I was like, “Look, I don’t think these parts are working, but I also have way more of this other stuff than I planned-I think this is going to be much longer than I thought. I talked to my editor about that as I was doing this process. Yeah, I think I signed it at 80,000 words, and I turned in a quarter million words. I initially sold a much shorter book but there was so much information I was finding.Ģ50, 300 pages. There was so much more of it than I planned, and I also didn’t originally see the book at 700 pages. But the history I was finding was so great. People who grew up with me or know my past will be like, “Oh, wasn’t your first job working for an orange farmer? Didn’t you work at the Score Educational Tutoring Center in high school?" I didn’t like writing it and it wasn’t lining up against the history I was finding very well. And people who know me will notice those parts. Yeah, there was some scaffolding of my childhood writing and reflections on experiences that was originally there, and then I pulled it out. I was going to ask about what you initially proposed and how it felt when you got into the brass tacks of writing. I tried to bait and switch in the earlier version of the book, and it wasn’t very good. And now it’s become very professionalized within academia in some ways. I feel like in the past, writers had more cultural authority to just say what they thought or do the work they think. I’m in my mid 30s, I’ve been writing professionally for the public for over ten years now, and people still consider me to be very young. But I also think we’ve been channeled into that kind of writing because it’s very strange. A lot of writers in my cohort do that kind of writing very well and I admire it. And that’s how I originally sold the book, it was part memoir, part history of Palo Alto, and my childhood interspersed with the history of Palo Alto. What are the makings of that kind of book and how do you identify it?Īs someone without a graduate degree, the easiest way to write a serious book, or acquire the authority to publish one on a historical topic, is to pick a subject that you have a personal relationship with that you can write your personal history inside. I was planning on writing a communist book, so I had to find a way to write a communist book that a publisher who could pay me enough to live on would want to publish. I only write things that I believe I’m a communist. I’ve been able to do it twice so far, which is not a lot of times, but enough to make it your job. Well, for me, it's a little more material than that because I have to come up with a book that my agent can sell to a publisher that can pay me enough money to live, because this is my job. When you were conceptualizing writing Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, were you initially thinking about addressing the limits of mainstream publishing? Specifically reckoning with the politics of the new West and the state as a colonial settlement, we also mused on the role of Apple within Silicon Valley, the forever governor Stanford Leland, and the effects of cultural amnesia as an economic export. In this conversation we focused on the foundational capitalist railroad era, drawing from Harris' research on Palo Alto to dissect labor geographies between China and California. Harris’ materialist analysis frames and re-casts prevailing narratives surrounding the development of the United States within a global economic context, offering an incisive Marxist reading of the contemporary history of California. He is a journalist, critic, and editor at The New Inquiry. Malcolm Harris is the author of Kids These Days: The Making of Millenials (2017), Shit Is Fucked Up and Bullshit: History Since the End of History (2020), and most recently, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World (2023). Malcolm Harris in conversation with Emmanuel Olunkwa
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