Who Runs the Publishing Industry?

UPDATE: Jonathon Sturgeon has just posted a piece on Flavorwire comparing the publishing industry to the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences, and gives Counternarratives a shout-out in the process.

The semester has begun, Blizzard Jonas and all, and I can already see my blogging pace dwindling, so I am going to try to follow a plan I set out a few years ago but have never followed, which is to maintain my blogging activity by posting micro introductions to interesting things I find on the web, and just let the articles speak for themselves. (I also hope to do this with the stubs of pieces I've begun but not finished in the recent past.)

Marlon James at the Man Booker Prize ceremony

So here goes. Last year Marlon James, author of several novels, including the 2015 Man Booker Prize-winning novel A Brief History of Seven Killings (Riverhead, 2014), stated at a Guardian-sponsored event in London that the publishing industry "panders to that archetype of the white woman, that long-suffering, astringent prose set in suburbia. You know, 'older mother or wife sits down and thinks about her horrible life'."

He went on to say:

[B]ecause white women readers dominate the market, “the male editors will only accept one type of story. Everyone knows what a New Yorker story will look like. I could have been published 10 times over – I knew that there was a certain kind of prose I could have written; intense scenes that hinted, rather than explored.”

In its report on James's remarks, linked above, the Guardian noted that "Women, particularly white women, make up the vast majority of regular fiction readers, purchasing two thirds of all books sold in the UK. Almost 50% of women classify themselves as avid readers, compared to 26% of men." He expanded a bit on these assertions in a highly entertaining and informative Guardian Books podcast.

James was responding, in fact, to a Tin House essay, "On Pandering," by Claire Vaye Watkins, who received multiple prizes for her 2010 collection Battleborn. Watkins' is a rich, exploratory attempt to make sense of her experiences as a white woman writing in a tradition that usually valorizes white men, abets sexism and racism, and consciously and unconsciously urges women, including white women, to write against their perspectives and themselves.

Claire Vaye Watkins

To quote her:

The stunning truth is that I am asking, deep down, as I write, What would Philip Roth think of this? What would Jonathan Franzen think of this? When the answer is probably: nothing. More staggering is the question of why I am trying to prove myself to writers whose work, in many cases, I don’t particularly admire? I recently finished Roth’s Indignation with nothing more lasting than a sincere curiosity as to whether Roth is aware that these days even nice girls give blow jobs.

I am trying to understand a phenomenon that happens in my head, and maybe in yours too, whereby the white supremacist patriarchy determines what I write.

I wrote Battleborn for white men, toward them. If you hold the book to a certain light, you’ll see it as an exercise in self-hazing, a product of working-class madness, the female strain. So, natural then that Battleborn was well-received by the white male lit establishment: it was written for them. The whole book’s a pander. Look, I said with my stories: I can write old men, I can write sex, I can write abortion. I can write hard, unflinching, unsentimental. I can write an old man getting a boner!

In The New Republic, Phoebe Maltz Bovy took issue with James's assessment, penning a response, "Don't Let Men Attack Pumpkins Spice Literature,"filled with links to others responding to Watkins' essay. In it she asserted that James was half-right, and was focusing on literary sexism. She contrasted his take with freelance writer Nicole Perkins' reading of "On Pandering" in the Los Angeles Times, and stressed the need for a more intersectional understanding of the literary marketplace, and for the voices of women of color to be heard (yes!). (NYRB critic, author, translator and blogger Tim Parks offered thoughts about conformity in literature that sidestepped any discussion of race or gender, but which I thought connected at certain points with what all these critics were saying.)

There have been many other essays and articles on the lack of diversity and need for equity in publishing, including in children's literature. There are even organizations, like We Need Diverse Books, dedicated to highlighting and transforming this situation. A few years ago, a former student and I attended a great workshop in Brooklyn on diversifying children's literature, especially in the speculative fiction and fantasy genres. Shortly before he passed away the late, highly acclaimed writer Walter Dean Myers and his son Christopher--who used the term "apartheid"--published essays in the New York Times calling for diversity in children's literature. But the need across all genres remains, and not just in the US, but in other plural Western societies, like the UK.

Yesterday, Electronic Literature posted an article based on a new publishing diversity baseline survey by children's book publisher Lee and Low showing that the US and Canadian publishing industries are overwhelmingly white and dominated by cis-gender, abled heterosexual women. Moreover, executive level publishing jobs US and Canadian publishing executives are even more concentrated in the hands of straight, cis-gender, abled white women. Shades of Hollywood, though with a gender reversal. These are the decision-makers in the book biz.

These facts suggest that real diversity, beyond lip service, is necessary if the publishing even wants to begin to reflect the reality of the society around them; James' critique has a basis in the sheer facts of who runs the industry; and that Watkins' understanding of the internalization of male-centered values extends beyond writers, to the people and institutions that put books into readers' hands.

I'll conclude by saying that my own experience as an author has tended more towards what Marlon James says, though I have never let that stop me. In fact, I even encountered pushback from industry people--though not, thankfully, my publisher, New Directions, whose chairperson is the legendary editor Barbara Epler--concerning Counternarratives. In other ways, however, I have been fortunate to encounter people from all backgrounds--all races and ethnicities, genders and sexualities, national origins, class, religious affiliation, physical abledness--who have been supportive of my work, and whose work I could enthusiastically support.

Black Dandyism

I am not and have never been much of a fashionable person, but during my second year at Northwestern I can distinctly recall the time a student in one of my undergraduate classes said to me, "You always dress so nicely!" I hadn't really thought about it, but I realized at that moment that while I did not particularly focusing on my daily outfits beyond making sure they were color-coördinated and non-rumpled, I also wasn't (at least for the most part) showing up to classes or university events looking like a slob either.
My self-presentation then as now results from my upbringing and socialization, my past experiences, and my recognition, beginning with my earliest academic jobs, in which I learned quickly that I had to establish myself, a black, queer, working-class, not-famous thirty-something man, as an authority in the classroom visually and through my performance from day one, since there were always undergraduate students, usually white and male, who would show up and wonder what the hell I was doing standing in front of them claiming to be their professor. (This problem has rarely manifested itself with women students of any race or ethnicity at any educational level. Go figure.)

In a (corduroy) hat

Post-tenure, things changed a bit, though I never descended into slovenliness, but now that I am at a new institution I realize I have been a bit more attentive to the things I leave the house in everyday to the extent that whenever I see an old friend who's now a colleague at Rutgers-Newark, he notes that I look "dressed up." I don't think of my clothing as dressy, but I don't hesitate to wear a tie and blazer on most days, or, absent my former curtain of hair, a hat. Instead, I think of myself wearing job-appropriate clothing.
I say all of this not to talk about myself but as an introduction to two recent stimulating features on the Chronicle of Higher Education's site, the first of which explores the history of black dandyism, and the second of which provides a visual tour through contemporary self-fashioning (in the literal sense) and presentation. What both underline is that clothing choices, especially when pressed beyond the limits of convention, have important, specific, historicized cultural and political meanings, especially for black people in this society, and they matter as much today as they did 200 years ago.
The first feature is an audio discussion of the early history of black dandyism by Monica L. Miller, an associate professor of English at Barnard College and the author of the authoritative, enlightening study Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Diasporic Identity (Duke, 2009), which received the 2010 William Sanders Scarborough Prize for the best book in African-American Literature and Culture from the Modern Language Association. In the discussion Miller reprises some of the material from her book for readers unfamiliar with it, offering a way to think not just about the past about contemporary black male fashion, from hip hop to Afro-hipsters, as well as about someone bring so many styles and traditions together like Kanye West, whose Concert for Sandy outfit continues to provoke commentary.

Kanye West at 12-12-12 Concert for Sandy Victims
(Photo supplied by WENN)

The second is a wonderful photographic spread highlighting three incredibly fashionable (and smart) black faculty members across the US--including a former colleague, Sharon P. Holland, who now teaches at Duke University--who might be said to fall into the "dandy" category. In the quote below, Sharon brings another aspect of her social performance to the fore: the intersection of race, imitation and gender insubordination. Unsettling, playfully, delightfully, insightfully. A few photos, with related quotes; enjoy!

Hasan Kwame JeffriesAssociate Professor of history, Ohio State University
"A black dandy...conveys a professional swagger
in the face of racial stereotypes about place
and profession."
(Photo by David Bernstein for The Chronicle)

Sharon P. HollandAssociate Professor of African and African-American Studies
Duke University
"A black dandy unsettles, but always playfully.
You might say, 'Is it a man or a woman?'"
(Photo by Lisa Gotwals for The Chronicle)

Ernest L. GibsonAssistant Professor of English
Rhodes College
"As a person of color, I feel that
I must be 10 times more invested in
how I present myself aesthetically
to my students and colleagues."
(Photo by Lance Murphey for The Chronicle)

Quote: Virginie Despentes

"What, in fact, is required of a real man? The repression of emotions and the silencing of sensitivity. Being ashamed of gentleness or vulnerability. Leaving childhood brutally and definitively behind: overgrown boys get bad press. Neurosis about the size of his dick. Being able to make women come without their knowing or being willing to share what makes them feel good. Not showing weakness. Gagging his sensuality. Dressing in dull colors, always wearing the same pair of drab shoes, not having fun with his hair, not wearing too much jewellery, or any make-up. Always having to make the first move. Without the slightest sexual education to improve his orgasm. Not knowing how to ask for help. Having to play brave, even while being a coward. Valuing strength, whatever his personality. Displaying aggression. Limited access to fatherhood. Being a success, so he can seduce the best women. Fearing his homosexuality, since real men must never be penetrated. Not playing with dolls when he was a kid, having to make do with little cars and ugly plastic guns. Not taking care of his body. Subjecting himself to the brutality of other men without complaint. Knowing how to defend himself, even if he is a sweet person. Being cut off from his femininity, just as women abandon their masculinity, not in response to situation or personality but because society demands it. Thus ensuring that women continue to provide children for war, and men continue to be willing to get themselves killed to protect the interests of three or four short-sighted idiots."


"Unless we step into the uncharted territory of the gender revolution, we know exactly where we will be regressing. An all-powerful State that infantilises us, interferes in all our decisions for our own good and—under the pretext of protecting us—keeps us in a childish state of ignorance, fear of punishment and exclusion. The special treatment until now reserved for women, with shame as the primary tool for ensuring their isolation, passivity and lack of protest, could now be extended to all. To understand the mechanics of how women have been made to feel inferior, and induced to willingly maintain themselves in this state, is to understand how the entire population is kept under control. Capitalism is an egalitarian religion, in the sense that it demands general submission, making everyone feel trapped—as all women are." --Virginie Despentes, from King Kong Theory, tr. Stéphanie Benson, London: Serpent's Tail, 2009, pp. 20-21.

Remembering Sedgwick & Ballard + Poem: Adrienne Rich

I will post about the Cuba trip later today, but I wanted to note to recent departures from the world of arts and letters, one I heard about only when I got back (I had almost no net access while away), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and one I read about this morning, J. G. Ballard. Both Sedgwick and Ballard were pathblazers, in very different ways, and global literary studies in the former's case, and fiction and science fiction in the latter's, would look quite different had they not appeared. Both have also been very important to me in many ways, as a creative writer, as a teacher, as a critic, and as someone trying always to think about how we see the world and the multifarious ways it works. Both were quite fearless in their work; for Sedgwick it meant trampling on binaristic assumptions that still grip our public and private discourses when it comes to gender and sexuality and how they function in the world, while for Ballard, it involved writing texts that could be read as pessimistic, anti-humanistic, sexist, and obscene. Not that such criticisms stopped either of them.

In the case of Kosofsky Sedgwick, as is now well known, her first two studies, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985), and The Epistemology of the Closet (1990) and Tendencies (1993), the text I have studied most closely, have been foundational in what many scholars, students, artists, critics, and increasingly the broader public may now take for granted, the field of queer studies, and the articulation of much more complex readings of the relationship between gender, sexuality, literary and cultural texts, discourse, performance, and related concepts. With each of these studies, the complexity of her argument, and her openness to a range of possible conceptual and performative axes, expanded. These critical texts, along with her teaching, raft of other publications, and public conversations and advocacy with an wide array of other notable scholars, artists and critics in and around gender, queer and performance studies, liberatory politics and practice/praxis, and critical theory, have remade the critical landscape in many humanities fields, while also helping to change discussions about the role of critics in shaping the public discourse around these topics. Though a self-described straight woman, she was truly emblematic of the complex and beautiful queerness she explicated and explored. Eve Sedgwick befriended and championed the work of the important, late black queer writer Gary Fisher (Gary In Your Pocket: Stories and Notebooks of Gary Fisher [1996]). (I should note that I recall the time I first heard her speak about Fisher, just before the book came out, and took her role in its production and publication quite skeptically, though Robert Reid-Pharr calmed me in the moment, and later I read the book and, after much rumination--because it is still a difficult book for me to take on many levels--and came to appreciate it, Fisher, and her role in bringing it into the world.) She was also a poet in her own right (Fat Art, Thin Art [1994]), which, like the playful essays in Tendencies, offered her another critical mode (why oh why do so few scholars not follow her example in this regard?). She had taught at a number of institutions, including Duke University and most recently the City University of New York's Graduate Center. She was only 58.

J. G. Ballard, a Shanghai native and trained physician, was one of the leading British and English-language experimentalists and of the late 20th century. His works could easily be described as "queer" in a different sense; they are often called science fiction or dystopic fiction, but in a number of them, at the level of narrative, they defy categorization. It's easy to forget, given the popularity of his more mainstream books, such as Empire of the Sun (1984), which later became an acclaimed Steven Spielberg film, which obituaries today have been highlighting, and The Kindness of Women (1991), how utterly strange and singular books like The Crystal World (1966), Crash (1973), which David Cronenberg masterfully turned into a cinematic shocker in 1996, Concrete Island (1974), and my personal favorite, one of the most perverse, draw-dropping, and horrifyingly sublime books in all of English-language literature, The Atrocity Exhibition* (1969) really are. Riding the genre line multiple ways and breaking not only formal boundaries but thematic and content ones as well, Ballard managed to delve perhaps more deeply than many of his fiction-writing peers into the ways in which our endlessly and excessively technologically mediated society was transforming, in a phenomenological sense and at a neuropsychological level, our experiences of the world. As his readers know, an adjective, Ballardian, has been coined to describe essential aspects of his style and dystopian thematics. The proliferation and normalization of paraphilias far beyond concerns about sexuality and pornography, the incessant and life-devouring obsession with mass media and hypercelebrity, the increasing struggle and ecological destruction produced by capitalism's churning engine, the spreading paranoia produced by the creeping global, govenrmental and corporate panoptican, and so much more, can be found in germinal and distilled versions throughout his oeuvre. This body of work influenced a wide range of artists across fields, but especially other fiction writers and many musicians, including groups such as Joy Division, The Normal, the Buggles, Jawbox, Radiohead, and many others. And Ballard did not let up: one of the last novels he wrote that I read, Super-Cannes (2000), refines these interests into what appears to be a straightforward realist narrative that slowly but surely turns bizarre, in quintessential late Ballardian style. He also published nearly two dozen collections of stories, a collection of essays, and an autobiography, and also wrote for film and TV. He was 78.

*As I never tire of telling students, there are different forms of censorship. Apocryphally Ballard experienced one form in the US when publisher Nelson Doubleday decided to glance at Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition and was so disturbed--very likely by the references to the late President Kennedy and his widow, and to the extremely graphic short story/chapter whose title included the words "Ronald Reagan" (Ballard was quite a visionary)--that he ordered the entire press run pulped. The entire press run. Jonathan Cape published the volume in the UK, and it later appeared in the US first under a different title, and then under Sylvère Lotringer's Re/Search imprint, with fetching graphic photos. You're forwarned....

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The poem I'm choosing today is by one of my favorite poets, Adrienne Rich, and it's from her "Twenty-One Love Poems," which appeared first as a stand-alone collection in 1976 and then in her volume The Dream of a Common Language (1978). It is worth reading all 21 of these poems, as they economically and incomparably demonstrate poetry's capacity to express desire and love--and in the case of these poems, specifically the love between women. Thinking of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and J. G. Ballard, I am posting Poem VII, "What kind of beast would turn its life into words?"

Love Poem VII

What kind of beast would turn its life into words?
What atonement is this all about?
--and yet, writing words like these, I'm also living.
Is all this close to the wolverines' howled signals,
that modulated cantata of the wild?
or, when away from you I try to create you in words,
am I simply using you, like a river or a war?
And how have I used rivers, how have I used wars
to escape writing the worst thing of all--
not the crimes of others, not even our own death,
but the failure to want our freedom passionate enough
so that blighted elms, sick rivers, massacres would seem
mere emblems of that desecration of ourselves?

Copyright © 1988, from Gay & Lesbian Poetry In Our Time, Carl Morse and Joan Larkin, editors, New York, St. Martin's Press. All rights reserved.