"Books About Race": Commercial Publishing and Racial Formation in the 21st Century

Abstract:This essay focuses on the the American commercial publishing industry's contribution to the ongoing process of racial formation in the 21st century. Responding to laudatory claims about publishing's increased diversification and drawing on a corpus of book deal announcements, this essay considers the racial discourse circulating through the institutions that produce and promote contemporary literature: how are race and ethnicity represented by an industry whose controlling interests and presumed customers are predominantly white? Which stories, by which writers, make it through the bottleneck of acquisition—what traits do they share, what narratives do they promote, and what, by extension, are the "authorized" stories of race and racism in the United States? Even as more books by or about people of color are considered commercially viable, presumptions about audience demographics (including race, socioeconomic status, and gender) have led to the perpetuation of stereotypical narratives about race and ethnicity.