I'm honored and excited to be working with Zed. It's a workers' collective in the UK "committed to increasing awareness of important international issues and to promoting diversity, alternative voices and progressive social change." The two scholars they found to review my proposal and chapter gave prompt and very critical, helpful feedback, and they publish all of their books in paper.
This will be "my" (explanation of the quotation marks to follow) seventh book, and my views of having a book published have changed quite a bit in the twenty years since Harvard University Press published the first.
First, although having books published by presses considered reputable is a great way to get credibility in the academic world, very few bookstores, newspapers, radio stations, or readers outside of one's immediate family or narrow slices of academia are interested. The consequences are underwhelming.
Second, one's book is not really one's own. Africa Existential will not really be "my" book. It has already been improved immeasurably by two very bright readers. It will receive, I hope and expect, a good deal of additional attention from those readers as well as a general editor and a copy editor, people who will make the book more logical, compelling, and readable and save me from embarrassing errors. The book is also the work of many hands in a more general sense. I have read hundreds if not thousands of accounts of Africa and watched many films. Everything I have to say is, in a very real sense, second hand. Not all of these contributions will show up in the references. I have had the pleasure of visiting Africa several times myself and am friends with many people from Africa and many Americans who have traveled to and thought about Africa. All of these experiences and people have shaped and will continue to shape "my" manuscript. Writing a book, furthermore, requires a vast support network in all sorts indirect ways. Wendy and Peter, my immediate family, are very supportive. I was raised by bookish working-class parents who had a mania for education that dozens of dedicated teachers nourished. Scores of librarians have assisted in the research itself, and vast, modern mechanisms of education, communication, and food distribution that only a tiny sliver of people in the history of the world have enjoyed have made it possible to set aside thousands of hours of time to work on this project and to use that time with a degree of efficiency unavailable to scholars even a generation ago.
Thirdly, I have learned that a book is never definitive. Our intellects our weak, our reach is modest. Every subject is a vast ocean. We do not master such vastness and complexity. Even those who spend decades at a given subject are only dipping their toes in here and there, exploring a few samples through distorted lenses. We therefore are always writing "a" history of something, never "the" history of anything. We must agree with Job: "Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know."
One has to wonder, then, if publishing a book is worth the countless hours of research and writing and rewriting that go into it, hours that might be more responsibly spent at more socially constructive and useful tasks, and I wouldn't be surprised at all if this turns out to be my last one. Still, for someone who spends much of his time trying to figure out what makes the world tick, it's a great privilege to have one's thoughts--refined by others--recorded and dispersed, their many shortcomings not withstanding. .
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