The avant-garde dies but never surrenders, and it seems to have taken its last, brave postmodern stand at the State University of New York. To browse in SUNY Press's latest catalogue of literary and cultural studies is as affecting, in its way, as the end of Beau Geste: one last, lingering look back -- in the failing, winter light of 1997 -- on that 1970s dawn in which it was academic bliss to be a handicapped Chicana lesbian, but to be the victim of incest was very heaven.
It's there at SUNY Press -- in titles like Un/Popular Culture: Lesbian Writing After the Sex Wars or the essay on "Re(his)tor(iciz)ing Captivity and the Other" in Creating Safe Space: Violence and Women's Writing -- that proud slash and those gallant parentheses still parade like doomed and dusty sentinels in the far-flung outposts of the decaying colonial empire of French intellectuals. It's there in Albany that the nostalgic reader may still find brave, new studies published with such marvelously dated titles as Transgressing Discourses, Gendering Classicism, Agonistics, or -- beyond parody -- From Hegel to Madonna: Towards a General Economy of Commodity Fetishism.
But it's unfair to single out particular volumes; nearly the entire SUNY catalogue is beyond parody. Robert Samuels's Hitchcock's Bi-Textuality is promoted with the promise that it combines "an articulation of Lacan's theory of ethics; a discussion of recent theories of feminine subjectivity and queer textuality; and close readings of Hitchcock's films." Laurel Davis's The Swimsuit Issue and Sport unsmilingly explains how Sports Illuserated " tramples women, gays, lesbians, people of color, and residents of the postcolonized world," using its swimsuit issue "to secure a large male audience by creating a climate of hegemonic masculinity."
For New York taxpayers wondering what their university system does with their money, THE SCRAPBOOK is proud to report that SUNY Press -- with its new catalogue of deconstructive, postmodern screeds about race, class, and gender -- is doing exactly what an academic publisher should: carefully preserving a cultural moment that would otherwise have faded entirely away.