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Hi friends, my new book REDLINING CULTURE dropped today @ColumbiaUP. The good folks at @lithub published an excerpt and I'm grateful to @nytopinion for letting me write about it last week. Here is a brief thread highlighting its main arguments/findings >>> https://lithub.com/the-inertia-of-whiteness-in-the-world-of-postwar-publishing/
First, the book is historical, focusing on 1950-2000; for the story up to 2018, please check out the @nytopinion article (link below). Again thanks to Gus Wezerek for inviting me to expand the book's story (and data) to the present. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/12/11/opinion/culture/diversity-publishing-industry.html?searchResultPosition=1
The historical argument I make is that we have misunderstood this period as one of rising multiculturalism, esp the 80s and 90s. Check out these numbers! The real story is that the post-war period is defined by the the consolidation whiteness across the entire literary industry.
Another key argument is that we have this misperception because of the success of a few key editors and authors, but any progress we see in this period is ephemeral and passing. Morrison had an impact at Random House but as soon as she leaves, any progress in diversity is erased.
I do want to flag that there was progress in equality at big publishers/literary field in terms of gender; see the below graph. Men + women reach parity by 2000, which is echoed in book reviews and prizes etc.
But this increasing gender parity didn't do anything to alter the vast racial inequality at places like Random House. See below graph. Gender equity just means white men + white women are changing places, but without an increase in minority representation.
The book also looks at the racial inequality of bestselling lists and book prizes. It's all bad. Here are a couple of more graphs.
What I find interesting about the prizes graph is that we see a brief spike in BIPOC prizewinners after the 1988 Beloved prize scandal, but by the late 1990s, we see a regression to white dominance. Will this happen again in the 2020s?
Also I do some stuff with network analysis to find the "most influential" books from 1965-2000 in terms of book reviews (in terms of who and where reviewed the books). Here are the top 10 most influential books for this period in terms of media recognition. All white!
Last, for my machine learning peoples: I do a ton of text mining to explore the impact of these #'s on LITERARY FORM, CONTENT and NARRATIVE. Here's just a sample, using word2vec - the unchanging, stereotypical representation of Black characters in RH fiction, 1950-2000. It's bad!
OK that's it. Thanks to my brilliant and hardworking editor, @PhilipLeventhal and brilliant and hardworking publicist Caitlin Hurst @ColumbiaUP - the best team in academic publishing, PERIOD - for making all of this possible. They did an amazing job.
Oh yeah and tons more of this - lots more close reading and historical analysis, along with the stats work and natural language processing! - in the actual book. Here's a link if you'd like to get a copy. Thanks for reading. https://cup.columbia.edu/book/redlining-culture/9780231197731
One more thing, a wonkier point for scholars: scholars have largely missed this story of severe inequality because we've focused too much on individual authors/examples and not been able to see the entire literary field at scale. Check out this quote from Skip Gates, for example
One last point, a big one: we've in part been blindsided by the insane whiteness of culture in the past 5 years because we misread this earlier period, over-estimating the success of "multiculturalism." Let's not make the same mistake again - we have a chance to fix it now.
