Ebony Accents in the Ivory Tower - academic publishing

Black Issues Book Review, Sept, 2001 by Angela Dodson

The only two historically black university presses in the U.S. have aggressive plans despite tough times for general academic presses

While academic books do not often make best-seller lists, they are the titles that push the intellectual envelope and challenge what we know or believe about the world. Their ideas resonate in scholarly circles and eventually penetrate the general media. University presses have provided initial exposure to leading academic stars such as Cornel West, Henry Louis Gates Jr. and historian Darlene Clark Hine.

Indeed university presses have been the primary incubators for much of the important scholarship and research by and about African Americans. The 1970s boom in black studies encouraged major presses at predominantly white universities to publish a wealth of course materials. And in 1972, Howard University became the first historically black institution to launch an academic press to serve this niche. (Charles F. Harris, later to make his mark in commercial publishing when he founded Amistad Press, was Howard University Press's first director and led it for 15 years.) But interest in African American studies declined in the 1980s only to be renewed in the 1990s. But despite the fact that the financial year ending in June 2001 has been reported to be the worst in recent memory for university press publishing in general, African-American studies titles are expected to remain strong sellers in the foreseeable future.

Consequently, although Howard University Press has experienced a hiatus in recent years under an interim director, it is reviving and relaunching its publications program under a recently appointed and energetic new permanent director, D. Kamili Anderson. And in the last two years another leading black campus, Clark Atlanta University, has created a new press from the ground up with plans for a gradually expanding list.

One of the trend-watchers for academic presses overall is Peter Givler, executive director of the Association of American University Presses (AAUP), which represents 119 member/publishers. "Our members have done a very strong job in publishing books about the whole range of African American studies," Givler says. "I started in textbook publishing in the early 1970s, when there was a kind of boom in African American studies departments, and many commercial publishers jumped in with textbooks. Then the enrollments began to sag in those courses, and most of the commercial publishers pulled out. The university presses, however, have continued right on through market ups and downs."

Givler cites the buzz on a controversial work like Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785-1985) by Martin Bernal (Rutgers University Press, 1989) as a early marker of reviving broader interest in African American titles during the `90s.

Among recent African American books generating buzz in the academic world, Givler cites plans by the University of Missouri Press for the sixteen-volume Collected Works of Langston Hughes, a series begun in the spring of 2000. He also points to The Harvard Guide to African-American History by Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham (editor), et. al.; and Ira Berlin's Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America, both from Harvard University Press.

University presses turn out about 700 scholarly journals, and between 9,000 to 10,000 books per year, or ten percent of the books published in the United States annually. According to AAUP, their combined gross sales adds up to $400 million. The AAUP has received a grant from the Mellon Foundation to work with Fordham University's Graduate School of Business on a study of issues facing their presses, including a survey of titles and categories being published. One question the AAUP hopes the study will answer is to better measure recent university press book output in various categories including African-American studies and general literary fiction.

The Black Campus Presses

Most University presses produce books that are largely read by other academics, often for adoption as textbooks. They are usually printed in small batches--editions of a few thousand copies, not the millions that best-sellers or even commercially published, general textbooks may yield. The presses themselves are nonprofit entities, heavily subsidized by their universities.

Strong financial backing from their respective universities is the main reason Howard University Press is able to start up again after years of limited operation, and Clark Atlanta's operation could begin from scratch.

D. Kamili Anderson, the new director of the Howard University Press, took over in December 2000, after the death of its previous director, Ed Gordon. Only a handful of books have been produced in recent years through Gordon's illness and death. "Our future will be about starting over and rebuilding'" said Anderson.

"Back in the 1970s, when Howard University Press was first established, the idea of scholarly presses seriously focussing on a list of books about issues that affect black people and other minorities was not a widely subscribed idea. We felt that it was important to put ourselves out there in the scholarly realm."