively trying to cultivate not just audiences in the academy, but more of a general audience as well,” Jackson said.
In many ways, Bassett’s continuing legacy remains an intimate affair. SAQ maintains its edge by maintaining its unique format—special issues, each on a different topic, each, to some extent, the brainchild of its individual editors. Yet such a methodology requires a vast network of intellectual contacts and a good bit of footwork on the part of its editors. “Generally it requires me to beg and hustle,” Farred said of his job as general editor. “I feel like Pete Rose or something.”
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