Kidding Around: The Child in Film and Media ed. by Alexander N. Howe, Wynn Yarbrough (review)

When it comes to publishing, general and academic, we are living in interesting times. As tremendous shifts in the material and economic conditions of publishing are taking place, we are all faced with a series of questions and possible implications: does the emergence of e-publishing and digital media lend itself to the democratization of culture, or more fully enact a segmentation whereby too-ready availability of digital texts encourages artificial strategies of value-adding (such as price gouging or conditional access)? In academic publishing in particular, we face the simultaneous shifts of e-publishing on the one hand, and of ever-increasing institutional pressures to publish in “quality” outlets on the other hand. Large academic publishing cartels seem to be more fully than ever before exploiting academic labor: scholars not only write and edit material, but also in some cases pay to publish it, and even sometimes pay again to access or circulate it. We may also be seeing a shift away from the scholarly monograph as the exulted or desired marker of academic citizenship, as universities move towards a quality-and-quantity accounting model of assessment which means multiple chapters and/or journal articles “count” for more than a monograph.

These general conditions are just that: general. However, they became increasingly present in my experience of reading Kidding Around: The Child in Film and Media. After all, the essay collection is a genre obviously impacted by the new publishing cultures within which we now all work. Gone are the days when journals may have had limited institutional reach or circulation (particularly internationally), and thus created a space for the edited collection to provide scholars with a single point of access for papers with shared concerns or methodologies. It must be said, though, that in the face of increasingly nodal access to bodies of scholarship, where the publisher or subscription-based access point shapes what research a given researcher may be able to access, the edited collection may well be poised to carve out a new space for itself as an affordable (if indeed published in an affordable way) means by which individual scholars may keep up-to-date in their fields. Seen nostalgically or optimistically, today’s edited collections need to make serious cases for their cohesion and contribution to knowledge if they are to be useful additions to personal or institutional libraries.

Imagine my surprise, then, when it became clear that this 2014 volume, which retails at US$100, is made up of ten essays from a 2008 conference. “Media” is given far too great a billing in the volume’s title, as the majority of the essays address film. Oh, and three of those essays have already been published elsewhere, while a fourth essay directs readers to a much fuller exploration of the topic at hand in the essay writer’s 2012 monograph. If this were not enough to give me pause, the editors should have thought carefully about their desired audience before making the breathtaking claim that

While this collection has its largest concentration in US-based media—particularly film—we believe that the theoretical models employed in these essays possess the sophistication necessary to be imported into other critical contexts to analyze primary works from other nations and cultures

(2–3).

As a reader who lives and works in one of those “other nations and cultures,” I was amazed to learn that my critical context must be in need of importing sophisticated theoretical models. I was even more amazed to discover that the theoretical models the colonially minded editors are offering to myself and other non-US-based folks include not-especially-US-based figures such as Foucault and Kristeva. I sincerely hope I’m not the first to break the news to the editors of this volume that there are parts of the world which are not the United States, but which are managing to engage with...