When I finished my doctorate and began my teaching career more than two decades ago, I wouldn't have predicted that editorial work would turn out to become so important to me. Early on I recognized that periodical print culture was central to the literary and political movements that I was interested in studying, above all the Harlem Renaissance and Négritude, and as I began to trace the intersections, correspondences, and discrepancies between those circuits of African diasporic culture, it seemed obvious to me that newspaper, journal, and anthology editors, along with translators—all the sorts of intellectuals who “nurture[d] the inconspicuous forms” of literature “that fit its influence in active communities”—were as instrumental in the making of these movements as the authors of the towering books of the tradition.Footnote ¹ If diasporic consciousness—the conviction of and investment in the notion of a shared racial background and political destiny among peoples of African descent—is produced most powerfully in print, in no small degree because of the labor of these facilitators, conduits, and compilers, then editorial work is a special sort of social dance, one of the key ways that “discourse creates the social space through which it moves,” and thus a means of conjuring publics through the polyvocality of periodical form.Footnote ²

Black editors have always been highly conscious of the “public-forming dimensions” of their labor.Footnote ³ The Martinican Paulette Nardal, the first Black woman to earn a graduate degree at the Sorbonne, was devout, cultivated, and disinclined to overt political activism, but she recognized that her work as the founding editor of the short-lived La revue du monde noir in the early 1930s was itself a radical political intervention: as she told an interviewer years later, “réunir tant de gens autour de moi, c’était ma façon de lutter contre le colonialisme. . . . Pourquoi ne pas rassembler les noirs du monde entier?” (“assembling so many people around me was my way of struggling against colonialism. . . . Why not gather all the Negroes in the entire world?”; Grollemund 71; my trans.; see also Edwards and Gianoncelli 28).

Part of what made editorial work seem like not only something to study but something to participate in myself was that I was struck by the degree to which so many of the great writers of the African diasporic canon have also been visionary editors: from Frederick Douglass with the North Star, to Pauline Hopkins with the Colored American Magazine, to W. E. B. Du Bois with The Crisis and Phylon, to Hubert Harrison with The Voice and The Negro World, to Richard Wright and Dorothy West with Challenge, to C. L. R. James with International African Opinion, to Aimé Césaire and Suzanne Césaire with Tropiques, to Ralph Ellison and Angelo Herndon with Negro Quarterly, to Kamau Brathwaite with Savacou, to Amiri Baraka with The Cricket, to Edouard Glissant with Acoma, to Nathaniel Mackey with Hambone.

It is still lamentably uncommon for literary scholars to analyze and appreciate the work of editors, to take stock of the time-consuming and energy-draining labor of publishing a periodical, what in 1847 the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison—perturbed by the prospect that Douglass was planning to found his own paper and pull back from his highly visible career as an antislavery lecturer—memorably described as the “cares, drudgery and perplexities of a publishing life” (qtd. in Foner 78): the daily bureaucratic grind; the scramble for funding and distribution; the prospecting for contributors; the pursuit of qualified, judicious, and constructive manuscript reviewers; the delicate prodding of authors with suggestions for revisions; the massaging of fragile if hefty contributor egos; the arrangement of various voices in the production of a new book-length collection every few months. My colleague David Scott, the founding editor of the pivotal Caribbean studies journal Small Axe, calls it “journal work,” by which I take him to suggest not just the enabling attention and coordinating vision of editing but moreover the full “infrastructural care” that goes into producing a periodical of any sort (Fielder and Senchyne; see also Josephs).

To call it “journal work” is a reminder, first of all, that working on a periodical has to do with a particular temporality. It is not just that the seriality of print culture represents a periodicity of intervention, an open-ended rhythm of recurrence, one issue after another, at three- or four-month intervals, characterized by a built-in time lag—a “gap between idea and event” (Tate 47)—that can seem deliberate at best and glacial at worst in the rapid-response climate of the Internet age. It is also, more bluntly, that the seemingly leisurely pace of putting out a triannual or a quarterly is in fact not at all intermittent but instead, well, journalière, as one says in French: an ongoing, day-to-day labor in which publishing a journal means working constantly and simultaneously on two or three issues at different stages of production (conceptualization, solicitation, review, revision, copyediting, page proofs).

At the same time, the formulation “journal work” strikes me as a way of insisting that even when they are “one-man operations”—to allude to Mackey's description of his own journal, Hambone, placing it in a long history of little magazines geared to counter the weight of institutional and disciplinary authority “with a valorization of individual energy, idiosyncratic vision, and centrifugal or polycentric judgment and address” (Mackey 245, 246)—still journals are always collaborative endeavors: “the collective constitution of an imagined moral-intellectual community” (Scott vii).

The most important work of an editor often takes place out of view or in the wings, too. It is a matter of the way one constructs a mise-en-scène for other voices as much as anything one might say oneself. In trying to learn how to read the periodicals I was studying, I strove to become sensitive to this sort of behind-the-scenes work, which I realized had to be understood as a specialized intellectual activity in its own right. As Antonio Gramsci wrote in the 1930s about the work of newspaper editors: “the ability of the professional intellectual skillfully to combine induction and deduction, to generalize, to infer, to transport from one sphere to another a criterion of discrimination, adapting it to new conditions, etc. is a ‘specialty’” rather than simply a matter of “common sense” (128). Nor can it be equated with scholarly production in general; obviously editing a journal is not the same thing as writing a journal article.

The specialized task of editorial practice is to maintain and even to guard jealously what Scott describes as the “internally generative source of values and preoccupations” of a journal's “project” (ix). But when he adds that the project of a journal changes over time “organically, unevenly, out of an agonistic relation between what you can make and what you have found,” Scott is alluding to the art of editing (ix–x). If as he explains, “a project never knows itself in advance” and comes to recognize its parameters only in the ongoing and never-finished process of serial publication (ix), then the supple “listening” that allows the journal project to be reshaped through the “receptivity to new kinds of work, new kinds of voices” happens only in the active process of editing (x).

Scott also highlights a particular “ethos” that animates journal work: “a reflexive spirit of intellectual receptivity and generosity” that characterizes the sensibility of the best editors (vii). He writes: “What journal work entails, above all, is less the ability to identify excellence, as such, than the cultivation of a capacity for attunement to the work of others, and a responsive ability to shelter and enable perspectives on common and uncommon themes that do not necessarily align with, indeed, that sometimes willfully diverge from, one's own” (vii). The term “journal work” is perhaps too vague and generic to capture the subtlety of an editorial ethos in this sense, which requires a constantly recalibrated mix of something like obstinacy (in one's commitment to the “source” of the journal's project) on the one hand, and humility on the other. For the editor's task is to manage the self-definition of that source, which happens only through its contact with an outside, with the unfamiliar and the new. In other words, the project is disclosed only through the “conversation” that is serially and formally constellated in the interplay and discrepance among the multiple individual texts published in the journal—a conversation that must come to suggest its own center of gravity, as it were, while remaining open to the entrance of new voices that inevitably shift that center.

If receptivity is clearly a matter of the ways the editor or editorial board accommodates unsolicited manuscript submissions, it is also a matter of assemblage: the ways editing involves the active shaping of that conversation through the journal's carefully curated “disposition of space,” the deliberate order and arrangement of the contents to suggest certain kinds of juxtaposition or convergence.Footnote ⁴ One might say that the art of editing is thus also an art of orchestration. And of course—in a manner that feels increasingly ironic or even anachronistic in an age when the predominant mode of reading journals has become downloading PDFs of single articles found by keyword searches on databases—the editor's unit of composition (the scale on which that conversation is formalized) is inherently the individual issue.

What drew me in? What tempted me, an untenured assistant professor, when my colleagues on the Social Text collective asked me to consider serving as coeditor? I had an instinctive inclination toward the “collective dimension” of scholarship (Alonso, “Editor's Column” [2003] 1235): first a hunch, then a leap, then a habit (ingrained in muscle memory), then a conviction of the social foundation of any and all intellectual work, and a deep aversion to the myth of monadic authorship. It was a matter of sensibility, too, I'm sure, rooted in what might be called a predilection for the backstage arts. Not quiescence, not timidity, but an attraction to a sort of voluble reticence—an inclination to speak through the cultivation and arrangement of other voices.Footnote ⁵ Through what the musician Butch Morris would call “conduction,” in other words: the delicate and volatile work of intuiting, guiding, and being guided by the “motive power” of an ensemble, in an open-ended convening or forum (Douglass, Life and Times 327).Footnote ⁶

I suspect that my own editorial trajectory is unique in that I have gone from serving for a decade as the coeditor of Social Text, a journal run by a multidisciplinary editorial collective, to my current position as the editor of PMLA, the august flagship journal of the main professional organization devoted to the study of language and literature in the United States. Like some of its peers in the cohort of scholarly journals founded in the 1970s (including October, Diacritics, New German Critique, Critical Inquiry, Radical History Review, and Feminist Studies), Social Text deliberately adopted a collective editorial structure in which decisions about submissions and issue contents would be decided by an affiliated group of scholars from different fields who shared an ongoing political commitment to a particular, if shifting, approach to the analysis of culture and society. The collective's open, shared, sometimes contentious editorial work was, and remains, rooted in an explicit rejection of the epistemological presuppositions of traditional disciplinary “blind” peer review. (The two coeditors are responsible for leading the editorial collective, but they do not serve as editors in chief in a hierarchical decision-making structure.) PMLA, in contrast, maintains a rigorous standard of so-called double-blind peer review, in which the identity of authors submitting work for publication is concealed from peer reviewers and from the editor and editorial board throughout the course of the review process.Footnote ⁷

Before I started my tenure as PMLA editor, I assumed that the hostility to anonymous peer review among many of the journals associated with critical theory, cultural studies, and feminism that emerged in the 1970s was a rejection of the long-standing, deeply entrenched protocols of disciplinary gatekeeping in the US academy. It was only when I began to read deeply in the history of PMLA that I came to realize that the history of peer review was more complicated than I thought.

In the mid-1990s, my predecessor Domna Stanton used a number of her editor's columns to revisit debates and lingering misconceptions around the adoption of double-blind peer review in PMLA. As she points out, in the 1970s author-anonymous peer review was quite uncommon among academic journals in the humanities. An ACLS survey of professional societies in 1977 found that its use was much more widespread in the social sciences, having been adopted as policy by professional organizations in fields including economics, political science, psychology, sociology, and anthropology (Stanton, “What's in a Name?” 68; Herbert 5).

In the MLA, the push for the adoption of author-anonymous peer review was initiated in the mid-1970s by the Commission on the Status of Women in the Profession, whose members were disturbed by anecdotal evidence that female scholars had difficulty successfully placing their work at the most prominent journals in the field. In 1974, a cognate group in the American Philological Association (APA), noting that “although the discipline had always had a considerable number of tenured women, disproportionately few were reading papers at the annual meetings,” called for an experiment: the APA would select program participants at its annual convention through anonymous review. The results were dramatic: within two years, the percentage of papers written by women that were accepted for presentation nearly tripled (from 6.7% to 19.5%) (Stanton, “What's in a Name?” 73). Inspired by this evidence, Stanton and other members of the Commission on the Status of Women in the Profession raised the issue in the MLA, focusing on the association's journal. “The results of the APA experiment were my first contact with the incredible dimensions of the problem,” Stanton later explained. “I pushed, using the Commission on the Status of Women as a catalyst, for PMLA to adopt such a policy, but there was enormous resistance—mostly from the editors, who were senior men. It took a lot of lobbying on our part” (qtd. in Herbert 4).

Responding to this pressure, in October 1976 the MLA Executive Council assigned William D. Schaefer, the executive director of the association as well as the editor of PMLA, to undertake a “comprehensive study” of author-anonymous peer review in other scholarly journals (Schaefer, “Anonymous Review” 4). In addition to his thirty-nine-page report, which Schaefer presented to the council in October 1977, PMLA staff members also surveyed the more than two thousand articles that had been submitted to the journal since March 1973.Footnote ⁸ A four-part series titled “PMLA Profile” was published in the MLA Newsletter, compiling a statistical breakdown of submissions by subfield as well as the ranks, institutional homes, and genders of the authors. And the Executive Council agreed to put the topic of anonymous peer review on the agenda for discussion at the MLA Delegate Assembly in December 1977.

Schaefer summarized the statistical findings in a long article in the summer 1978 MLA Newsletter on the pros and cons of anonymous peer review (“Anonymous Review”). The article includes quotations from letters by faculty members around the country, which indicate the deep disagreement in the profession about the potential policy change; more letters were published in the following issue as well under the title “Anonymous Review: The Debate Continues.” Although the breakdown suggested that female scholars at every rank in the profession met lower acceptance rates than their male counterparts, Schaefer found that the evidence was ultimately ambiguous: the figures “tell us a good deal about patterns within our profession,” he wrote, “but the situations those patterns describe are so complex that anyone who believes that bias does or does not exist can find ‘evidence’ to support a particular viewpoint” (“Anonymous Review” 4).Footnote ⁹ In fact, Schaefer admitted, “the issue is . . . one on which I have strong personal feelings.” In his seven years as PMLA editor, after having read “some six thousand reports on nearly three thousand articles,” Schaefer wrote, “I have come to respect—indeed, to cherish—the openness of our present system,” in which the names, rank, and institutional affiliation of authors were not concealed from peer reviewers during the editorial process (5). Some opposed to anonymous review argued that “a reader cannot write a truly helpful report unless the identity of the author is known and the reader has some idea of the author's background,” Schaefer reported, and others contended that “humanistic study, which unlike the sciences attempts not to ‘prove’ but rather to illuminate and to explain, involves and demands an open community of scholars” (5). Schaefer continued:

A few years later, when Stanton penned her own reflection on the way the policy change had come about, she included a withering dismissal of Schaefer's strained mask metaphor, and minced no words in diagnosing what she considered to be the real roots of his high-minded resistance:

In May 1978, the Executive Council called for a formal vote on the question of author-anonymous review at the Delegate Assembly at the December convention (Stanton, “What's in a Name?” 77). The change was approved overwhelmingly, approved by the council in May 1979, and finally implemented in January 1980, initially for a three-year trial period and then as a permanent procedural change (“New Policy”; Stanton, “Editor's Column” [1996] 201).

Since then, PMLA has operated with a strict policy of anonymous peer review for every submitted article, according to which “the author's name is not made known to consultant readers, to members of the Advisory Committee and the Editorial Board, or to the editor” until a final decision is reached whether to accept or decline the submission (Stanton, “Editor's Column” [1997] 191). Although the impetus for the transformation was a feminist concern around potential bias against women authors, Stanton argued in 1982 that

In other words, author-anonymous peer review developed as a political critique of the standards of review in the humanities: the change in policy was “founded on the incontestable premise that the decisions determining who speaks and who remains silent in institutional and professional contexts involve a dialectic of power and thus the ideology of the culture” (74). Looking back at the effects of the change from a more recent vantage point, Michael Bérubé has gone so far as to say that “peer review itself constitutes the real revolution in scholarly communication, the one that gave scholars autonomous intellectual authority over the means of production in their fields” (135).

What I realized when I revisited the history of this major shift was that the founding of Social Text and its cohort of influential 1970s journals of critical theory, cultural studies, and feminist theory was concurrent to this debate within the MLA, and even emerged from the same climate of critique within the association.Footnote ¹⁰ Fredric Jameson, who founded Social Text in 1979 with another scholar of comparative literature, John Brenkman, and the sociologist Stanley Aronowitz, recalls that their initial meetings came about through the work of the Marxist Literary Group (MLG), an affiliated group of the MLA that was organized in 1969 and 1970 to foster the discussion of issues at the intersection of Marxist literary criticism and political theory (Edwards and McCarthy 3). Jameson invited Aronowitz to take part in the plenary session “Toward a Marxist Theory of Culture,” organized by the MLG at the 1976 MLA convention in San Francisco. Their conversations quickly turned to the idea of founding a journal in order to “re-examine the salience of Marxist theory for cultural, political, and social thought” (Aronowitz qtd. in Edwards and McCarthy 4). They were struck by what they took to be a consensus on the intellectual Left at the time that the key venue of political mobilization was no longer the political party. “So we thought,” as Jameson later remembered, “if we're trying to build up a Marxist intellectual movement in this country, we would have to have a journal” (qtd. in Edwards and McCarthy 4). At the December 1977 MLA convention in Chicago—the very same convention where anonymous peer-review was on the agenda for discussion at the Delegate Assembly—Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak hosted a reception where the founding of Social Text was announced.

The four-page prospectus that Jameson, Brenkman, and Aronowitz wrote for the first issue makes it clear that the new journal would take up a set of concerns that went beyond the arena of literary studies. Social Text was subtitled “Theory, Culture, Ideology,” and the editorial statement sketched a bracing array of rubrics the journal intended to cover, including a number of topics (“Everyday Life and Revolutionary Praxis”; “Symbolic Investments of the Political”; “The Texts of History”; “Marxism and the State”; “‘Consumer Society’ and the World System”) that went beyond the purview of literature as a delimited focus of study. This is not to say that the journal abandoned the literary altogether; but in founding Social Text, Aronowitz, Brenkman, and Jameson took up what they considered to be the legacy of the “little magazine,” especially the great modernist periodicals of the early twentieth century that were explicitly cast as the “sponsors of innovation, the gathering places for the ‘irreconcilables’” of literature and political critique (Hoffman et al. v). In other words, the undertaking would be what Perry Anderson calls a “tightrope affair,” striving to maintain “a balance between such disparate fields as the economic and the aesthetic, the sociological and the philosophical . . . under the primacy of the political” (22). Although Social Text quickly came to consider unsolicited submissions, initially this orientation also meant a focus on commissioned work. As Aronowitz put it, this curatorial approach to editing the early issues helped give them “a certain bite, and a certain character”: a recognizable “profile” (Aronowitz et al. 169). Literature remained central, but it was set editorially into new constellations of inquiry, as demonstrated by the juxtaposition between the first two articles in the first issue: Edward Said's devastating “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims” (one of the key sections of his book The Question of Palestine) and Bruce Boone's groundbreaking work on queer poetics, “Gay Language as Political Praxis: The Poetry of Frank O'Hara.”

There is much more to say, of course, about the political and procedural implications of the differences in editorial structure between these two models. There is a stark contrast between the “infrastructure art” (Dimock 10) of editorial review in the journal of a sprawling professional association and the hardscrabble tactics of a periodical run by a small self-selected group of colleagues that was deliberately established in the lineage of what Ezra Pound long ago evocatively called the “impractical or fugitive magazine” (702), initially relying for its production costs on contributions from members of the collective, meager subscription sales, and small state grants. In the years before the journal was granted an editorial office at Rutgers University in 1991 and then signed a publication contract with Duke University Press in 1992, the hard road of institutional independence and the eschewal of a grounding in disciplinarity had consequences for the functioning of Social Text at every level, from the journal's DIY approach to copyediting, desktop publishing, and envelope licking to the occasionally scattered review process itself. One former coeditor, Toby Miller, recalls that a friend once received a rejection letter from Social Text

Although the editorship of PMLA is a “democratic and collaborative enterprise” rather than “the solo performance of an imperial authority, someone like the legendary ‘Mr. Shawn,’ whose word at the New Yorker was reputedly the beginning and the end” (Stanton, “Editor's Column” [1993] 9), it is nonetheless a different galaxy from an editorial collective where submissions are discussed openly and voted on by the entire group. In the Social Text model, what is shared among members of the collective is not disciplinary affiliation but instead a commitment to what the founding editors called “the Marxist framework” (Jameson et al. 3), understood as a “tendency” rather than a “programme”: an open-ended set of problematics and a commitment to dialectical thought and historical perspective rather than a dogma.Footnote ¹¹

One way to summarize the difference would be to say that in the PMLA model, the discipline itself is what is continually put into question and renegotiated. As another former PMLA editor, Carlos Alonso, once observed, the “preoccupation with what constitutes the qualities of a successful PMLA article is in fact never settled in the mind of a board member” (qtd. in Stanton, “Editor's Column” [1995] 194). On the contrary, this question is what animates the entire multistage review process, which at its best functions as a sort of “ideal seminar” that is catalyzed and recast by each and every submission (Showalter 4). In the Social Text model, however, it is the collective itself that becomes the arena and product of a shifting negotiation of the standards and parameters of inquiry into society and culture in the broadest sense. The editorial collective

As divergent as they may seem, the two models might be said to share a certain romanticism, based in an investment in a process geared to evaluate a loosely defined but supposedly universal standard of “intrinsic merit” (Schaefer, “Anonymous Review” 4) or “intellectual merit” (Stanton, “Editor's Column” [1997] 192) in a manner that risks ignoring the ways that “personal affinity and intellectual charisma come to play a crucial role in any group dialogue” and overlooking the ways that “disciplinary expertise can come in through the back door, as it were, giving authority to advocacy or critique at certain moments in the process of deliberation” (Edwards et al. 76). In a 1988 PMLA guest column, Stanley Fish argues forcefully that the very notion of a disinterested consideration of intrinsic merit is ludicrous. For Fish, the intrinsic is “a political rather than an essential category” (745), produced by internal debates within the profession in a manner that could not be extricated from precisely the “extraneous considerations” that anonymous peer review was designed to eliminate (739), including “considerations of rank, professional status, previous achievement, ideology, and so on” (744).

But this critique would have to apply across the board—as Fish writes, “the pure case of a reading without bias is never available” (746)—in a way that would shape the dynamics of the review process in the editorial collective model as much as in the anonymous peer review model. What bothers Fish is his sense that some advocates of “blind submission” justified that policy change as a matter of equity: as a means of supposedly “doing away with politics” (745). But reviewing the intertwined history of these shifts in academic publishing in the late 1970s is a reminder that in fact both anonymous peer review and collective editorial models emerged as what Fish calls “frankly political arguments” (745).

Revisiting the history of peer review from both sides, now, I am struck by the degree to which the founding of journals such as Social Text and the implementation of author-anonymous peer review at PMLA were parallel political interventions aimed at disciplinarity from different angles: one a feminist irruption from within the discipline itself, the other a challenge to the “strategic containment or delimitation” of academic disciplines from the outside (Jameson et al. 3).

Although I appreciate the ways that, as a rhetorical strategy, the critique of disciplinarity as “strategic containment” can make space for the unfettered methodological innovation of a collective editorial process, my experience at PMLA over the past few years has made me less convinced that the journal serves to police or “delimit” the scope of inquiry in the scholarship it publishes. In a 2009 essay about the function of the editorial collective, my Social Text coeditors Randy Martin and Anna McCarthy and I wrote that “peer review might once have served the purpose of ensuring professional autonomy, but the politics of late-twentieth-century disciplinarity demanded that the peer-review editorial system trade blindness for oversight” (Edwards et al. 75). I remember being tickled when Randy came up with that clever riff on Paul de Man, but now, it feels unjustified and facile, at least as a description of the PMLA process. I find it impossible to describe the intense, conscientious, pragmatic discussions at editorial board meetings as producing anything approaching disciplinary “oversight.” As my predecessor Marianne Hirsch once wrote about her own experience as editor,

In my experience, a significant portion of the discussion at editorial board meetings is devoted to the cross-disciplinary implications of the submission at hand: the ways that almost all PMLA essays go beyond the scope of the merely literary, incorporating methodologies derived from fields as various as philosophy, linguistics, legal history, economics, gender and sexuality studies, sound studies, digital humanities, environmental science, media studies, colonial history, art history, and ethnography. If receptivity means anything in journal work, it means an openness to the ways that literary study is constantly being “splintered”Footnote ¹² and reconfigured into different modes of inquiry in each and every article, and in the virtual symposium they represent when read in conjunction. Whatever the editorial model, the ultimate responsibility of peer review is to learn to listen for these changes.