THERE ARE MANY PEOPLE I WISH TO NUMBER IN MY SONG of thanks, starting with the following for their help and comments on different incarnations of various chapters in the book: Anjali Prabhu, Ananya Kabir, Stuart Murray, Tejumola Olaniyan, Abiola Irele, Mark Wormald, Drew Milne, Mary Jacobus, Simon Baron-Cohen, Joanna Lewis, Graham Pechey, Harriet Deacon, Benita Parry, Dickson Eyoh, Alissa Trotz, Sara Abraham, and Fiifi Jehu-Appiah. Brian Corman was an interlocutor and facilitator without even knowing it.
I wish also to number my many students at Pembroke College and the Faculty of English at Cambridge, on whom many of the ideas expressed here were first tried out. Special thanks are due to Henry Louis Gates Jr. and the staff of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African American Research at Harvard University for a very pleasant sabbatical year in 2004. The institute’s regular Wednesday colloquium was the first place I tried out my notion of aesthetic nervousness. Abiola Irele (again), Emmanuel Akyeampong, and John Mugane were great hosts and companions and made my stay an enjoyable and productive one.
A very special thanks to Sunil Agnani, for the opportunity to present an early version of the chapter on J. M. Coetzee at the University of Michigan, and to David Theo Goldberg and Philomena Essed, for inviting me to make a presentation drawing on the first chapter at the Cloning Cultures conference in 2005. To the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences, I express warm gratitude for the opportunity to present the central points of my research as my inaugural lecture to the Academy in May 2006 (and to Agya Appiah, for the timely cufflinks on the day of the inaugural lecture). Boafo-Gyimah and Abdul Wahab Musah of the Ghana Center for Democratic Development (CDD) I also thank, for arranging for me to meet with advocacy groups and other interested parties on the historic passing of the Ghana Persons with Disabilities Act.
The anonymous readers of Columbia University Press did an amazing job of joining the dots between the suspension marks in my thought and pushing me to examine much further the questions raised in the manuscript. Their comments were both critical and highly productive. I want to thank them and also my editor, Jennifer Crewe, whose gentle but persistent pressure brought this project to a happy and timely conclusion.
I swell to full-throated thanks when turning to Valentina for her forbearance in a time of transition; to Barry Rosen for conversation, conviviality, and great friendship; and also to Antonella Rosen for her hospitality.
Jijo, Abena, and Kamau sing with me on all my daily rounds, but I wish to number them especially for providing me with the primary audience for my storytelling impulses, something that I use to join my own childhood to theirs and to that of my parents. Hopefully, they will continue the song.