Against Conglomeration

In the 1980s, anxiety about the extensive and ongoing conglomeration of the publishing industry led to the emergence of a movement of nonprofit publishers. It included counterculture figures like Coffee House’s Allan Kornblum and Milkweed’s Emilie Buchwald, who got their start with boutique letterpresses; political and aesthetic activists like Arte Público’s Nicolás Kanellos, Feminist Press’s Florence Howe, and Dalkey Archive’s John O’Brien; and refugees from conglomeration like Fiona McCrae and André Schiffrin. Nonprofits often defined themselves by their support for literariness, and which they depicted as under threat from commercial houses, which helped them gain support from private foundations, philanthropists, and government agencies like the National Endowment for the Arts. We discovered that these two different ways of structuring publishers’ finances—conglomerate and nonprofit—created a split within literature, yielding two distinct modes of American writing after 1980. This essay characterizes the two modes, explains how the split between them happened, and illustrates the significance of this shift for the rise of multiculturalism. We pay particularly close attention to the careers of Percival Everett and Karen Tei Yamashita. 93 James Kyung-Jin Lee writes that Yamashita critiques “an abstract notion of cultural difference that always demands the sameness produced by the silencing of stories of violence and exclusion. As such, an embrace of multiculturalism would be Asian America’s ultimate undoing, as our allegiance to ignore the suffering of others inevitably prevents us from confronting the suffering within”