Progressive Geographies

Has anyone written about the history of publishing Festschrift ? There doesn’t seem to be an obvious English equivalent term. They are/were books dedicated to an author at the time of a significant birthday or retirement. Books of celebration, homage or tribute, or commemoration. In French they are sometimes titled as Mélanges, or hommage to someone. They are very often uneven, sometimes including stuff which might never have been published otherwise, and I can understand why publishers were or became reluctant to do them. I can’t imagine they sold very well, and like other edited collections they probably suffered from people only wanting a few pieces, which they might photocopy, but not buy the whole text. The only time I remember being asked to be involved in one it didn’t happen, partly because publishers were reluctant, and the idea shifted to be a thematic collection which was dedicated to the person. But for a period – possibly post-second world war until the 1970s – they were quite common, some people published in them frequently – often making it hard to find copies of their work.

Did anyone ever get invited, contribute something, and then get told that it didn’t fit or wasn’t good enough? How did they handle review, if at all? Was the selection process just about who got invited, and then it was too hard to turn someone down? Some of the pieces seem like “I had an idea, here’s some odd notes on it” – the sort of thing which might, today, be very hard to place. (Possibly with good reason. Though the difficulty of publishing things which are more than a review and not quite an article might be a different discussion.) Did people contribute both to honour the recipient, or because they couldn’t say no, but also to get a contributor copy of something which might have some other interesting pieces in it, and which might be hard to track down otherwise?

They seem like a relic of a different kind of publishing – doubtless filled with problematic gender, race and class discrimination in terms of who was honoured, invited to contribute, etc. or even had the sort of academic position that might be honoured in the first place. We might say then that whatever happened didn’t happen soon enough. But despite all this, which is certainly not minor, they can contain some interesting work…

A bit of looking led to how Alan Soble formulated 13 semi-serious conditions of which 11 are viewable without subscription, and the longest discussion I’ve found is a chapter in Irving Louis Horowitz, Communicating Ideas: The Politics of Scholarly Publishing.

But the semi-curious look for something on them is hindered by searches bringing up things that are themselves Festschriften, not about them. So, a semi-serious question about what happened to them – I think I know, but a more genuine one about whether anyone has tried to write a history of the genre.

[Update: thanks for the various comments online about this post. The best piece I’ve been told about is Graham Whitaker, “Unwrapping the Classical Festschrift” in Stephen Harrison and Christopher Pelling (eds.), Classical Scholarship and Its History: From the Renaissance to the Present. Essays in Honour of Christopher Stray, De Gruyter, 2021. Thanks to Nathan Uglow for this suggestion.]

Eglė Rindzevičiūtė, The Will to Predict: Orchestrating the Future Through Science – Cornell University Press, 2023

In The Will to Predict, Eglė Rindzevičiūtė demonstrates how the logic of scientific expertise cannot be properly understood without knowing the conceptual and institutional history of scientific prediction. She notes that predictions of future population, economic growth, environmental change, and scientific and technological innovation have shaped much of twentieth and twenty-first-century politics and social life, as well as government policies. Today, such predictions are more necessary than ever as the world undergoes dramatic environmental, political, and technological change. But, she asks, what does it mean to predict scientifically? What are the limits of scientific prediction and what are its effects on governance, institutions, and society? 

Her intellectual and political history of scientific prediction takes as its example twentieth-century USSR. By outlining the role of prediction in a range of governmental contexts, from economic and social planning to military strategy, she shows that the history of scientific prediction is a transnational one, part of the history of modern science and technology as well as governance. Going beyond the Soviet case, Rindzevičiūtė argues that scientific predictions are central for organizing uncertainty through the orchestration of knowledge and action. Bridging the fields of political sociology, organization studies, and history, The Will to Predict considers what makes knowledge scientific and how such knowledge has impacted late modern governance.  

Tim Simpson, Betting on Macau: Casino Capitalism and China’s Consumer Revolution – University of Minnesota Press, April 2023

Update: there is a New Books discussion with Michael O. Johnston here.

Betting on Macau delves into the radical transformation of what was formerly the last remaining European territory in Asia, returned to the People’s Republic of China in 1999 after nearly half a millennium of Portuguese rule. Examining the unprecedented scale of its development and its key role in China’s economic revolution, Tim Simpson follows Macau’s emergence from historical obscurity to become the most profitable casino gaming locale in the world.

Identified as a UNESCO World Heritage Site and renowned for its unique blend of Chinese and Portuguese colonial-era architecture, contemporary Macau has metamorphosed into a surreal, hypermodern urban landscape augmented by massive casino megaresorts, including two of the world’s largest buildings. Simpson situates Macau’s origins as a strategic trading port and its ensuing history alongside the emergence of the global capitalist system, charting the massive influx of foreign investment, construction, and tourism in the past two decades that helped generate the territory’s enormous wealth. 

Presented through a cross section of postcolonial studies and social theory with extensive insight into the global gambling industry, Betting on Macau uncovers the various roots of the territory’s lucrative casino capitalism. In turn, its trenchant analysis provides a distinctive view into China’s broader project of urbanization, its post-Mao economic reforms, and the continued rise of its consumer culture.