In the writing business, you get used to often-brutal rejection. You comfort yourself that for creative writing, opinions are wildly subjective. Everyone knows about the book rejected by 50 publishers going on to win every award known. So you grimace and keep submitting, or give up and sulk. Academia is different.You have to publish in reputable journals (edited by people other than you and your friends), or you're not an academic, you're a hustler. And in academic reviews you expect a disinterested opinion, preferably from an expert who understands your work. So a review of a journal submission like the one below might be, uhm,worrisome: "This paper is vastly over-simplified and naïve, reading more like a conspiracy theory than a scholarly exploration of the relationship among nationalism,memory, and public media. Its treatment of the relevant literatures is superficial, and a number of important works are either left out or misread.
Instead of building a convincing argument step by step, the paper is instead a bombastic presentation of, essentially, the same (unsubstantiated) claim, over and over again. "This paper is more appropriately an op-ed piece in a newspaper than a publication in an academic journal. Less crucial but distracting, the paper also contains many typographical errors, which in this era of technology seems almost entirely avoidable." Ouch. Assuming the reviewers are academics, devastating. Unless you'd previously sent the same paper to another journal and gotten this response: "This is a well written and argued paper. The author does an excellent job of developing the central argument about media and the articulation of collective memories in ways that have marginalised Indo and European histories and experiences in Trinidad. "Throughout, the author does very well to show how state control over mainstream media and other sites of cultural production has resulted in what s/he terms 'discursive isolation' (p. 12) where the Indo-origin/East Indian population of Trinidad is concerned.
I would certainly recommend publishing this article, but would suggest one key revision/rethink concerning the relationship between media,memory and identity." This (second response) was from a UK journal which took too long to respond, so you thought you'd try a "Caribbean" journal. Both are reputable, and like most journals, seek to be fair to authors by asking academics they think are their peers to review. From the remarks, I'd guess the Caribbean journal referees were UWI people. The UK ones, no idea. And here, the Caribbean journal bonks dey head. Or more accurately,my head. The disparity in reviews is inexplicable if academic quality is the issue. But not if the issue is the Caribbean journal editor who (presumably) chose the reviewers- specifically, I might have called the editor an imbecile, publicly. Had I known this individual was involved I wouldn't have submitted. Reviews are supposed to be blind, but given the dig about the "op-ed" thing, I'm reasonably sure the process was below-board in the Caribbean journal, even if anonymity was maintained.
The article theorises a relationship between ethnic nationalism, media, and collective memory-a relation many UWI academics can't even conceive. The Caribbean reviewers evaded the theory and played defence. It's a common reaction. I remember this from my postgrad seminars: hysteria when childish dogma is challenged. Luckily,my supervisor was a real historian, as was my external examiner, with no neuroses disguised as "academic seriousness." My own ennui aside, I wonder how many ideas/people meet this reception? I've encountered it before, about ten years ago regarding a paper on the now defunct CCA7. Its owner, Charlotte Elias, threatened to sue Randle Publishers and it was nixed. I've only been submitting academic work regularly for five years, and avoiding Caribbeanbased journals and publishers. I have three papers published this year-debunking the Trini "national literature"myth; exposing nationalist historians' and historiographers' dishonesty; demonstrating UWI's cluelessness re- garding cultural studies.Nice, uncontroversial stuff, but published in UK, European and US publications, though edited by UWI and foreign academics.
It's probably not coincidental that work which retheorises and reinterprets the Caribbean outside ethnic fairy-theories is rare in Caribbean-based publications. So it's not a region-wide conspiracy against me. (Not this time.) "It" might be one person (or more), or a subculture in regional academe which polices knowledge for reasons of crapaud-ness, cloaked in institutional anonymity. The consequences include doctors who sicken people, economists who sink economies, lecturers who kill imaginations, politicians who wreck societies. It starts with UWI cultural studies postgrads I've lectured to being unable to define capitalism, or culture. And the lecturers are worse than the students. After the 2007 election, Selwyn Ryan kindly allowed me to invite myself to a SALISES forum to discuss the role of media in that election. The "senior academics" didn't understand the basic terminology of media analysis-" framing;" "institutional capture;" "semiotics." I asked them if I was in a rumshop. These might have been the people who reviewed my paper. But there's another, simpler, possible explanation: I wrote a poor paper; I'm stupid, and UWI academics are smart; my other publications were flukes; the UK reviewers were incompetent, the Caribbean reviewers were competent and honest; and UWI academics' and graduates' creativity and inventiveness will save the region.