Abstract
Publish or perish is indeed the leitmotif in academia these days but what counts as ‘publish’ differs from discipline to discipline. The monograph is still of very strong standing in the humanities and in their strife to publish the coveted output, few question the format itself. Janneke Adema's book offers a welcome attempt to question the all too familiar conventions guiding the structure of most monographs. In her book, she aims to ‘explore, speculate on, and experiment with the future of the scholarly book’ (p. 2). She does not see the monograph as a fixed object but ‘as an elaborate set of scholarly practices, structures of knowledge production, and discursive formations, which together enact the dynamic and emergent materiality of this medium’ (p. 2). The book showcases a range of experiments in arts and humanities book publishing presenting radical new forms. Adema considers ‘more experimental, ethical, and critical futures for the monograph; futures in which scholars take greater responsibility for their continued engagement with the scholarly book's becoming’ (p. 3). The book is positioned within a wider framework critiquing ‘the idea of the human around which so much of the humanities has been built’ and connecting ‘to a larger movement toward formulating a posthumanities’ (p. 11). The book is split into Introduction and five substantial chapters on the most characteristic features of the discourse of book history; academic authorship; the commodification of the book object; experiments on radical open access book publishing and ‘liquid books and fluid humanities’ (p. 199).