1. On #Publishingsowhite and Why Race in Publishing Matters: A Thread.
So I literally turned in my book on cultural appropriation to my editors yesterday. This is a very small sample of what I wrote re: American Dirt.
So I literally turned in my book on cultural appropriation to my editors yesterday. This is a very small sample of what I wrote re: American Dirt.
2. ""Researchers at the Stanford University Literary Lab discovered that not only does 86 percent of the publishing industry identify as White, but both book acquisition rates and book advances are lower for writers of color because publishers don’t consider their target audience
3. significant enough to generate popular interest. This assessment is based on the fact that the majority of “comps” or “comparative” titles editors use to determine a publication’s market value are White-authored.
4. What people are angry about is that a marketplace determines whose stories sound “authentic” enough to deserve money and a readership.
5. They’re angry that having a Latinx name apparently means having only one subject matter and political opinion, and that editors don’t seem eager to prove this assumption false.
6. For them, Cummins’s Whiteness was exactly what made this novel so attractive to its publishing house, because it meant a larger and ethnically wider audience, and it pandered to a readership that didn’t want to be politically or aesthetically challenged.
7. The publishing world’s embrace of American Dirt absolutely occurs at the expense of Latinx authors, since Cummins is granted the appearance of more creative and political freedom.
8. By making American Dirt an Oprah’s Book Club selection, or pushing it to get large trade reviews, or placing it prominently in bookstores, the publishing world reinforces the belief that people don’t need or want to hear what Latinx authors, and Latinx people, have to say.
9. If you and I can agree that the human imagination is never free of human bodies, X, we need also to recognize that literary texts can never be sheared of their historical context, aesthetic affiliations, and political readings.
10. When critics accuse American Dirt of being culturally appropriative, it’s because they understand how literature has been historically used to enforce particular patterns of power.
11. It is not the depiction of race on the page, but the ways colonial history continues to shape publication policy that offends people. We might call the publication and promotion of American Dirt then a kind of marketplace colonialism."
