Diversity, media and racial capitalism: a case study on publishing

Saha, Anamik; Lente, Sandra van

doi:10.1080/01419870.2022.2032250

Cited by 20 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…1–2). The pernicious myths that BIPOC do not read (Saha and van Lente, 2020, p. 4), or that Black people in particular are “oral” rather than literate or literary (McHenry and Heath, 1994), flourish under these conditions, shaping education through, e.g. norms and expectations, texts selected and interpretive strategies that are valorized or deemed acceptable.…”

Section: Pivoting To a Structural Accountmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Grady, 2023; Reid, 2021; de León et al ., 2020; Squires, 2012; Kean, 2004). Some versions of distributive diversity may call for an increase in the number of publishing workers of color but they will not, and arguably cannot, adequately address the myriad experiential, procedural and qualitative inequities these workers face (see Saha and van Lente, 2020).…”

Section: Pivoting To a Structural Accountmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A final and related concern centers on the way in which distributive solutions “[reduce racial inequality] to a numerical problem to be fixed through self-administered targets based on gaining demographic parity with the wider population” in both the publishing workforce and the titles it brings to market (Saha and van Lente, 2022, p. 1806). This approach to “inclusion,” Saha and Sandra van Lente (2022) argue, serves to essentialize and marginalize the work of authors of color while maintaining the privileged position of White gatekeepers, who currently acknowledge a demand for “diverse titles” that they also treat as inherent commercial risks. In interviews with “BAME” (i.e.…”

Section: Pivoting To a Structural Accountmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Of acquisitions and interference: accounting for systemic threats to the freedom to read

Lawrence

2023

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PurposeLibrarianship’s dominant conception of the freedom to read is governed by a liberal principle of noninterference, wherein free readers are those who face no intentional intervention in their choice of materials. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how this account fails to adequately capture systemic threats that impoverish people’s reading lives.Design/methodology/approachThis conceptual paper deploys informal argumentation to expose a flaw in the dominant account of the freedom to read. The author uses a case study of comparative titles or comps, an editorial decision-making and justificatory convention that reproduces racial inequality in Anglophone trade publishing.FindingsComps present one example of how everyday norms and practices of literary production render people’s reading lives pervasively unfree, even absent some intent to interfere in them. The going account of the freedom to read calls, at best, for a greater diversity of book-commodities from which consumers may choose. However, the comp case suggests that this distributive remedy will be insufficient without relevant changes to the institutional arrangements that condition readers' choices in the first place.Originality/valueThis paper draws together insights from Library and Information Science, political philosophy and print culture studies to illuminate limitations in librarianship’s standard conception of the freedom to read. This reveals the need for an alternative, structural account of that freedom with significant implications for practice.

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Section: Pivoting To a Structural Accountmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Pivoting To a Structural Accountmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Pivoting To a Structural Accountmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Of acquisitions and interference: accounting for systemic threats to the freedom to read

Lawrence

2023

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“…Second, art and media operate as public-facing, project-based work in which the sociodemographic identities of creators are treated as highly salient. For example, race-based valuation, evaluation, and classification are found across creative industries, including in music ( Grazian 2005 ; de Laat and Stuart 2023 ), film and television ( Erigha 2021 ; Friedman and O’Brien 2017 ; Yuen 2016 ), fashion ( Mears 2010 ), art ( Buchholz 2022 ; Rawlings 2001 ), museum curatorship ( Aparicio 2022 ; Banks 2021 ), dance ( Robinson 2021 ), comedy ( Jeffries 2017 ), radio ( Chávez 2021 ; Garbes 2022 ), cuisine ( Gualtieri 2022 ), and literature ( Chong 2011 ; Saha and van Lente 2022 ). More substantively, in the restaurant industry, critics rely on different logics of evaluation for “ethnic” versus “classic” cuisines ( Gualtieri 2022 ); in Hollywood, “racial valuations” are deployed in profit forecasting for films with black directors and casts ( Erigha 2021 ); and in the classification processes for music, race “acts as a master category that overrides other feature values” when musicians engage in category blending ( van Venrooij, Miller, and Schmutz 2022 :575).…”

Section: Tokenism In Social Scientific Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tokenism and Its Long-Term Consequences: Evidence from the Literary Field

Childress,

Nayyar,

Gibson

2023

Am Sociol Rev

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Research on tokenism has mostly focused on negative experiences and career outcomes for individuals who are tokenized. Yet tokenism as a structural system that excludes larger populations, and the meso-level cultural foundations under which tokenism occurs, are comparatively understudied. We focus on these additional dimensions of tokenism using original data on the creation and long-term retention of postcolonial literature. In an institutional environment in which the British publishing industry was consolidating the production of non-U.S. global literatures written in English, and readers were beginning to convey status through openness in cultural tastes, the conditions for tokenism emerged. Using data on the emergence of postcolonial literature as a category organized through the Booker Prize for Fiction, we test and find for non-white authors (1) evidence of tokenism, (2) unequal treatment of those under consideration for tokenization, and (3) long-term retention consequences for those who were not chosen. We close with a call for more holistic work across multiple dimensions of tokenism, analyses that address inequality across and within groups, and a reconsideration of tokenism within a broader suite of practices that have grown ascendent across arenas of social life.

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“…In the past five years alone, numerous academic and industry reports have drawn attention to longstanding patterns of racial inequality and exclusion in the UK cultural and creative industries (CCIs), whether music (Black Lives in Music, 2021), film (Nwonka & Malik, 2021), publishing (Bold, 2019; Saha & van Lente, 2020), or arts and crafts (Brook et al, 2018; Patel, 2020). This has been undergirded by impactful anti-racist activism on social media that focuses on the CCIs.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Black, Brown and Asian cultural workers, creativity and activism: The ambivalence of digital self-branding practices

Sobande

Hesmondhalgh

Saha

2023

The Sociological Review

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How do cultural and creative workers respond to racism and the politics of representation and respectability in the digital age? In what ways do they engage in forms of community-building and solidarity-making, while managing pressures to build digital presence and personal brands? This article seeks to address these questions via 30 in-depth interviews with Black, Brown and Asian (BBA) workers in the UK cultural and creative industries (CCIs). Focusing on the ambivalence of digital self-branding practices, our work builds on scholarship on inequalities in the CCIs, and on platformization and race. We organize our findings regarding the experiences and values of these workers into three main themes: the positive potential these workers find in the capacity of digital media technologies for forging community and solidarity; the benefits and limitations of using digital media technologies to communicate counternarratives, including exposure of discrimination in CCIs, and adapting and ‘gaming’ features such as recommendation algorithms; and how they experience and navigate felt pressures to self-brand in contemporary digital contexts. We find a marked ambivalence in the reported experiences of these workers, which generatively complicates existing accounts of digital technology, algorithmic struggles and the UK’s CCIs.

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Diversity, media and racial capitalism: a case study on publishing

Cited by 20 publications

References 30 publications

Of acquisitions and interference: accounting for systemic threats to the freedom to read

Of acquisitions and interference: accounting for systemic threats to the freedom to read

Tokenism and Its Long-Term Consequences: Evidence from the Literary Field

Black, Brown and Asian cultural workers, creativity and activism: The ambivalence of digital self-branding practices

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