Pub Date : 2023-05-04DOI: 10.1080/17449855.2023.2216998
P. Morey
ABSTRACT This article examines the circumstances surrounding the cancellation of Omar El-Khairy and Nadia Latif’s play Homegrown in 2015. Commissioned by the National Youth Theatre, it was unexpectedly cancelled days before it was due to open. This move can be attributed to heightened sensitivity towards so-called “extreme” opinions of the kind Homegrown features, as the British government tightened definitions of unacceptable speech and placed the onus on civil society bodies to police it. Yet, as this article argues, Homegrown’s treatment can also be understood in terms of the historical commissioning processes for minority – especially Muslim – theatre, which privilege certain topics and modes of address that result in marginal communities’ continued stigmatization. From the outset, Homegrown was alert to these constraints and sought to counter them through a radical refusal to conduct its debates in the manner approved by the framing conventions of security discourse and the governing etiquette of post-9/11 theatre.
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Pub Date : 2023-05-04DOI: 10.1080/17449855.2023.2215482
R. Ahmed, P. Morey
The last few years have witnessed a rising awareness across the media of the whiteness of Britain’s fiction publishing industry and an amplification of calls for racial diversity both within the workforce and within author lists. In 2015, shortly after the release of the allwhite authored list of books to be freely distributed across the UK for World Book Night 2016, The Guardian published a piece featuring a roster of British writers of colour critiquing the industry’s shameful record of race as well as class inclusivity (Shukla et al. 2015, n.p.; see also Flood 2015). Here, the words of trailblazing campaigner for Black, Asian, and People of Colour authors and Britain’s first female Black publisher, Margaret Busby, sit alongside those of relative newcomer Nikesh Shukla, whose own success as an anthologist and author has been accompanied by a tireless advocacy for a racially diverse literary marketplace (Shukla et al. 2015, n.p). In his contribution, Shukla alludes to his then forthcoming essay collection The Good Immigrant (Shukla 2016) whose publication in 2016 and commercial and critical success marked the beginning of a new shift – even a watershed moment – in the UK book industry. Together with Reni Eddo-Lodge’s (2017) chart-topping non-fiction book Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, Bernardine Evaristo’s (2019) history-making Booker Prize win Girl, Woman, Other, and Candice Carty-Williams’s (2019) novel Queenie, which won the British Book of the Year award in 2020, among others, Shukla’s high-profile collection helped to pave the way for a boom in books by Black and Brown writers. This was underpinned by new initiatives such as Penguin’s Black Britain: Writing Back list, curated by Evaristo and launched in 2021, and its WriteNow mentoring scheme for writers from under-represented backgrounds, established in 2016, as well as the inauguration of the Jhalak Prize for “British/British resident BAME [Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic] writers” in 2017. This shift took place against the backdrop of the worldwide rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, following the racist murder of George Floyd in 2020. By then, book publishers evidently felt an imperative to speak out against racial violence: that race was their business, or, more cynically, that they could no longer afford to remain silent on matters of race. Penguin Random House, Hachette UK, Pan Macmillan, and HarperCollins all issued statements affirming their solidarity or allyship with racialized people and their commitment to inclusivity in the wake of Floyd’s murder (Saha and van Lente 2022, 1804–1805).
在过去的几年里，媒体对英国小说出版业白人化的认识不断提高，对劳动力和作家名单中种族多样性的呼吁也越来越强烈。2015年，在2016年世界图书之夜将在英国各地免费分发的全白人作家名单发布后不久，《卫报》发表了一篇文章，其中包括一批英国有色人种作家，他们批评该行业在种族和阶级包容性方面的可耻记录（Shukla等人，2015年，另见2015年洪水）。在这里，黑人、亚裔和有色人种作家的开拓性活动家以及英国第一位黑人女出版商玛格丽特·巴斯比的话与相对较新的妮克什·舒克拉的话并驾齐驱，舒克拉作为一名选集作家和作家的成功，伴随着他对种族多样性文学市场的不懈倡导（Shukla et al.2015，n.p），Shukla提到了他即将出版的散文集《好移民》（Shukla 2016），该集于2016年出版，在商业和评论方面取得了成功，标志着英国图书业新转变的开始，甚至是一个分水岭。与蕾妮·埃德多·洛奇（Reni Eddo Lodge）（2017年）的非小说类排行榜冠军《为什么我不再与白人谈论种族》（Why I’m Not More Talking to White People About Race）、伯纳丁·埃瓦里斯托（Bernardine Evaristo）（2019年）的历史性布克奖得主《女孩、女人、其他》（Girl，Woman，Other）以及坎迪斯·卡蒂·威廉姆斯（Candice Carty Williams）（2019）的小说《奎妮》（Queenie，舒克拉备受瞩目的收藏为黑人和布朗作家的书籍热潮铺平了道路。这一点得到了新举措的支持，如由Evaristo策划并于2021年推出的企鹅黑英国：回写名单，以及2016年成立的针对代表性不足背景的作家的WriteNow辅导计划，以及2017年为“英国/英国居民BAME（黑人、亚裔和少数民族）作家”设立的Jhalak奖。这一转变是在2020年乔治·弗洛伊德被种族主义谋杀后，“黑人的命也是命”运动在全球兴起的背景下发生的。到那时，图书出版商显然觉得有必要公开反对种族暴力：种族是他们的事，或者更愤世嫉俗的是，他们再也不能在种族问题上保持沉默了。企鹅兰登书屋（Penguin Random House）、英国哈切特出版社（Hachette UK）、潘麦克米伦出版社（Pan Macmillan）和哈珀柯林斯出版社（HarperCollins。
{"title":"Introduction: Secularism and the literary marketplace","authors":"R. Ahmed, P. Morey","doi":"10.1080/17449855.2023.2215482","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2023.2215482","url":null,"abstract":"The last few years have witnessed a rising awareness across the media of the whiteness of Britain’s fiction publishing industry and an amplification of calls for racial diversity both within the workforce and within author lists. In 2015, shortly after the release of the allwhite authored list of books to be freely distributed across the UK for World Book Night 2016, The Guardian published a piece featuring a roster of British writers of colour critiquing the industry’s shameful record of race as well as class inclusivity (Shukla et al. 2015, n.p.; see also Flood 2015). Here, the words of trailblazing campaigner for Black, Asian, and People of Colour authors and Britain’s first female Black publisher, Margaret Busby, sit alongside those of relative newcomer Nikesh Shukla, whose own success as an anthologist and author has been accompanied by a tireless advocacy for a racially diverse literary marketplace (Shukla et al. 2015, n.p). In his contribution, Shukla alludes to his then forthcoming essay collection The Good Immigrant (Shukla 2016) whose publication in 2016 and commercial and critical success marked the beginning of a new shift – even a watershed moment – in the UK book industry. Together with Reni Eddo-Lodge’s (2017) chart-topping non-fiction book Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, Bernardine Evaristo’s (2019) history-making Booker Prize win Girl, Woman, Other, and Candice Carty-Williams’s (2019) novel Queenie, which won the British Book of the Year award in 2020, among others, Shukla’s high-profile collection helped to pave the way for a boom in books by Black and Brown writers. This was underpinned by new initiatives such as Penguin’s Black Britain: Writing Back list, curated by Evaristo and launched in 2021, and its WriteNow mentoring scheme for writers from under-represented backgrounds, established in 2016, as well as the inauguration of the Jhalak Prize for “British/British resident BAME [Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic] writers” in 2017. This shift took place against the backdrop of the worldwide rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, following the racist murder of George Floyd in 2020. By then, book publishers evidently felt an imperative to speak out against racial violence: that race was their business, or, more cynically, that they could no longer afford to remain silent on matters of race. Penguin Random House, Hachette UK, Pan Macmillan, and HarperCollins all issued statements affirming their solidarity or allyship with racialized people and their commitment to inclusivity in the wake of Floyd’s murder (Saha and van Lente 2022, 1804–1805).","PeriodicalId":44946,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Postcolonial Writing","volume":"59 1","pages":"271 - 283"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41679862","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-04DOI: 10.1080/17449855.2023.2214857
P. Veyret
ABSTRACT This article unpacks Mohsin Hamid’s position as a global novelist invested in translating the world view of Muslim characters for a secular, western audience. Its approach to Hamid’s secularism combines materialist with textualist frames of reference, seeing the circulation and reception of The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) and Exit West (2017) as entangled with the novelist’s aesthetic strategies. The materialist approach, based on Graham Huggan’s and Sarah Brouillette’s work, questions how western audiences’ anxieties about religiously driven “Others” are marketed by the publishing industry, thus reinforcing the figure of the postcolonial author as a problematic interpreter of marginalized communities. The textualist approach argues that Hamid’s writing participates in the diffusion of global literature, and close reading will question how authors like him propose ways of reconsidering and rewriting hegemony through positioning themselves as “embedded with the world”, and by forging geocentred fictions which, paradoxically, trace lines of flight from the global marketplace.
{"title":"Marketing secular anxieties: Mohsin Hamid’s planetary turn","authors":"P. Veyret","doi":"10.1080/17449855.2023.2214857","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2023.2214857","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article unpacks Mohsin Hamid’s position as a global novelist invested in translating the world view of Muslim characters for a secular, western audience. Its approach to Hamid’s secularism combines materialist with textualist frames of reference, seeing the circulation and reception of The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) and Exit West (2017) as entangled with the novelist’s aesthetic strategies. The materialist approach, based on Graham Huggan’s and Sarah Brouillette’s work, questions how western audiences’ anxieties about religiously driven “Others” are marketed by the publishing industry, thus reinforcing the figure of the postcolonial author as a problematic interpreter of marginalized communities. The textualist approach argues that Hamid’s writing participates in the diffusion of global literature, and close reading will question how authors like him propose ways of reconsidering and rewriting hegemony through positioning themselves as “embedded with the world”, and by forging geocentred fictions which, paradoxically, trace lines of flight from the global marketplace.","PeriodicalId":44946,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Postcolonial Writing","volume":"59 1","pages":"347 - 361"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48076219","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-04DOI: 10.1080/17449855.2023.2215487
Rachel Gregory Fox
ABSTRACT This article focuses on the reception of Elif Shafak’s fiction as it circulates within the global literary marketplace, examining the responses of secular and religious readerships in English and Turkish. Taking Shafak’s 2010 novel, The Forty Rules of Love, and her 2016 work, Three Daughters of Eve, as case studies, and referring to media and reader reviews of these books, and public commentary by the author, it evaluates the readerly relationships with spirituality and faith that Shafak constructs as they are emulated by both the readers in her novels and the readers of her novels. In doing so, it asks what reading methodologies Shafak forges in a marketplace that situates books as both stories and products. In the urgent defence of a cosmopolitan ideal, and amidst transcontinental markets and metropoles, this article argues that Shafak puts faith in the potential for conviviality to be fostered by the process of reading.
{"title":"Marketing stories: Writing with faith and reading in search of spirituality in Elif Shafak’s fiction","authors":"Rachel Gregory Fox","doi":"10.1080/17449855.2023.2215487","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2023.2215487","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article focuses on the reception of Elif Shafak’s fiction as it circulates within the global literary marketplace, examining the responses of secular and religious readerships in English and Turkish. Taking Shafak’s 2010 novel, The Forty Rules of Love, and her 2016 work, Three Daughters of Eve, as case studies, and referring to media and reader reviews of these books, and public commentary by the author, it evaluates the readerly relationships with spirituality and faith that Shafak constructs as they are emulated by both the readers in her novels and the readers of her novels. In doing so, it asks what reading methodologies Shafak forges in a marketplace that situates books as both stories and products. In the urgent defence of a cosmopolitan ideal, and amidst transcontinental markets and metropoles, this article argues that Shafak puts faith in the potential for conviviality to be fostered by the process of reading.","PeriodicalId":44946,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Postcolonial Writing","volume":"59 1","pages":"362 - 376"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49369168","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-04DOI: 10.1080/17449855.2023.2216491
R. Ahmed
ABSTRACT This conversation with Leila Aboulela is shaped primarily by an interest in her work’s position in the literary marketplace, especially in the UK. It explores Aboulela’s considerable success as a Muslim writer whose fictional worlds are infused with Islam, and asks what this might tell us about the place of faith within the marketplace. The discussion ranges from the author’s journey to publication through the roles played by editors and designers in the production of her fiction to the marketing and reception of her work, also exploring the question of whether and how to translate faith to a secular readership. Mindful of shifts in the reception of writers of colour, including Muslim-heritage writers, through Aboulela’s long career, it concludes with a consideration of a new generation of writers whose work does not shy away from Islamic perspectives, suggesting an openness to unfamiliar world views among readers and some publishers.
{"title":"A conversation with Leila Aboulela","authors":"R. Ahmed","doi":"10.1080/17449855.2023.2216491","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2023.2216491","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This conversation with Leila Aboulela is shaped primarily by an interest in her work’s position in the literary marketplace, especially in the UK. It explores Aboulela’s considerable success as a Muslim writer whose fictional worlds are infused with Islam, and asks what this might tell us about the place of faith within the marketplace. The discussion ranges from the author’s journey to publication through the roles played by editors and designers in the production of her fiction to the marketing and reception of her work, also exploring the question of whether and how to translate faith to a secular readership. Mindful of shifts in the reception of writers of colour, including Muslim-heritage writers, through Aboulela’s long career, it concludes with a consideration of a new generation of writers whose work does not shy away from Islamic perspectives, suggesting an openness to unfamiliar world views among readers and some publishers.","PeriodicalId":44946,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Postcolonial Writing","volume":"59 1","pages":"377 - 390"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44841412","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-04DOI: 10.1080/17449855.2023.2215972
P. Morey
ABSTRACT In this interview, Rukhsana Yasmin describes her experiences as a literary agent from a Muslim cultural background. She recalls how, early in her career, she was somewhat limitingly regarded as a representative of “diversity” within the industry, but also notes the advantages of her insider’s ability to recognize potential areas of sensitivity and broker conversations between authors and publishers to ensure the writer’s experience is respected in the editing process and that unconscious biases resulting from a predominantly white, middle-class majority viewpoint are minimized. Although she still receives comparatively few novels addressing faith, Rukhsana is heartened by the success of recent essay anthologies by Muslim women. Along with the determination of younger writers to resist being pigeonholed by producing tonally and thematically varied work that better reflects their experiences, such publications push back against the trend for Muslim trauma narratives that have been a staple feature of minority publishing.
{"title":"An agent’s view on diversity, secularism and religion: A conversation with Rukhsana Yasmin","authors":"P. Morey","doi":"10.1080/17449855.2023.2215972","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2023.2215972","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In this interview, Rukhsana Yasmin describes her experiences as a literary agent from a Muslim cultural background. She recalls how, early in her career, she was somewhat limitingly regarded as a representative of “diversity” within the industry, but also notes the advantages of her insider’s ability to recognize potential areas of sensitivity and broker conversations between authors and publishers to ensure the writer’s experience is respected in the editing process and that unconscious biases resulting from a predominantly white, middle-class majority viewpoint are minimized. Although she still receives comparatively few novels addressing faith, Rukhsana is heartened by the success of recent essay anthologies by Muslim women. Along with the determination of younger writers to resist being pigeonholed by producing tonally and thematically varied work that better reflects their experiences, such publications push back against the trend for Muslim trauma narratives that have been a staple feature of minority publishing.","PeriodicalId":44946,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Postcolonial Writing","volume":"59 1","pages":"399 - 408"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46242746","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-04DOI: 10.1080/17449855.2023.2209907
C. Chambers, Sairish Hussain
ABSTRACT This article discusses the challenges British Muslim writers and publishers face in a largely secular literary marketplace and a society marked by Islamophobia. It explores these authors’ publication experiences, analysing examples from industry diversity initiatives and from conducting interviews with authors. Arguing that distorted representations strip Muslims of their complex humanity, while more nuanced portrayals can humanize them without resorting to stereotypes, we analyse the thrillers East of Hounslow (2017) by Khurrum Rahman and Take it Back (2019) by Kia Abdullah. The article provides unique insights into the publication tactics of Muslim-heritage writers while also demonstrating genre fiction’s potential as a powerful tool for promoting inclusive narratives and challenging stereotypes. It concludes that genre fiction’s popularity and accessibility can help expand readership beyond literary circles and provide a wider audience for diverse storytelling that might otherwise go unheard in mainstream publishing, thus contributing over time to a more inclusive literary landscape.
{"title":"Rethinking Muslim narratives: Stereotypes reinforced or contested in recent genre fiction?","authors":"C. Chambers, Sairish Hussain","doi":"10.1080/17449855.2023.2209907","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2023.2209907","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article discusses the challenges British Muslim writers and publishers face in a largely secular literary marketplace and a society marked by Islamophobia. It explores these authors’ publication experiences, analysing examples from industry diversity initiatives and from conducting interviews with authors. Arguing that distorted representations strip Muslims of their complex humanity, while more nuanced portrayals can humanize them without resorting to stereotypes, we analyse the thrillers East of Hounslow (2017) by Khurrum Rahman and Take it Back (2019) by Kia Abdullah. The article provides unique insights into the publication tactics of Muslim-heritage writers while also demonstrating genre fiction’s potential as a powerful tool for promoting inclusive narratives and challenging stereotypes. It concludes that genre fiction’s popularity and accessibility can help expand readership beyond literary circles and provide a wider audience for diverse storytelling that might otherwise go unheard in mainstream publishing, thus contributing over time to a more inclusive literary landscape.","PeriodicalId":44946,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Postcolonial Writing","volume":"59 1","pages":"284 - 299"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47948712","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-04DOI: 10.1080/17449855.2023.2209906
Sauleha Kamal
ABSTRACT With the location of the global literary marketplace in western centres, post-9/11 interest in anglophone Pakistani literature comes with the fetishization of minoritized identities. Fatima Bhutto’s The Runaways combats Islamophobic arguments about the Islamic origins of radicalization, showing that it emerges out of exclusion stemming from material facts of race, class, and gender. However, the novel's place in the literary marketplace complicates Bhutto's efforts to elicit empathy from readers. This article argues that although The Runaways is ideologically opposed to Eurocentric cosmopolitan liberalism, it occasionally falters in its representation of Pakistan and Islamic practices. The novel’s empathy is invested in universalism, suggesting a blind spot which is attributable to the global literary marketplace’s anticipation of a secular cosmopolitan “elite” readership. Through analysis of Bhutto’s novel, this article explores the possibility of productive empathy, and interrogates the ethics of reading and writing the other.
{"title":"Exclusion, empathy, and Islam: The Runaways in the literary marketplace","authors":"Sauleha Kamal","doi":"10.1080/17449855.2023.2209906","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2023.2209906","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT With the location of the global literary marketplace in western centres, post-9/11 interest in anglophone Pakistani literature comes with the fetishization of minoritized identities. Fatima Bhutto’s The Runaways combats Islamophobic arguments about the Islamic origins of radicalization, showing that it emerges out of exclusion stemming from material facts of race, class, and gender. However, the novel's place in the literary marketplace complicates Bhutto's efforts to elicit empathy from readers. This article argues that although The Runaways is ideologically opposed to Eurocentric cosmopolitan liberalism, it occasionally falters in its representation of Pakistan and Islamic practices. The novel’s empathy is invested in universalism, suggesting a blind spot which is attributable to the global literary marketplace’s anticipation of a secular cosmopolitan “elite” readership. Through analysis of Bhutto’s novel, this article explores the possibility of productive empathy, and interrogates the ethics of reading and writing the other.","PeriodicalId":44946,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Postcolonial Writing","volume":"59 1","pages":"300 - 314"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47903220","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-04DOI: 10.1080/17449855.2023.2216037
P. Morey
ABSTRACT In this conversation, Hamish Hamilton’s editorial director Hermione Thompson discusses the stages by which a book reaches the buying public. The role of agents and the different expectations of literary and genre-focused publishers are considered. The Black Lives Matter movement has been instrumental in the upsurge of interest in black writing and, while welcoming this development, Thompson acknowledges the importance of not pigeonholing writers according to their identity. That matters of religious difference seldom occur in editorial discussions may be a result of the kinds of submissions received, but Thompson acknowledges that it may also indicate a secular norm, of a piece with the white middle-class norms still governing the industry. The interview ends with a consideration of new developments, such as social media and podcasting, and the tendency in some literary festivals to rely on big-name authors to pull in a crowd, thereby further entrenching ethnic and cultural norms.
{"title":"A publisher’s perspective on diversity: A conversation with Hermione Thompson","authors":"P. Morey","doi":"10.1080/17449855.2023.2216037","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2023.2216037","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In this conversation, Hamish Hamilton’s editorial director Hermione Thompson discusses the stages by which a book reaches the buying public. The role of agents and the different expectations of literary and genre-focused publishers are considered. The Black Lives Matter movement has been instrumental in the upsurge of interest in black writing and, while welcoming this development, Thompson acknowledges the importance of not pigeonholing writers according to their identity. That matters of religious difference seldom occur in editorial discussions may be a result of the kinds of submissions received, but Thompson acknowledges that it may also indicate a secular norm, of a piece with the white middle-class norms still governing the industry. The interview ends with a consideration of new developments, such as social media and podcasting, and the tendency in some literary festivals to rely on big-name authors to pull in a crowd, thereby further entrenching ethnic and cultural norms.","PeriodicalId":44946,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Postcolonial Writing","volume":"59 1","pages":"391 - 398"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46911418","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-04DOI: 10.1080/17449855.2023.2216039
R. Ahmed
ABSTRACT This article considers Nikesh Shukla’s The Good Immigrant (2016) alongside two anthologies of essays by British Muslim women: Mariam Khan’s It’s Not About the Burqa (2019) and Sabeena Akhtar’s Cut from the Same Cloth? (2021). Situating them within the publishing industry’s racializing practices, which valorize writing by authors of colour as authentically representative of their cultures while devaluing it as less “literary” than white British writing, the article asks how the foregrounding of religiosity rather than race in Akhtar’s and Khan’s anthologies works to confirm or challenge these dominant terms of reception. The article is interested in how these anthologies might trouble the boundary between “culture” as the values and practices subscribed to by a racially minoritized community, and “culture” as the self-reflexive expression of individual creativity. Ultimately, it suggests the essay anthology might point to a form of literary solidarity that reaches beyond the confines of the neo-liberal marketplace even while remaining partly constrained by them.
摘要本文将奈基什·舒克拉（Nikesh Shukla）的《好移民》（The Good Immigrant，2016）与英国穆斯林女性的两本散文选集放在一起：玛丽亚姆·汗（Mariam Khan）的《与罩袍无关》（It’s Not About The Burqa，2019）和萨比娜·阿赫塔尔（Sabeena Akhtar）的《同一块布上的剪裁？（2021）。将其置于出版业的种族化做法中，这种做法将有色人种作家的作品视为其文化的真实代表，同时将其贬低为不如英国白人作品“文学性”，这篇文章询问了阿赫塔和可汗选集中宗教而非种族的前景如何证实或挑战这些主流的接受条件。这篇文章感兴趣的是，这些选集可能会如何打破“文化”和“文化”之间的界限，“文化”是少数种族社区认同的价值观和实践，而“文化”则是个人创造力的自我反射表达。最终，它表明，这本散文集可能指向一种超越新自由主义市场界限的文学团结形式，即使在一定程度上仍受其约束。
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