RT = Endorsement

Academia is not immune to today's breakneck pace of content generation and dispersal. I confess to feeling pulled in that direction, devoting far more of my reading during "work hours" to news and social media than I do to journals, once the serial currency of our professional identities. Where that currency hasn't been depreciated by my attention being drawn elsewhere, it's been replaced by non-peer-reviewed yet just-as-smart para-academic criticism on blogs, websites, and even podcasts. There are enough of these online media to keep me busy for what seems like eternity. And yet, if I'm honest, these are more gratifying to engage with when it comes to the glut that is contemporary culture. Anne Anlin Cheng's review of the adaptation of Crazy Rich Asians for Los Angeles Review of Books is all I need to grasp the affordances and limitations of that movie.1 Post45 Contemporaries' roundup of both Ferrante and Knausgaard is all I need to say with confidence: Those are not my research questions.2 The academic response to cultural glut ought to be public engagement, not critical legitimation. Sometimes all that needs to be said about a contemporary text can be said in a text.

So where do journals fit into this contemporary media environment? It's entirely too cynical to say: Peer-reviewed articles are recognized as an essential component of the tenure dossier; thus, I'll write them only insofar as that's what I "need" to do for the job. There's something disheartening about this view, stemming as it does from an impoverished sense of intellectual commitment—what it means to work through, clarify, and maybe even defend one's ideas in a scholarly forum. My own, more affirmative, approach has been to understand articles' strengths as an intellectual genre and to see where those may be integrated into our contemporary media environment.

With bravura readings nested in Facebook posts and DH data summarized in the Atlantic, what's left for journal articles, it seems to me, is the kind of contextual detail that makes the question, "So what?," resonate among academic peers and institutional committees alike. This has been one of articles' longstanding strengths, requiring as it does the usual vetting of sources and honing of argument, and I think it remains unsurpassed by other forms of critical writing. The problem is that airing this contextual detail, and advocating for why it matters beyond academia, is harder than ever in our contemporary media environment. Think about how many times you've seen a friend post something to the effect of, "Check it out: my new article appears in such-and-such journal this week." You "liked" the post, and then gladly skipped "checking it out." It's this imperative to "check something out" that I think is the problem. It accedes too much to the platform without standing for something, without conveying why I should care. Like it or not, we may be at a point in our media diet where we need to be told why we should care.

That's exactly what I've been trying to do with my writing on Twitter. I'm often amazed when I encounter academics' accounts that have 20, 30, or even upwards of 90K tweets. I cannot conceive even retweeting that much information, fingers constantly moving over my screen, day in and day out, year after year. My own earnest ethos recommends that I only tweet what I mean, and my self-effacing nature tells me that very few people really care what I have to say. My instincts, then, are already academic. But I also study enough media theory to know it's pointless to stick my head in the stand, pretending Twitter and other platforms aren't there. Even if I weren't on it, my name would be on occasion, and, more importantly, so would the scholarly issues I care about.

It's because those issues are there, deserve a hearing, and require more than journalistic coverage that I'm on Twitter. And in order to engage those issues, I've taken to distilling my academic article-writing into the 280 characters of a tweet. I started doing this, not coincidentally, while retweeting a Public Books essay on the black experimental novelist William Melvin Kelley.3

William Melvin Kelley flew under the radar of white publishers & BAM alike; no surprise he coined "woke" when no one knew how to read him https://t.co/du3zsK3Tu0

— Kinohi Nishikawa (@kinohin) May 26, 2017

Like Public Books, I had been interested in calling attention to this unsung genius of American letters. But rather than merely repeat the essay's key insight, which would simply entail retweeting without comment, I inserted the sentence, "William Melvin Kelley flew under the radar of white publishers & BAM alike; no surprise he coined 'woke' when no one knew how to read him." There's actually a great deal of scholarship behind this claim: it's based on my work with Kelley's papers at Emory University's special collections library,  tracking his critical reception over the years, and on knowing the specific contours of black literary politics in the 1960s.4 I try to convey all of that while still nodding to what the Public Books piece is about (on his coining the term "woke"). The tweet may not have been a hit—as suggested by a paltry 2 retweets and 10 likes—but it was a start.

Since then, I've tried to hone my article-adjacent tweets, using an extant story, preferably with an image already embedded, to highlight my scholarly ideas and my takeaway from the piece being retweeted. It's this intertwining of idea and takeaway that I think has resonated with other users. In a retweet of a New York Times story on Malcolm X's papers,5 for example, I took coverage of a new archival discovery and turned it into broader appreciation for the work the Schomburg Center has done for the idea of the "black archive," which I implicitly argue is our collective heritage.

It can't be stressed enough how important and right it is that these fragments have been acquired by ⁦@SchomburgCenter⁩, whose stewardship of Black archives for the common and public good is unparalleled. #MalcolmX #BlackArchive https://t.co/MWT9D7HeMC

— Kinohi Nishikawa (@kinohin) July 27, 2018

You can see me pivot on the Times in my choice of words: yes, the Malcolm X "fragments" are fascinating, but the equally "important" and "right" thing about this is the fact that the Schomburg acquired them. Though the point stands on its own, I also composed it, in my head, as a rebuttal to the scholarly fad of bemoaning the incompleteness or partiality of the black archive. My own work has resisted this inward-turning trend, as I have tried to value archives for the kind of knowledge they contain and to recognize the possibilities for social change that their preservation paradoxically reveals. I consider my tweet, then, a veiled affirmation of intertwined points: that historians of race have been well aware of the archive's limitations yet continue to write nuanced scholarship, and that archivists themselves are invested in expanding our sense of what counts, or ought to count, as preservable.6 On this issue, you could say I'm fighting my battles (while still untenured) by simply promoting a different view of the #BlackArchive.

My most successful translation of academic knowledge production into a tweet came on September 2.

In the history of Black-owned book publishing in the United States, there's one name that stands out for its intellectual verve, literary quality, innovative design, and, above all, longevity: THIRD WORLD PRESS -- helmed by Haki R. Madhubuti since 1967 https://t.co/m2yG7poQkC

— Kinohi Nishikawa (@kinohin) September 3, 2018

Retweeting a fairly straightforward profile of Haki Madhubuti that appeared in Chicago's local independent paper,7 I wrote:

In the history of Black-owned book publishing in the United States, there's one name that stands out for its intellectual verve, literary quality, innovative design, and, above all, longevity: THIRD WORLD PRESS - helmed by Haki R. Madhubuti since 1967.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that this got retweeted by the journalist and social justice activist Sean King. No doubt he amplified my reach exponentially. The key, I think, is, again, my pivot: where the Chicago Reader focuses mainly on Madhubuti (and the interview they conducted with him), I choose to highlight the press he co-founded and what has made its longevity both notable and extraordinary. In other words, I push my own act of amplification, albeit of a rhetorical variety. And behind this act, it should be noted, is nearly a decade of studying the Black Arts movement, and, more recently, of writing journal articles on the movement as a defining feature of black publishing history.8 I punctuate my statement with a nod to the true subject of the article, but the thrust of my tweet is to emphasize what I imagine Madhubuti would call his life's work.

Reflecting on my Twitter writing for this forum, I've come to ask myself the following: What if we could imagine the extended labor of writing journal articles as preparatory, as only the first step in a broader and, yes, deeper engagement with public discourse? How might writing an article be seen not as an end itself but as a process of identifying what matters most about what one is researching? Maybe the most important thing to come out of writing an article in today's media environment is learning how to compose its abstract and advance its keywords.

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Kinohi Nishikawa is Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies at Princeton University. His first book, Street Players: Black Pulp Fiction and the Making of a Literary Underground, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2018.

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