I really enjoy reading. I also enjoy listening to other people’s opinions on things I’d like to read, which is why I’ve recently gotten into the podcast Literary Friction, a monthly podcast hosted by Octavia Bright, a writer and academic, and Carrie Plitt, a literary agent. This month’s podcast featured Kiley Reid, author of Such a Fun Age, a book that I’ve been dying to read ever since reading Vanity Fair‘s review whilst trying desperately to distract myself a particularly uncomfortable flight. What I expected to learn during this podcast was the ways in which Such a Fun Age addresses postcolonialism in 2015 United States; what I actually got (or, rather, what I received in addition), was a peek into the politics of literary criticism.
Most people read books that receive strong reviews. This isn’t just a result of the review itself (i.e., how positively or negatively the book is regarded), but also of the publicity a piece of authorship receives when it is reviewed. What I didn’t fully realize (but upon further consideration, it makes sense), is that there are a few, extremely powerful individuals who control which books receive such publicity by mainstream reviewers. It is to this fact that Literary Friction alerted me, and now I can’t seem to stop thinking about it. How are books chosen for review, and who is curating my reading list? Let’s see.
In Information Inequality: The Deepening Social Crisis in America, Herbert I. Schiller remarks upon the difficulty with which alternative (in many case, minority) publishers and authors are faced. According to Schiller, art reviews have always, for the most part, rested in the hands of the elite; in other words, in the hands of upper-class, white men. Schiller argues that the rise of commercialism has only reinforced this disparity, creating a culture in which authors associated with major publishing powerhouses receive significantly more reviews (and therefore purchases) than authors associated with alternative publishers. Exacerbating this disparity is the racial, class, and gender divide that separate “alternative publishers” from their mainstream counterparts. According to Schiller, “books that approach social questions from a critical perspective are rarely selected for review.” So when “alternative” authors (or authors who do not represent the upper-class, white, and often masculine perspective) write about their social experiences, they are often automatically siphoned off into the category of “rarely selected for review,” an irony if one considers the fact that writing prides itself, in many cases, for its ability to partake in the free flow of uncensored ideas. Perhaps this is a new form of censorship.
In 1983, Joanna Russ published a book entitled, How to Suppress Women’s Writing. In it, she argues that women’s (and especially minority women’s) work is suppressed via two systemic, masculine processes: (1) informal prohibitions to prevent the work from being authored in the first place, and (2) “denying the authorship of the work in question… belittlement of the work itself in various ways, isolation of the work from the tradition to which it belongs… assertions that the work indicates the author’s bad character… and simply ignoring the works, the workers, and the whole tradition.” It is this final tactic upon which I would like to focus: “ignoring the works, the workers, and the whole tradition.” Despite the fact that How to Suppress Women’s Writing was published in 1983, this sentiment still rings true in our contemporary literary scene. Today, however, we are learning that in addition to being gendered, our process for reviewing and publishing books is also racialized. According to one British author cited in piece by The Guardian, “I remember being told to make sure one half of a love relationship was white, because white readers would have problems reading books with ‘foreign’ settings or all-black casts.” Although this singular narrative account does not represent the experiences of all minority authors, it does demonstrate that a masculine, racialized culture dominates our present literary culture. As one NPR reporter puts it: “Russ’s plaiting of particulars makes a vindicating case: What the powerful fear, they will vilify; what they cannot understand, they will dismiss.”
So what does this mean, and what do we do? In regards to the first of these questions, I posit that although the gender disparity in the publishing and writing industries has become more level, the disparity in executive positions still exists (a study by Lee & Low, a multicultural children’s book publisher, “found that 78% of publishing staff overall were female. At executive or board level, however, 40% of respondents identified as men”). This means that the true decision-making power remains in the hands of a privileged few who dictate to which books the most funding goes. Furthermore, of this proportion of women in publishing, the vast majority are white women, a fact that no doubt influences the success of minority authors who may be submitting certain pieces to an agency. According to Schiller, it is this difference in funding for advertising that significantly impacts the likelihood of a book to be reviewed by a major review section. So what we’re seeing is that the books we read are filtered through a masculine, racialized lens, effectively invisibilizing authors whose works do not fit the stereotypes with which their identities are associated by the mainstream (read: white, male) norm. Yikes.
And now for the second question: What do we do? At the conclusion of Literary Friction, Octavia Bright and Carrie Plitt offered us a glimpse of hope lying in the potential for social media as a democratizing force. From their perspective, readers have more publicity power than ever before, which means that individuals can promote books just as (if not more) successfully than major publishing houses and review sections. While I for one am always wary of such proclamations of social media’s populist power, I do find it comforting that, if I am so compelled, I can exercise agency within this literary system by seeking out minority authorship and reviewers that shine a light on those works most frequently ignored due to the “alternative” perspectives they present. I’m hopeful that others will choose to do the same.
AMC
Sources:
https://electricliterature.com/how-to-suppress-womens-criticism/
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/apr/15/report-books-world-ethnic-minorities-london-book-fair
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