Hardly a review of The NYT Review since Parul Sehgal doesn't shed light around the commissioning process. While reviews are often solicited from non-experts, African literature is almost always reviewed by white non-experts.
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nytimes.com/2021/02/26/boo…
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nytimes.com/2021/02/26/boo…
Somali writer Nuruddin Farah's novel North of Dawn was reviewed by Melanie Finn, self-described as 'I’m a writer, a mother, the founder and director of a small healthcare charity in the remote Tanzanian bush" melaniefinn.com/contact
Tsitsi Dangarembga's Mournable Body was reviewed by Alexandra Fuller, identified as "British-Rhodesian" writer. She didn't TD wrote a trilogy and didn't mention the second one, Book of Not claiming TD returned with novel after 30 years.
nytimes.com/2018/08/30/boo…
nytimes.com/2018/08/30/boo…
Maaza Mengiste's first novel was reviewed by someone who didn't finish the novel nor really notice the title of it. See the correction/apology. nytimes.com/2010/01/17/boo…
Nadifa Mohamed's 1st novel was reviewed by Lorraine Adams who missed the point "Had she dived deeply into just one city in this atlas of misery, Mohamed might have told us more about what it is like to be a scavenger child in Africa than this novel does."
nytimes.com/2010/08/29/boo…
nytimes.com/2010/08/29/boo…
SO MANY such examples can be dug up. The New York Times can have all kinds of reckonings around race and gender and sexuality but until the deeply incestuous and troubled review-commissioning processes are brought to light, there's no review of The Review
Book reviews are the singularly most important genre. They offer the anchor to the work, they are often the only thing readers use to decide whether to buy a book or not. They fundamentally determine the market, especially when its super powerful platforms like NYT
My Cold War book breaks down the nexus of agent-editor-reviewer in Anglo-American publishing today and how we've inherited an intensely ideological legacy around compartmentalizing, canonizing, validating certain books/writers and keeping certain books out of official circuits
I know one answer is to build platforms, blogs, websites and establish alternative circuits. I used to do that with the reviews page on Warscapes for years and by reviewing under-radar books when I can. But the big white platforms still overdetermine this, its super frustrating
*she didn't appear to know nor mention Dangarembga's second novel "Book of Not"
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