I’m taking a break from my struggles with the Computers and Writing presentation: thanks to a heads-up from Doctor Daisy, I picked up New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society, the, er, sequel to Raymond Williams’s classic Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, which itself was originally intended as an appendix to the excellent Culture & Society: 1780-1950. When I first heard about New Keywords (I saw a draft version of the entry on “Economy” in a graduate economics seminar), my immediate thought was: them’s some mighty big shoes to fill.
Despite the high caliber of J. K. Gibson-Graham’s entry on “Economy,” as well as a few other entries, my misgivings were not misplaced: New Keywords suffers from the same spotty, slapdash quality as most sequels, and it doesn’t even begin to live up to the standards of Williams’s original text. Certainly, the Revised Vocabulary fills in some of the gaps of the past thirty years, with entries like “Network,” “Power,” and “Self”; and there are some heavy hitters among the contributors. But far too many of the entries barely scratch the surface of their topics (the three-pager on “Class” I’ll save for a longer rant: suffice now to say that both in terms of quality and in terms of depth of coverage, it would still be complete and utter crap even were it not compared to Williams’s original, and it adds practically zero understanding to the topic) and end with empty platitudes.
Consider Karim Murji’s vapid concluding thoughts on “Race”: “The idea of race has been tainted, discredited, valorized, reclaimed, and contested. It retains positive and features that are both anachronistic and contemporary” (296). Or Craig Calhoun’s last words on “Private”: “The idea of ‘private’ remains contested” (282). And then on its counterpart, “Public”: “In short, both the ideas of what the public is and what is in the public interest remain subject to public debate” (286). There seems to be a consistent tendency here, evident again in André Frankovits on “Development”: “Development is bound to remain a contested term” (81).
One simply has to admire such breathtakingly steadfast commitment to equivocation.
Been waiting for your review although I somewhat predicted it after the what the Guardian had to say. Perhaps it’s our blog assignment to extend the definitions that this new volume fell short of completing?