Sharon Marcus - Think in Public: A Public Books Reader

THINK IN PUBLIC

Public Books Series

Public Books Series

Sharon Marcus and Caitlin Zaloom, Editors

Founded in 2012, Public Books is required reading for anyone interested in what scholars have to say about contemporary culture, politics, and society. The monographs, anthologies, surveys, and experimental formats featured in this series translate the online experience of intellectual creativity and community into the physical world of print. Through writing that exemplifies the magazines commitment to expertise, accessibility, and diversity, the Public Books Series aims to break down barriers between the academy and the public in order to make the life of the mind a public good.

Think in Public: A Public Books Reader , edited by Sharon Marcus and Caitlin Zaloom, 2019

Antidemocracy in America: Truth, Power, and the Republic at Risk , edited by Eric Klinenberg, Caitlin Zaloom, and Sharon Marcus, 2019

THINK IN PUBLIC

A PUBLIC BOOKS READER

Edited by

SHARON MARCUS
CAITLIN ZALOOM

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW YORK

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright 2019 Caitlin Zaloom and Sharon Marcus

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-54871-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Marcus, Sharon, 1966 editor of compilation. | Zaloom, Caitlin, editor of compilation.

Title: Think in public : a Public books reader / edited by Sharon Marcus and Caitlin Zaloom.

Other titles: Public books (Online journal)

Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2019] | Series: Public books series | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018054003 (print) | LCCN 2019007204 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231190084 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231190091 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Classification: LCC AC5 (ebook) | LCC AC5 .T355 2019 (print) | DDC 081dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018054003

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at .

Cover design: Julia Kushnirsky

Cover image: Ourit Ben-Haim

Book design: Lisa Hamm

CONTENTS

SHARON MARCUS AND CAITLIN ZALOOM

FRED TURNER

LILLY IRANI

STACEY BALKAN

J. R. McNEILL

IMANI PERRY

FRANCES NEGR N-MUNTANER

N. D. B. CONNOLLY

MATTHEW ENGELKE

PHILIP GORSKI

KIM PHILLIPS-FEIN

MAX HOLLERAN

NAJWA AL-QATTAN

JEREMY ADELMAN

DESTIN JENKINS

ANDREW J. PERRIN

KIERAN SETIYA

SHANNON MATTERN

B. R. COHEN

SUZY HANSEN

JAMES VERNON

SALAMISHAH TILLET

MATTHEW CLAIR

GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK

JOHN PLOTZ

CHRISTOPHER SCHABERG

ELI ROSENBLATT

REBECCA L. WALKOWITZ

SHEILA LIMING

SIMON DURING

NICOLE R. FLEETWOOD

REBECCA FALKOFF

HARUO SHIRANE

KARL ASHOKA BRITTO

JUDITH BUTLER

JOSEPH JONGHYUN JEON

SALAMISHAH TILLET

MARAH GUBAR

ANNE E. FERNALD

NAMWALI SERPELL

TESS McNULTY

MARK McGURL

NICHOLAS DAMES

JAN MIESZKOWSKI

KAREN DUNAK

DAEGAN MILLER

SHARON MARCUS AND CAITLIN ZALOOM

I n an age of ignorance, how do we learn to think? Who protects old ideas from extinction? How do new ideas emerge and take flight?

One short answer to all these questions: books. Thanks to their durability as physical objects, books connect people and ideas across space and time. Books stimulate and preserve inconvenient truths and inspire new ways of thinking. At their best, books require slow research, careful argument, and immersed engagement. The independent, the unorthodox, and the solitary have long turned to books to fuel their imaginations.

Another short answer: universities. Universities preserve old insights and foster new ones. They are social laboratories where students experiment with politics and expression. At their best, universities gather people from around the world and encourage them to challenge received wisdom, advance knowledge, and overturn established hierarchies.

Our answer is Public Books . A digital magazine that unites the best of the university with the openness of the internet, Public Books celebrates the power of books to spread research, pioneer new ways of thinking, and introduce ideas into our lives. Our site puts readers and writers in deep conversation with books past and presentserious books, popular books, good books, and even bad books that can teach us something important when examined seriously.

Public Books is a gathering place for those who seek, as our motto and the title of this collection put it, to think in public. Our contributors know their subjects deeply and use their knowledge to wrestle with complex problems, confront urgent issues, and offer insight into problems old and new. Our readers value knowledge and arguments that challenge us to think differently.

Today we think of a scholar as an authoritative specialist who teaches and writes. But the original meaning of scholar was a student: someone who learns and reads. Public Books exists to nurture public scholars: professors who want to speak to the broadest possible audience and readers who want to learn more about ideas both timeless and timely. Our contributors are public scholarsand our readers are, too.

We founded Public Books in 2012 on these precepts: That publics are thirsty for knowledge. That those who devote their lives to mastering their subjects need to be heard. That expertise and authority are not confined to white, straight, cisgender men. That it is desirable for academics to speak to a broader audience and exciting for readers outside the academy to debate what academics have to say. Most importantly, that boundaries between disciplines and ways of knowing deserve to be bridgedand barriers between the academy and the public deserve to be broken.

Academia, for too long, has excelled at building walls: walls between colleagues and specialties, walls between the corridors of research and the world outside. And now, to the benefit of public scholars and ideas, these walls are tumbling down. Whole generations of graduate students, unable to secure employment in the ivory tower, are flooding the public square. Union drives have humanists uniting with ethnographers and lab scientists. Competing universities join forces to fend off attacks by partisan politicians who want to defund knowledge. All the while, young people fighting for commonsense gun laws and humane immigration policies find themselves embracing theories of intersection and solidarity. All signs point toward a future for knowledge based on unification, not division.

Its time to embrace this new openness, to look broadly for inspiration and interconnection, to speak out widely and wisely.

Academics can no longer stay in cloistered enclaves, reassuring themselves that universities and colleges will always provide a secure oasis for books and ideas, for informed answers and clear thinking. We cannot sit back, assuming that the value of knowledge speaks for itself and that we can focus exclusively on dissertations, conferences, and publications geared toward specialists in our subfields.