The anatomy of textbook publishing: complex publication process, lack of respect steer many scholars away from writing textbooks - Faculty Club - Statistical Data Included

Black Issues in Higher Education, June 20, 2002 by Kendra Hamilton, Ronald Roach

Absolutely not, says Dr. Molefi Kete Asante of Temple University's renowned African American Studies department. That's why Asante chose to publish his own: African American History: A Journey of Liberation (1993), which has won a broad audience among high schools, historically Black colleges and universities, and even Research I institutions.

"I wrote that book because, as a scholar surveying the field, it was clear that our mythic quest as a people had never been dealt with. And that is our mythic quest as a journey of liberation, in contrast to the American quest of conquest," Asante says.

Dr. Floyd Coleman, a professor of art at Howard University who is collaborating on an art history textbook with a team that includes the MacArthur-winning photographer and art historian Deborah Willis, has a similar motivation. The standard text in his field mentions only "five or six" African American artists and misreads their work because it insists on tacking them on to the European and European American canons, Coleman explains.

Even worse, in scholarly treatments of the artists of the 1960s, conservative scholars are "gentrifying" the history of the period, Coleman says. "Faith Ringgold, Martin Puryear, the late John Biggers, Charles White--those names might be mentioned in discussions of social commentary. But in general, the history of the period is being `whitened' and the contributions of important artists are being forgotten."

But while passion provides the fuel, success is due, at least in part, to the "point of career issue" described by Dr. Martin Davidson, an associate professor at the University of Virginia's Darden Business School.

Writing a textbook is "the kind of thing that when you're younger, you absolutely wouldn't want to do because you'd jeopardize your chances of tenure," he explains. "But when you're older, you would want to do it because you're established and you're looking to those royalty checks."

Coleman emphatically agrees. "See, I'm old now," he says, only half-jokingly, "so the timing is just right."

IGNORING THE RULES

There's another avenue as well--trod by scholars who simply ignore the academy's rules and carve out nontraditional career paths for themselves. Deborah Willis, the MacArthur fellow, is an excellent example.

Formerly a curator of exhibitions with the Smithsonian Institution's Anacostia Museum, over the past 20 years Willis has written or co-written a series of pioneering books in the study of race in photography, including this year's The Black Female Body: A Photographic History; Reflections in Black, A History of Black Photographers, 1840 to the Present (2000); and Picturing Us: African-American Identity in Photography (1994).

Willis, who started doctoral studies at George Mason University after she was already an established name in her field, says she began writing because no one had written the kinds of books she longed to read.

"Now I'm meeting people in American studies, history, art history, cultural studies who are adopting Picturing Us, because it crosses racial and disciplinary boundaries, allows (scholars and students) to have a conversation about imaging, family, politics, gender--really fills the gap in the topics we're discussing now in photography and history," Willis explains. "I'm getting wonderful, warm e-mails from people saying, `My classes loved this book. Thank you.'"