Ghost in the Machine: Kitchen Table Press and the Third Wave Anthology That Vanished

Abstract

Ghost in the MachineKitchen Table Press and the Third Wave Anthology That Vanished Jennifer Gilley (bio) What a text says is forever linked to the mundane realities underlying the physical product that gives the text a material embodiment. —G.Thomas Tanselle1 Simone Murray, in the introduction to her 2004 book Mixed Media: Feminist Presses and Publishing Politics, argues for the importance of a nascent academic field she names feminist publishing studies, calling for it as a necessary intervention into the already extant fields of book history and women's studies. While book historians like Tanselle (see epigraph) had pointed out the relationship between meaning-making and the physical and economic process of publication, feminist scholars had not yet paid a lot of critical attention to the "mundane realities" of publishing that undergirds feminist knowledge production. Speaking of the books that made women's studies possible by providing the course content, Murray writes, "It is exceptional that a field such as women's studies, which has paid rigorous attention to the means by which academic disciplines are constructed and imbued with intellectual authority, should have failed to address in-depth attention to the political and commercial realities underpinning its own development."2 There was, in fact, a developing body of scholarship on feminist print culture by 2004.3 Yet it remained largely under the radar, with much of the material relating to book publishing buried in dissertations.4 Therefore Murray rightfully declares that there is "a paucity of book-length research on the subject of feminist publishing."5 She goes on to describe a litany of other scholars (Florence Howe, Dale Spender, Cheris Kramarae, Stacey Young) who had also lamented this lack of historical attention to feminist publishing studies and concludes that "by a curious turn of academic events, feminist publishing begins to take on the trappings of a phantom discipline—commented upon as much for its absence as for its contributions."6 To begin to flesh out this "phantom discipline," Murray [End Page 141] advocates for "a dynamic blend of feminist theory and publishing practicality, grounded in varied and detailed case studies, [which] is required to do justice to the complexities of the modern feminist publishing experience."7 A growing number of scholars have heeded this call, creating a burgeoning literature in feminist print culture studies.8 In addition to exploring case studies of feminist texts, presses, and periodicals that actually exist(ed) for what they have to tell us about how feminist knowledge production interacts with and is influenced by the material realities of publishing under capitalism, Murray urges us to look for the "hiatuses, disruptions, and silences in the [publishing] process."9 In other words, what books never got published, what points of view were either discarded or reframed, what presses never got off the ground? These sorts of stories are harder to tell because there may be little evidence of what never existed, but Murray warns that "the ghosts of these silences and hiatuses haunt feminist publishing endeavors."10 Alexis Pauline Gumbs, writing about black feminist publishing projects that never materialized, feels the weight of these untold stories as well: "And just because something does not happen does not mean that it doesn't exist, as a marker of the edge of the world, as a warning, as a shadow, as a trace, as a ghost. What if haunting is a form of survival? In that case we might want to look more closely at the plans that never came to be, what happens to books that are never published."11 In this context I offer the case study of one such "ghost" book: an anthology commissioned by Barbara Smith of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press that was to be titled The Third Wave: Feminist Perspectives on Racism. Smith intended The Third Wave to continue the work of Kitchen Table's previously published anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color in defining a new path forward for feminism that foregrounded race, racism, third world feminism, and transnational feminism. The book took six years to create and seemed due to be published around 1993. At the 1993 American Booksellers Association...