Publishing

Why does the publishing industry elevate white writers over #ownvoices writers when it comes to the experiences of communities of colour? It happens because books like American Dirt and Act of Grace fit comfortably with mainstream stereotypes, they don’t challenge white and Western readers to think and see First Nations people and people of colour in their depth and complexity. It happens because the sensationalist depiction of brutal violence and trauma in the Great White Novel sells. Both American Dirt and Act of Grace have plenty of stomach-turning scenes of gratuitous violence, rapes, and beatings. At a time when there is global concern about the plight facing refugees, migrant children being caged and separated from parents, the horrors of offshore detention and border walls, the publishing industry has peddled us these exploitative and cartoonish depictions that produce an easy empathy rather than forcing readers to reckon with their own positionality in structures of power, and the deeper problems that require action.

Between 1935 and 1939, the Federal Writers’ Project – an initiative funded by the Works Project Administration under the New Deal – provided employment for some 6000 jobless writers. Today, as stunned authors in Australia and around the world come to terms with the economic consequences of the coronavirus pandemic, that experiment deserves reconsideration.

In the context of the now more-or-less complete collapse of the New Left, the pulp novels of the fifties and early sixties deserve reconsideration, since, in some ways, contemporary pop culture today occupies a similar space, in that it’s produced almost entirely by commercial businesses with no relationship to any real social struggle.

It is easy to think of writers pursuing their aims with a noble persistence, despite the fact that they will only have a few readers, and little support along the way – but it would be truer to see the experience of isolation as constitutive of their writing, as a formative influence, rather than as an impediment to it.

Middle Eastern writers occupy a particularly jeopardised position on the peripheries of this imaginary, where to exist as a writer presupposes inventing palatable difference in ways that make readers feel special and accepting.

What some might call selling out may actually be art listening, responding, and adapting to dynamic changes in the environment in which it is produced.

‘I think it is important for women of colour to know that we are not objects or tokens to be used and dispensed.’

‘The problem is that western Sydney is a place but it’s also an idea.’

‘Given my ambivalent relationship to literary journals, why on earth would I want to start one?’

‘When we began the research there was no ready answer to the most basic question — which Australian books had been published in the USA? — let alone when and how and with what effect.’