I started the book fifteen years ago. The person most surprised that I finished it is me.
Main research question, elevator version: If you are a British explorer writing in nineteenth century Africa, how do local and regional non-western cultural forces, most of which lie outside your knowledge, influence the documentation you produce (at the material and discursive levels)?
Favorite section to write: Introduction. It was written last. When I completed it, I finally understood in full the argument I had been developing for fifteen years. #BetterLateThanNever
While living in Botswana in 2003-04, I discovered that I had a deep interest in colonial African history and in using the colonial archive to understand the development of that history from local African perspectives. That interest gave rise to the book.
My book answers the following question: How does someone who is a Victorianist by training write a book that does not shy away from diving into the particulars of a series of local African cultural contexts?
For years my book caused me all sorts of problems on the job market because people thought that a Victorianist writing about Africa was taking up an obscure subject. I was told that explicitly.
The biggest advantage I had in writing the book – as a Victorianist – was that I had lived in Botswana and could imagine people who lived in sub-Saharan Africa as people first, rather than as “discursive representations.”
In the middle of writing my book, I took about five years off so that I could run five major Livingstone Online projects concurrently. See if you can figure out which ones they are: Livingstone Online
For a book that is decidedly not about the digital humanities, I say quite a bit about them in the Introduction and Epilogue.
It took ten years and 242 jobs applications before I got my first tenure-track job. During that time – to stay viable professionally when I had no permanent job prospects and was thinking of switching careers – I published drafts of all five chapters as articles.
If a draft of each of my chapters was peer reviewed and published as an article, did that make my book a peer reviewed book even before the proposal went out for peer review?
In integrating five chapters previously published as articles into a book, I discovered that five articles without extensive revision do not a book make – just like four solo Beatle careers were not the Beatles.
I keep going back and forth as to whether Chapter Three or Chapter Four is the real breakthrough chapter in my book.
I completed five of the six chapters that I originally planned to write. Chapter Six haunts the book like a ghost, but only I can see it.
The ratio of my book is as follows: 67% text, 33% footnotes.
The longest chapter is 14,087 words (Chapter Four), the shortest 1,127 words (Glossary of Key Terms). Runner up for shortest is the Epilogue at 3,383; and runner up to that is Chapter Five at 6,309.
Chapter Four is 57% footnotes, 43% text. Also nine images. When I sent off the manuscript, my biggest fear was that the publisher would try to tamper with this chapter.
Chapter Four took the longest to write: five years.
The hardback print run is 110 copies and you won’t be able to afford a print copy. But you might be able to afford a digital copy - which I suppose is fitting for a Victorianist that took fifteen years to write his book, but amidst that got hired as a digital humanist. (You can also wait for the paperback in 2021 or email me for some book samples.)
Number of footnotes used on the entire Livingstone Online site: 0 (yes: zero).
Native American people who previously occupied the land on which I completed my book (Lincoln, NE): Očhéthi Šakówiŋ (Sioux), Pâri (Pawnee), and Jiwere (Otoe-Missouria).
African region about which I write extensively and hope to visit on my next trip to sub-Saharan Africa: the region east of Lake Tanganyika (present-day Tanzania).
Two African regions about which I write extensively but will most likely never visit due to significant regional conflicts: area north of Lake Albert (South Sudan); areas west and north-west of Lake Tanganyika (eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo).
My book includes 30 illustrations, over 10 of which are maps. One of the most pernicious ways by which British explorers appropriated African knowledge was cartography.
Foreign language knowledge that was most useful to me in researching the book: French and Swahili.
In my acknowledgments, inter alia, I thank the glorious summer of 2018 and the Cooper and Copple YMCAs of Lincoln, NE.
As I entered the final throes of writing the book and spent more and more time on the YMCA treadmill, my channel of choice became the Hallmark Channel. I have no explanation.
The last citation I added to the book was a reference to the article version of the first chapter that I wrote for the book. As things worked out, I never ended up using that chapter in the book, so this was my attempt to fit it in somehow.
I also turned another of the chapters that didn't make it into the book into an article. When I sent it off, that article sat with a journal for a year before being rejected. The next journal to which I sent the article accepted it after exactly one day, because the editor loved it. I won't tell you which article, but I will tell you that both journals are highly regarded in the field.
My book is intricately written. Throughout, I constantly reference other chapters using small caps: "see Chapter Two," etc. When I finished the book, I realized I was using these internal references just like relative hyperlinks because I am in a permanent digital state of mind thanks to eight years of Livingstone Online development.
If you count the title (or the first subtitle of the Introduction) as the first word of the book, and the last word of the Epilogue as the last word, my book begins and ends with the same word - just like James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.