Review of a review of the reviewers

Diversity and obsessive self-reflexivity
Perhaps surprisingly, apart from a glancing mention of the gender politics in the
conclusion, there is a very little in Chong’s book about diversity, race, and sexual identity,
issues which have been prominent in recent public discussion of the arts and its organs of
dissemination.
If this is so for the USA, where many cultural institutions made public commitments to
racial inclusiveness following the events of the summer of 2020, it is also true in
Australia, where there are frequent calls for decolonisation and racial justice and
organisations like Stella campaign for gender equity in the literary world.
One would expect that the subject position of a reviewer and the increasing expectation
for diversity of the books reviewed must be a consideration in editorial decisions and in
the self-positioning of reviewers. If so, we don’t get much discussion of it here.
6/6
That also means that any incipient tension between the demands of aesthetic and political
realms remain unexplored. Does the need to represent a multiplicity of voices and
experiences in the media, especially those voices which have been marginalised and
silenced, make it harder or easier to argue for the function of criticism at the present
time? Does the current self-examination by institutions of culture, including universities,
museums and newspapers, about their own historical implication in oppressive or
discriminatory power relations make the role of the reviewer-as-expert, as privileged
purveyor of judgement, harder to sustain?
Chong’s respondents are all anonymous, presumably in the interests of scholarly
objectivity, but it would be interesting to hear their views about these most livid areas of
our current cultural conversations.
Reading this book was, for me, something of a cross-disciplinary encounter. In my own
subject, literary studies, self-reflexivity borders on the obsessive. Literary academics, like
a lot of scholars in the humanities, are forever examining the whys and wherefores of
what they do. What’s the value of “doing English”? How do we justify our discipline in an
age when the social and cultural capital of the humanities is frequently challenged by the
econometric thinking of politicians and policy makers?
It’s salutary to look at how a sociologist handles the “value of criticism” question, which is,
bluntly, with a lot more lucidity and less theoretical agonising. Chong goes to the
practising reviewers and asks them to describe what they do and why they do it, then
subjects their answers to qualitative analysis. The questions she raises – what status do
we give to someone’s taste? Is there an extra-subjective element to aesthetic judgement? –
are pretty venerable ones.
Chong doesn’t go to Kant or Hume to come up with answers, but rather goes to the
reviewers themselves. There are benefits to that approach, but also costs: questions go abegging
and many presumptions remain unchallenged.
More than a philosophical angle, I would have welcomed some more genealogy and
intellectual history. How did the reviewing ecosystem evolve into its current state? What
was it like thirty years ago? How has reviewing culture shifted in recent decades and what
are the cultural, social, and institutional explanations for these changes?
In saying that, I may be violating a fundamental rule of fair-minded reviewing – you
review the book the author has written, not an imaginary alternative. Chong has given us
a valuable, clear-headed inquiry into contemporary journalistic book reviewing. Her
research brings calm illumination to these troubled waters. Her own non-judgmental
approach gives us a crystal exposition of how and why judgements are made by those,
editors and reviewers, seeking to navigate these uncertain straits.
Indifferent to smb/smth-having or showing no interest in smb/smth.