Over at Bookslut, Eryn Loeb decries the anthology:
In this stalled cultural climate of Britney Spears, Disney princesses and an embattled Miss USA (let’s just forget about Nancy Pelosi for a moment), there’s been an avalanche of anthologies encompassing nearly every issue and subgroup within feminism. Seal Press first published Listen Up: Voices from the Next Feminist Generation in 1995 (a second, expanded edition followed in 2001), the same year Rebecca Walker claimed to be “Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism” with her anthology To Be Real. The more academia-flavored Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing Feminism followed in 1997. In the years since, there have been the more specialized Body Outlaws: Rewriting the Rules of Beauty and Body Image (originally published in 1998 as Adios Barbie), Yentl’s Revenge: The Next Wave of Jewish Feminism (2001), Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism (2002), Young Wives Tales: New Adventures in Love and Partnership (2001), Jane Sexes It Up: True Confessions of Feminist Desire (2002) and Without a Net: The Female Experience of Growing Up Working Class (2004)… to name a few. By the time The Fire This Time: Young Activists and the New Feminism came along in 2004, I was pretty tired of reading the same book again and again.
I read anthologies all the time. I lap them up, and tend to browse for them whenever I have time to kill in a library or bookstore. I’ve read some of the ones she mentions here. After reading this article, I decided to think about why I might like them so much, so I made a list:
I have a limited amount of time.
I have a limited attention span.
Um….
Loeb believes that the anthology has become a format conducive to coalitional identity-politics mediocrity, a bunch of people representing their faction but not getting very far past the introduction phase:
In the absence of validation from outside the world of Women’s Studies, these anthologies function as justifications of feminist activism and politics. They read like progress reports, but also like P.R., calculated proof of feminism’s vitality and diversity. Each new anthology builds the same case from scratch: How is feminism not dead? Let me count the ways. There are essays by sex workers, performance poets, queer women, questioning women, transwomen, abused women… maybe a man or two. In this format, diversity has become its own formula. And all these voices mashed together have come to sound a lot like background noise.
Now, I love essays and vignettes and manifestos; I love all of the pieces I’ve seen anthologized. But, I suppose like Loeb, I usually finish the anthology wanting to hear more. And, honestly, I read them in much the same spirit I read blogs. Maybe that’s a point in favor of the writing I’ve encountered, rather than a strike against the format. I don’t know if I agree with this, exactly:
Seal Press, currently the main perpetrator, is responsible for at least four new anthologies this winter: She’s Such a Geek: Women Write About Science, Technology, and Other Nerdy Stuff; Homelands: Women’s Journeys Across Race, Place, and Time; Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender Conformity; and We Don’t Need Another Wave: Dispatches from the Next Generation of Feminists. Though often edited by excellent, surely well-intentioned writers (like Michelle Tea, Annalee Newitz and Mattilda a.k.a. Matt Bernstein Sycamore — whose latest anthology is her fourth), there’s a uniformity to these books. The individual essays are confessional, with loving — if frequently self-critical — descriptions of what the writers and their communities are up to. Sure, the heavy emphasis on personal experience is always made insistently political, but after a certain point I’m not really interested in how someone’s history of abuse has impacted her masturbation habits.
Because this kind of personal experience is fascinating to me. On the contrary, it seems like the essays I read provide extremely brief windows into someone else’s life and perspective, like a single chapter of a much longer book.
And, honestly, it seems to me that the problem is not that anthologies are too insular but that they are not insular enough. They read like movement syllabi–an answer to the typical mainstream series of questions, to wit:
Who the hell are you?
What are you talking about?
Didn’t we solve that problem?
Why would anyone do that?
Why should I respect you?
And Loeb seems to feel the same way about the tone that most anthologies take with their readers. They’re not pretentious. They’re defensive. I think the “presumption of passion and innocence,” to the extent that it’s there, might be bravado rather than the real belief that there’s nothing left to prove. After all, why would anyone need a syllabus if there wasn’t much left to teach?
You forgot that anthologies are perfect for reading while in the bathroom.
Wow. For a book slut, Eryn’s knowledge of publishing seems to have a gap or two. I suspect that Seal Press is a repeat offender in the anthology category not so much because they prefer it that way, though they may, but because they have very little budget to go into advances.
So the essays of mine they have published in various anthologies have had total compensation of, let’s see, $275. I can’t write a book for $275, because my kid has to eat and so do I. They can afford an essay I’ve published elsewhere, so that’s what they print.
But the bathroom point is taken, as well. Perhaps anthologies outsell nonfiction for that reason…I don’t know.
To my mind, the biggest problem with anthologies is that they either 1) excerpt material from books which is richer and more fulfilling in the original or 2) commission people to write a short piece for an anthology. As genres go, the short-piece-for-an-anthology is low on the totem pole — not that some people can’t write brief, punchy, meaningful essays, but most people can only write brief or punchy or meaningful essays in the space provided by an anthology. Also, anthologies are often the product of coteries, so you’re liable to see the same few names — or, at the very least, people from the same circle of acquaintances — appearing in different anthologies but writing pretty much the same thing.
I kind of just want to tell her, “If you don’t like anthologies, don’t buy them, but obviously they have a purpose in the marketplace, or they wouldn’t sell.”
I can’t imagine her claiming that, say, erotica anthologies are only popular because they reassure fans that people still need porn, but when it’s feminism we have to bring up justification.
That and it’s not as though the people in the anthologies will never write anything again. You could, say, read an anthology, and then seek out the individual writers’ individual, more expanded work, if you want. Maybe they can’t get more published, and you can give them a hand. Maybe they have a magnum opus already–can it not be read because they also contributed a short piece to a group work?
It just confuses me, you know? I see anthologies as jumping-off points, to show you which trials are available to be run down when you’ve got the inclination and resources at hand.
I think anthologies are incredibly important to people just coming to feminism. As a vaguely interested young teen, I wasn’t going to pick up “The Feminine Mystique” or “The Second Sex” or what have you. But “Listen Up”? Hell yes. Anthologies connect people to other people, people in the movement whose lives have shaped their work. They aren’t faceless ideologies.
And I’ve been a feminist for years now, and I still enjoy them. Sometimes I get depressed and bogged down about the state of things and feel disconnected- but reading something like “We Don’t Need Another Wave” brings me home again- I can have better faith in the continuing movement. And they’re fun to reread.
And true, I will always research more a writer whose essay particularly impressed me.