Humanities in the Twenty-First Century: Beyond Utility and Markets ed. by Eleonora Belfiore and Anna Upchurch (review)

Eleonora Belfiore and Anna Upchurch’s collection of essays Humanities in the Twenty-First Century: Beyond Utility and Markets contains an overview of the problems currently facing the humanities. These essays struggle with the difficult questions facing scholars in multiple disciplines. Divided into five sections, they explore: “The Humanities and Their ‘Impact,’” “Utility v. Value,” “The Humanities and Interdisciplinarity,” “Meaning Making and the Market,” and finally “Digitisation, Ethics, and the Humanities.” The collection’s editors, both employed in the UK themselves, balance the essays well among considerations at both UK and US institutions, a necessary balance given the policy shifts in both nations, such as the shift in focus of government funding to laboratory-based sciences in the UK, and US policy’s clear favoritism toward big business and banks instead of higher education at both the state and federal level (Belfiore and Upchurch 2-3, Bérubé 66-68). Interestingly going beyond the quantifiable considerations of utility and markets, Humanities in the Twenty-First Century demonstrates exactly how the study of literature, history, art, and other disciplines enhances the quality of one’s life.

Belfiore and Upchurch’s collection answers these questions and more. Particularly noteworthy pieces include Michael Bérubé’s “The Futility of the Humanities,” in which he argues that the humanities has never benefitted from the language of utility, but will always “respond surprisingly well to forms of qualitative assessment” (75). In other words, although we can quantify the skills developed in the humanities, such as measurable improvements in “reading and writing,” this should not be an obligation (72). The essays in the section on interdisciplinarity, “The Histories of Medicine: Toward an Applied History of Medicine” and “Productive Interactions: Geography and the Humanities,” are excellent explorations of a potentially amorphous question. In “The Histories of Medicine,” Howard I. Kushner and Leslie S. Leighton explain how medical history can be used for purposes besides rote memorization. As history is an examination of “historical sources,” which are “subject for contested interpretation,” these contestations themselves serve as red flags to clinicians who may be examining both “typical and atypical presentations of disease” (113-14). Connie Johnston’s essay on geography provides a defense both of geography as a continued discipline that treats humanity’s relationship with the environments in which it lives as always incomplete, as well as the frequent reliance on philosophy to develop approaches to studying different trends in regions across the globe (139). In a final section on the digital humanities, essays from Eleonora Belfiore, Rick McGreer, and Mark J. V. Olson debate how the humanities can be benefitted, reshaped, or potentially harmed by technology. McGreer, for instance, argues that technology has provided both the “greatest explosion of information and communication in human history,” while also providing “the potential for the greatest level of censorship in human history” (228). One’s ability to store a vast number of texts on a Kindle device, for instance, is also limited by Amazon’s prerogative, backed by force of law, to “remove anything” from that same device (226, italics original).

As Belfiore and Upchurch’s collection claims to be “agenda-setting,” then the debates these essays incite should be, and are, thought-provoking (5). The greatest concern the book addresses, however, is the apparent crisis surrounding the humanities. Regardless of this crisis narrative’s status as a rhetorical construct, at least in part, the majority of this collection argues that this narrative still requires our full attention. Given policy changes mentioned above that affect the funding higher education receives, the humanities must either find a language with which it can defend its own market value and “useful” qualities, or demonstrate to these government agencies that the humanities is quite different from a “useful” product, but still inherently valuable to the human condition. This crisis is particularly felt in the UK, where the government has recently passed legislation whose language is clearly...