Ecologies of Neoliberal Publishing | Post45

From the Introduction by Jeremy Rosen

Right about now, you might be thinking: "not more neoliberalism!" Come to think of it, you might be getting a little tired of "ecologies" too. But pulling together these two somewhat played-out keywords has generated — through a disproportionate mix of Contemporaries' foresight, my dumb luck, and the fidelity to nuance in favor of grandiosity in the scholarship of the authors featured here — a salutary corrective to the potential for "neoliberalism" to serve as a catch-all bogeyman for all sociocultural critiques in the contemporary moment.1

This cluster of essays evades the tendency to use "neoliberalism" as a singular explanatory cause by exploring in detail the workings of various ecologies of today's publishing industry. Quite simply, these essays ask: how do neoliberal market forces and ideologies play out in practice, in the field of literary production? What does the bogeyman look like up close and on the ground: in the factories, on the Twittersphere, in the corporate initiatives and junkets? As the word "ecology" in our title implies, these essays analyze the workings of various interconnected processes in the publishing system, and proceed not so much in search of holistic accounts of that system as in efforts to discover a series of local changes in the ways literature gets produced today. 2 These changes are sometimes manifestations or effects of neoliberal logics and practices, sometimes interventions and irruptions in them; other times these practices shape and alter the neoliberal whole, in unexpected ways that make it look increasingly hard to offer a totalizing account.

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