It hasn’t been that long since my previous Editor’s Note, but this is my last opportunity to write one before my editorial term ends, so I can’t resist making a few remarks in addition to offering the usual round-up of recent publications.
I’m happy to announce that after some considerable effort on the part of our supporters at Johns Hopkins University Press, Print Plus publications will now be indexed on Google Scholar (in addition to continuing to be indexed by the MLA). This is another important step toward consolidating the legitimacy and academic currency of the journal’s digital platform.
But as I always say, none of that would matter if it weren’t for the quality of the content. In the past few months, we’ve run a sample article and review from each our two recent print issues, issues of which I’m particularly proud. Laura E. Helton reviewed Jean-Christophe Cloutier’s long-awaited Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature in our April issue—a nice echo of the journal’s recent visit to its own archive of work on modernism and race. Maite Barragán’s “The Fabric of the City: Magazines, Dressmakers, and Madrid’s Gran Vía” offers a beautifully illustrated analysis of the dynamics of fashion, class, and public space in modernist-era Madrid, while Matthew Hayward and Maebh Long’s “Towards an Oceanian Modernism” stages a forceful but nuanced confrontation between “modernism” and the modern literatures of Oceania. I think of Hayward and Long’s piece as an appropriate follow-up to our recent “Indigenous Modernities” cluster, along with Ramsey McGlazer’s review, in our January issue, of Ben Conisbee Baer’s Indigenous Vanguards. I hope this will help set the stage for a near-future in which work by and about Indigenous peoples will be a regular feature on both our print and digital platforms.
We’ve also continued to publish work exclusive to the Print Plus platform, including Julie Cyzewski on the complex relationships between radio, rhythm, and orality in postcolonial Nigerian poetry and an expansive and fascinating cluster— coedited by Heather A. Love and Lisa Mendelman—exploring “Modernism and Diagnosis” via topics ranging from turn-of-the-century Japan to T. S. Eliot on the metaphysical poets, FIRE!! and queer Harlem, and a recent French film on masculinity and bodybuilders.
For the latest installment of the “The Discipline,” editor Kate Stanley brought the blogging herself—to the benefit of all our readers—with timely reflections on “The Pedagogical Potential of the Eco-Epic” via the work of contemporary queer Indigenous poet Tommy Pico. Samuel Cohen’s “The 2016 Project,” for the “In These Times” blog, gives an insider’s perspective on the challenges and imperatives of teaching about history and race at a state university in contemporary Missouri—a piece that for me resonated with Frances Dickey’s recent article on “T. S. Eliot and the Color Line of St Louis.”
Mentioning the “In These Times” blog, edited by Debra Rae Cohen, last, gives me a seamless transition to thanking her, the founding editor of Print Plus, not only for creating this fantastic scholarly space, but more specifically for building all the behind-the-scenes infrastructure that allowed someone else to step in without immediately falling on their face. No one “replaces” such an editorial force; you just come after them chronologically and do what you can do. Anne Fernald is already full of great ideas for how she is going to move this platform forward. I know how much I’m already looking forward to being a reader during the Fernald Era; if you aren’t yet, you’ll soon know why.
The end of my two-year term as editor of Print Plus coincides with the end of my five-year term as coeditor of Modernism/modernity. Five years is a long time and I think it’s fair to say that for most of us these past five years have been unusually long, often in a bad way. So, I’m ready for a break. But I’m also pleased with some of the things we were able to accomplish over the past few years and am very much looking forward to participating in the modernist community in new ways after having “met” so many of you, in one sense or another. Thanks to everyone for all their hard work and great contributions. Those of you who are able to travel to the MSA in Chicago this fall: I look forward to seeing you there.
—Christopher Bush