1
Depoliticizing literature, politicizing diversity:
Ethno-racial boundaries in Dutch literary professionals’ aesthetic
repertoires
Timo Koren (6082424) timokoren@gmail.com
Research Master Social Sciences, University of Amsterdam July 1st, 2015
Supervisor: Christine Delhaye Second Reader: Walter Nicholls Academic Journal: Poetics
Abstract
Although it is still a neglected area, over the years, a growing body of sociological research on the position of ethno-racial minorities in western artistic fields has emerged. I aim to contribute to it by focusing on ethno-racial diversity in the Dutch literary field. Through in-depth interviews, I analyze the ways in which gatekeepers draw ethno-racial boundaries when discussing acquisition, quality assessment and marketing of literature. I argue that literary publishers and other professionals selectively employ a modernist literary-aesthetic
discursive repertoire that values the autonomy of the artistic field, by which non-white writers and publishers concerned with diversity are often positioned in an identity politics
framework. As such, this group is said to take in a less prestigious ‘political’/’subjective’ position rather than a ‘literary’/’neutral’ one. This paper informs about the way in which gatekeepers conceive of acquisition practices, differentiate when assessing literary quality and imagine their audiences, which shapes the position of non-white authors in the Dutch literary field.
Keywords:
ethno-racial boundaries | literature | cultural sociology | gatekeepers | diversity
2 1. Introduction
In 1999, a publication of the Letterenfonds, the main subsidiary body for literature in the Netherlands, described the Dutch literary world as “inward-looking”. The document, directed at writers with a migrant background, marked the start of the Letterenfonds’ intercultural policy, that was in place until 2013. As this policy aimed to get ethno-racial minority writers signed to literary publishers, its success ultimately relied on the willingness of the latter. Over the years, various attempts to increase diversity1 have proven to be relatively unsuccessful.
On the rare occasions that the ethno-racial homogeneity of the Dutch literary scene is debated, the field is described as “white” (for example, Rouw 2015). The words “inward-looking” and “white” form the departure of this paper that aims to investigate the
classification systems, cultural ideals and imagined realities of a relatively tight-knit cultural class of gatekeepers in the Dutch literary field.
The Dutch literary field provides an interesting case to study the absence and presence of ethno-racial minorities in the arts, because it is a space where elite, genre and market-oriented norms coexist and access (for writers) requires relatively limited economic capital. Past studies have shown considerable differences in the way ethno-racial minorities’ artistic practices have been accepted by established institutions, not only between countries, but also regarding form and genre (Martiniello and Lafleur 2008). Researchers have devoted attention to how, focusing on specific art forms and countries, immigrants and their offspring have organized themselves in order to gain recognition for their artistic work (Morawska 2008; Sievers 2008). In addition, there has been attention to diversity practices on a more
institutional level, for example to how particular venues take up this task in a context where national diversity policies are absent (Delhaye and Van der Ven 2014). This study takes a similar approach, by taking institutions and their gatekeepers as its primary focus. In doing so I aim to contribute to sociological research on ethno-racial minorities in western art scenes. Despite a growing number of studies, there still exists, as DiMaggio and Férnandez-Kelly put it, “a notable gap in research [concerning] the ways in which the arts are organized – both at the level of the host society and within immigrant communities” (2015: 1237).
Theoretically, I investigate how ideas that have originated in migration sociology and postcolonial and literary theory can contribute to cultural sociology and increase our
1 I employ diversity as a shortcut to what is understood as ethno-racial or cultural diversity. When I refer to
3 understanding of the literary field. Since the 1980s, there has been a growing body of
literature in the Netherlands that focuses on gatekeepers and literary institutions (De Glas 1998; Laan 2010; Franssen 2015; among others). However, with respect to ethno-racial diversity and the position of ethno-racial minorities in the literary field, almost no research has been conducted. This may be Bourdieu’s legacy, whose framework many of these
sociologists employ, and who believed exclusion in the arts could roughly be reduced to class discrimination (Bourdieu 1996: 227). Notable exceptions are Berkers’ (2009) study on the assimilation of ethno-racial minority writers in the literary mainstream, as well as Kuitert’s (1999) study on diverse publishers and their practices. However, these studies do not examine the literary norms and values that inform gatekeepers’ stances towards diversity, and, in Kuitert’s case, mainstream publishers that do not focus on diversity are left out.
Through in-depth interviewing with literary publishers and editors, I analyze the way they categorize and classify literature and publishing practices in relation to the absence and/or presence of non-white Dutch writers. Because diversity as a policy and practice has urged gatekeepers to think about the issue, this topic often comes up as a focal point in the analysis. To contextualize their repertoires, and critically reflect on them, I also interviewed other literary professionals, as well as ethno-racial minority writers. My central focus is on how literary publishers’ and editors discuss acquisition, quality assessment and marketing and, as they do so, on the ways in which literary gatekeepers perform boundary work (Lamont 1992). First, I analyze how literary professionals imagine their field in their repertoires on the acquisition process. Then, I delve deeper into the manner in which gatekeepers formulate quality criteria and relate these to diversity. Finally, I study their imaginations of the readers’ public and how it mediates the perception of diversity as a commercial strategy.
2. Understanding ethno-racial boundaries in the Dutch literary field
In his study of the French literary field, Pierre Bourdieu (1996, 2008) argues that publishing houses (and other literary actors) are positioned in relation to each other according to the type and amount of capital they possess. First, there is an opposition between a subfield of
restricted production and a subfield of large-scale production. The former group of publishers have a greater degree of autonomy, focus on prestige within the field (such as literary prizes) and owe this, partly, because they make no concessions to the general public. The latter group organizes themselves around economic success, whereby bestsellers are a company goal.
4 Often, those within the subfield of large-scale production find themselves symbolically discredited as they produce what ‘the public wants’. Second, there is an opposition between consecrated, established publishers and newcomers: the first group represents the dominant aesthetic mode, whereas the latter still seeks recognition. According to Bourdieu, artistic innovation usually comes from the producers situated at the fringes of the field.
With respect to Dutch publishing, the division between the two subfields is as demarcated as Bourdieu implies. For example, De Glas (1998) argues that individual houses cannot always be connected to specific publics and Franssen (2015) finds that the literary fiction subfield is less autonomous than expected. Still, the tension between an economic and artistic logic is present in the way literary professionals describe their work. For example, Franssen and Kuipers (2013) find that acquisition editors in the translation market use a variety of classification repertoires. In assessing literary fiction, taste plays an increasingly large role, whereas more popular fiction is often evaluated according to genre norms. Furthermore, a consideration of commercial potential or a possible public often plays a role in the decision-making process (Franssen 2012). As so few books are profitable, bestsellers are often needed to compensate financially through a process called ‘internal subsidizing’.
Within the literary field, publishers (and their employees) function as gatekeepers, those who come in-between creative artists and consumers (Negus 2002). The study of
intermediaries has its roots in a production of culture perspective. In this tradition of research, symbolic artefacts of culture are not perceived as isolated texts (Bourdieu 1988) but rather as being shaped and constituted within the systems in which they are created, distributed, evaluated and preserved (Peterson and Anand 2004). From the 19th century onwards, publishers have developed into key institutions in the literary field, as they came to hold a hegemonic position in deciding what should and what should not be published (Laan 2010). Therefore, in the absence of formal criteria, the symbolic question of who is and who is not recognized as a (literary) author, lies predominantly in their hands (Janssen 2000, cited in Laan 2010). Or, in Bourdieusian terms: within the literary field the publishing company plays a dominant role in the struggle over the definition of writer (Bourdieu 1996: 224). In cultural sociology gatekeepers have been defined in increasingly broad terms – ranging from A&R managers and editors to accountants and lawyers (Negus 2002). However, this study limits its focus to acquisition, quality assessment and marketing, and the publishers and other
5 I aim to understand the various ways in which gatekeepers define, classify and
categorize both literature and publishing practices through Michèle Lamont’s concept of boundary work, which has been applied to the literary field in Weber’s (2000) study of French and American publishing houses. Lamont defines symbolic boundaries as “conceptual distinctions made by social actors to categorize objects, people, practices, and even time and space” (Lamont and Molnár 2002: 168). Weber argues that, for example through the process of defining genres by terms such as prestige or originality, gatekeepers perform boundary work: they use criteria to build, maintain and shift symbolic boundaries (2000). The way people draw moral, cultural and symbolic boundaries shapes their maps of perception: not only the values and norms that lie at the center of these, but also those that are deemed unimportant or are completely ignored (Lamont 1992: 4). Boundary work is embedded in discursive classification repertoires that are often culture and nation specific (ibid.).
The concept symbolic boundaries has frequently been used as an alternative to more static cultural theories of ethno-racial difference (Lamont and Molnár 2002: 174). Although most studies of literary gatekeepers focus on commercial and genre boundaries, Berkers (2009) focuses on ethno-racial boundaries. In relation to literary policy, criticism and history, he investigated how intermediaries construct and reproduce differences between ‘us’ and ‘them’. In Bourdieu’s study of the publishing field, exclusionary mechanisms are mostly explained in terms of class, as he believes racial discrimination is roughly reducible to class discrimination (1996: 227). Berkers’ (2009) work, quite on the contrary, does show why it is relevant to study ethno-racial boundaries within literary fields. He finds that in American, Dutch and German national literary histories and newspaper criticism writers are often categorized as different, for example by explicitly mentioning ethno-racial background, thereby moving away from ‘purely’ artistic classification. Furthermore, Berkers shows that ethno-racial minority panelists were absent from the Letterenfonds until the start of the intercultural literary policy in 1999. And although he acknowledges that literary publishers are key institutions, he did not research them, as reliable data on rejection rates of authors are unavailable (2009: 19). Therefore we cannot know how many minority authors in comparison to majority authors are rejected. The unavailability of quantitative data is one of my
motivations for using a qualitative research design.
In this paper, I want to elaborate on the framework proposed by Berkers in three ways. First of all, in order to understand the ways in which literary professionals draw ethno-racial boundaries, not only national context should be taken into account, but also more
6 specific demographic and geographical features of a publishing scene. With regard to cultural fields in general, Negus (2002) rightly points out that within a comparatively small network, relatively elite educated, white males shape the hierarchization of cultural goods. Dutch literary publishing appears to share these characteristics: although there seem less gender disparities, it is described as a tight-knit network in which most professionals have earned a university-level humanities degree (see also, Franssen and Kuipers 2013). As it has been frequently argued that worldviews or ideologies do not necessarily and inevitably flow from class position (Hall 1982), it is important to take other characteristics into account when situating the repertoires of literary professionals, such as the field’s whiteness (Negus 2002). Geographically, the most prestigious publishers (according to Franssen 2015) are situated in Amsterdam’s reputable South or canal district. This could be relevant, as market
concentration (both in spatial and economic terms) is often used as an explanation for the amount of different types of diversity in a cultural field (Weber 2000; Velthuis 2013). Seen in this context, a concept such as Lamont’s “maps of perception” is useful to analyze how within this specific cultural field social and spatial boundaries form symbolic boundaries (and vice versa).
Second, in his analysis Berkers uses “artistic classification” in a fairly unproblematic manner. By doing so, he explains which ethno-racial minority authors have become part of the mainstream or have been canonized, but obscures how dominant mainstream norms are historically constructed and reproduced. As many have argued, modernist conceptions of artistic classification can ignore or devalue non-white artistic traditions (Morrison 1988), for example, when it is seen as ‘unoriginal’ (Saraber 2001) or ‘amateurish’ (Delhaye 2008). The risk is then to reinforce a discourse where politics and aesthetics are perceived to be at odds (Elliott 2002). This discourse is related to - what Bourdieu (2008) describes as – gatekeepers’ ‘belief in the game’. Since literary fiction is consecrated and perceived as universal, power-defined social relations may be misperceived or not perceived at all. This means that aesthetic classifications are viewed as both ‘pure’ and ‘apolitical’, and not as a class-, time- and place-specific construction, with ‘impure’ effects such as exclusion (Bourdieu 1984; Lamont 1992).
Finally, since Berkers’ study is on institutions with a strong aesthetic interest, he mainly focuses on artistic classifications. As others pointed out, commercial motives play a role for most literary publishers (De Glas 1998; Franssen 2015). In their decision to publish, at least a vague idea of the potential public is often present (Franssen 2012). To cope with uncertainty, editors rely on social media and knowledge about media outlets’ target
7 audiences, for example, to get to know their readers. This provides an incentive to not only study the way literary professionals draw ethno-racial boundaries as they classify these authors and their work, but also as they explain how they make sense of the readers’ public.
3. Data and methods
In the Netherlands, literary publishers are organized in the Literaire Uitgeversgroep (Literary Publisher’s Circle), who are part of the Nederlandse Uitgeversbond (Dutch Publishers Union). This group was founded in 1996. On their website, they claim that the literary publisher is “a determining factor in the Dutch literary landscape” and within this group topics relevant to the literary market are discussed2. Due to entry requirements, especially smaller and regional publishers are not part of the Literaire Uitgeversgroep (including ‘multicultural publishers’ such as In de Knipscheer and Uitgeverij Jurgen Maas). Still, the operationalization of Dutch literary publishers by the Literaire Uitgeversgroep, liberates me from the definitional problem who to consider as literary. The group includes roughly all fiction publishers that Franssen (2015) defines as the most prestigious.
I sent interview requests to all publishers in the Literaire Uitgeversgroep that publish Dutch contemporary literary fiction. In response, eight accepted to do a semi-structured in-depth interview, one only wanted to fill in a questionnaire, five did not respond and eight declined my interview request. I mentioned that I did a research on cultural diversity in the literary field; publishers that turned my request down told me this topic was “not relevant for them”, they “lacked experience” on this issue or thought that “our authors don’t fit your request”. This leads me to assume that publishers I interviewed have a more favourable attitude towards diversity because they are at least willing to talk about it, even though almost everyone does not see increasing diversity as a goal in itself. I usually interviewed a publisher or an acquisition editor; some had worked for houses I was not able to interview, and could provide me with (perhaps outdated) information about these. Respondents are all white. Gender, age and socio-economic background varies.
As I pointed out earlier, publishers are not the only gatekeepers in the acquisition and distribution process of Dutch literary fiction. To investigate how their repertoires relate to the rest of the literary field, I also interviewed a literary agent, the former head of the
Letterenfonds’ intercultural policy (which used to be a comparatively small project of the
8 main public funding body for Dutch literature) and an employee of the CPNB (a foundation, set up by publishers, bookstores and libraries, that has “propaganda of books” as its central aim). As symbolic boundaries, and the mechanisms of exclusion that accompany them, come to be perceived differently by those excluded (Lamont 1992), four writers were interviewed. These interviews were conducted to contextualize and contest the repertoires of publishers and editors. Authors had varying migrant backgrounds and had all published one or more books for a house in my sample. Interviews (including with publishers) lasted between 45 minutes and one and a half hour.3 All respondents’ names are anonymized, although due to
their specific characteristics it was impossible to anonymize CPNB and the Letterenfonds as institutions.
4. A short history of cultural diversity in the Dutch literary field (1999 – 2014) In order to situate the repertoires of both gatekeepers and writers, I provide a short history that shows how an ongoing political debate on national identity and citizenship has come to play a role in the arts, and literature specifically. Within the Dutch public and political realm, heavy criticism on supposedly multicultural and laissez-faire integration policies has fostered a renewed interest in a debate over Dutch national identity (Uitermark 2010). From the 1990s onwards Dutch citizenship has been defined in increasingly moral and cultural terms,
whereby ‘non-western allochtones’ are set apart from ‘white natives’ in policy and statistics (Paulle and Kalir 2013), thus becoming the ‘objects of problematization’ (Schinkel 2013). In general, policies concerning ‘allochtones’ have shifted from an emphasis on rights (late 90s) to duties (early 00s) (Groenendijk 2007).
Within the arts, the first and most prominent example of a policy focusing on rights was the policy document Culture as Confrontation by Secretary of State Rick van der Ploeg in 1999. It aimed to enhance diversity in the arts, by which a broader conception of artistic quality was pleaded for (Delhaye 2008: 1306). As a result, the Letterenfonds implemented an intercultural sub-policy, after which the percentage of ethno-racial minority panelists
(granters) increased from 0% (1995) to 5,1% (2000) and the share of “ethnic grantees” rose (Berkers 2009). This intercultural policy worked in an ambiguous way: by relegating diversity into a separated funding circuit, it left the established structure of the field untouched (Delhaye 2008), maintaining the whiteness of the Dutch literary world itself
9 (Ahmed 2012). Outside of policy, there have been a couple of publishers that actively sought to increase the visibility of ethno-racial minorities in Dutch literature (Kuitert 1999). Apart from that, there have been literary prizes for unpublished authors, such as El-Hizjra for Dutch Arabs that served as a stepping stone for aspiring writers. Most prominently, some of the El-Hizjra laureates eventually won large mainstream literary prizes (Nijborg and Laroui 2013).
The most intensive public debate on this issue took place in 2001, when the CPNB organized its annual National Book Week. Its theme ‘writing in-between cultures’ was controversial as ethno-racial minority writers were supposedly put in the spotlight not because of their work and felt like they were being ‘exoticized’ (Breure and Brouwer 2004). The promotion of diversity was perceived (especially by critics) as promoting a non-literary category that threatened literature’s autonomy (Vaessens 2013). Opponents frequently employed a modernist discursive repertoire, that favours a universal notion of literary quality as the only legitimate criterion, by claiming ethno-racial background should not play a role in literature (Bouazza 2001; Breure and Brouwer 2004). Their language worked in a paradoxical way: by privileging ‘universalist’, autonomous criteria, a cultural division was being made between those who legitimately entered the Dutch literary scene and those who supposedly did not (Breure and Brouwer 2004). Just like in the citizenship debate, these arguments served to delineate Dutch territory, however, in this particular case it was obscured by using universalist language. Albeit less prominently, within this debate, exclusionary features of the Dutch literary field were also criticized. Three smaller publishers pointed, for example, at the lack of ‘multicultural’ writers in bigger publishers’ lists (NRC 2001).
The sudden rise of interest in ‘migrant literature’ in the 1990s is often described as a hype that waned after the 2001 National Book Week (Minnaard 2008; Vaessens 2013). In 2013 the intercultural policy was abandoned by the national government. Officially, its tasks would now be incorporated in “existing regulations” (Nederlands Letterenfonds 2014: 28). However, during my interview with the now retired employee responsible for this policy, he plainly spoke about “abandoning”. The termination of this policy does not stand on its own: in 2010 the anti-islam Freedom Party (PVV) supported a right-wing minority government, which resulted in cutting down the culture budget with 25% while explicitly stating diversity was not an issue of national policy anymore (Delhaye and Van der Ven 2014). Although the government’s official advisory body Raad voor Cultuur continues to argue for intercultural policies, they remain largely absent.
10 As a political issue, gender disparities in Dutch literature are sometimes addressed in newspaper op-eds (see for example: Huff 2014; Ouariachi 2014; Weijers 2014), but think pieces on ethno-racial diversity (such as Rouw 2015) are rare exceptions. When publishers refer to ‘diversity’ in the public debate or in professional magazines such as Boekblad they usually mean genre diversity, which is related to the single price law. Similar to France, Dutch publishers determine a book’s price. The rationale behind this is that smaller retailers are supported by preventing large companies (for e.g. supermarkets) from selling large amounts of bestsellers at low prices. Along with this, it is an argument for ‘internal
subsidizing’: it allows publishers to focus on less popular genres (like poetry) or writers with high literary esteem as well (Van der Pluijm 2014). As far as I know, the single price law is almost solely defended in genre terms, never with socio-political arguments (like ethno-racial or gender diversity). It appears therefore that efforts to debate diversity as a political issue have not proven particularly successful.
5. The acquisition process: center versus periphery, and diversity as coincidence As research on book translations has shown, the Dutch publishing scene has definitely not been immune to processes of cultural globalization (Franssen 2015). At the same time, given the proximity of publishers to each other, the Dutch literary field can largely be characterized as a tight-knit cultural network or community (Scott 1999). Of the publishers in my sample (the Literaire Uitgeversgroep), a vast majority, including the most reputable ones, is located in either Amsterdam’s prestigious canal district or South district. Likewise, all other literary institutions I interviewed are located in this area, along with many venues that host literary events. The charisma of this area was well illustrated by the literary agent, when he explained the choice of location for his companies’ office: “It all happens here, all literary stuff is here, lectures are here, parties are here, you know, that’s all in Amsterdam. So you’re selling yourself short when you’re not in Amsterdam.”
In my interviews, the canal district (“grachtengordel”) is often used as a metaphor for the Dutch literary field to denote a closed-off network of white, higher educated people with a high income. For example, an acquisition editor described migrant authors as “writers that don’t fit the typical canal district picture”. And the employee of the CPNB was well aware that when organizing the children’s edition of the National Book Week, you should not only have “white, canal-district kids” on your posters. In that way, canal district becomes a metaphor that is employed to criticize the homogeneous population of the Dutch literary
11 world, while at same time constructing ethno-racial diversity as something that is situated outside of this space, as something that is not a part of it. Interestingly, the only large publisher that self-identifies as aiming to enhance diversity, was indeed the only one that is located outside of Amsterdam.
Literary gatekeepers that actively focus or had focused on diversity employ a similar logic: there is always a sense of distance between ethno-racial minority writers and the literary field. In their maps of perception, diversity is situated at the periphery. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, one small publisher “specifically looked” for non-white writers that grew up in the Netherlands, following the realization that “a part of the Dutch population is not getting published”:
So, I went to scout there, and they came [names a couple of writers and the prizes they won], they came from everywhere, because, there as well, it was not situated in the center, and there we go again, but in the periphery. You’ve got the mainstream, that’s the center, and you’ve got the periphery, which is where I look. So most people look in the center, whereas I think: where does it happen? In the underground or at the fringe. And our task is to bring it to the center.
In this quote the literary mainstream and the center are seen as synonymous, whereby non-white writers are positioned in the periphery, and need to be brought to the center. These authors reside somewhere under the radar; you will not find them if “you don’t actively look for it”. When arguing for their intercultural policy, the Letterenfonds-employee also points at the distance between migrant writers and the Dutch literary field: “I always defended it [the policy] by saying: they arrive in a new culture, they don’t have a network, they can’t give their manuscript to friends and ask: what do you think of it?” The claim here is that the limited network of both migrants (who supposedly do not have friends to read their
manuscript) and literary professionals (who do not have migrants in their networks) are the reasons why an intercultural policy is necessary. In both cases, non-white authors are not seen as having access to the networks of gatekeepers.
Similarly, as ethno-racial minority writers discuss how they entered the literary scene, they often describe their arrival in terms of overcoming distance, as reaching something they used to believe was out of reach. This becomes evident in the way they discuss literary prizes for writers with a specific cultural background. First, they say, these prizes had given them the confidence that a career in writing was also something they could aspire. Second, they
12 feel it provides an imperative for publishers to look for writers in places they are not familiar with – thereby explicitly mentioning two of Amsterdam’s suburbs (Zuidoost and Nieuw-west) that, due to their demographical characteristics, function as metaphors for ethno-racial diversity. Just like other literary professionals, they imagine the literary world as a
demarcated geographical space representing a white, higher educated, cultural class – whereby an ethno-racially diverse population is positioned on the periphery and sometimes outside of this area.
Most gatekeepers do not say these geographical conceptualizations mediate the acquisition process. But, even though publishers and editors deny that non-literary factors influence this process, they do describe – just like gallerists (Velthuis 2013) – acquisition as a practice embedded in specific social environments. What is important to note first is that editors and agents face abundance: they receive much more manuscripts than they can actually read in its entirety, let alone publish. Therefore, the difficulty is not to find authors, but to find the right author for their house. Arguably the most democratic way of acquisition is the selection of unsolicited manuscripts. Editors and agents estimate that they receive between four hundred and eight hundred manuscripts per year, which they refer to as the ‘slush pile’. They say that out of this slush pile, usually one or two writers are good enough to publish, whereby it is frequently remarked that it is “not a lot, really”. It appears to be an unfavourable acquisition method, as it is usually anonymous: many editors say it is a disadvantage when you have not met in person or they “don’t know your face”.
Generally, the image of an editor in his office reading the mail and selecting the manuscripts only partly reflects what editors say they do. Apart from scrutinizing unsolicited manuscripts, literary professionals employ a variety of acquisition practices. They look for young authors at talent nights, rely on their network, surf the internet, read magazines and literary journals, receive offers from agents and contact winners of writing contests. Out of this list, two things become evident. First, editors do a lot of their acquisition outdoors. Given their time-consuming job and the fact that most talent nights they refer to are located in Amsterdam, their outdoor activities mostly occur within reachable distance of their publishing house. Second, the conception of quality does not simply reflect the editors’ personal taste or the publisher’s signature, but is mediated by other gatekeepers - from the programmers of talent nights to the juries of writing contests. This already points to some of the spatial and social constraints acquisition editors face, which is likely to limit the spaces where they look for talented writers.
13 These processes also shape the idea of what a writer should be. He or she needs to be able to write and to know at which places to promote oneself. Therefore, for an outsider to get published, one needs to get access to these networks by obtaining, in Bourdieu’s (1996) terms, cultural and social capital, and a ‘feel for the game’. Like an editor of a large publisher said: “People who know how the cultural milieu works (…) approach someone in person, or – actually, it is not so difficult to get to know some people and find some sort of entrance.” So, literary professionals generally describe their acquisition work rather paradoxically: social factors are said to play a role, but are being downplayed in specific instances – especially when discussing diversity.
Most of the time, literary professionals say they select according to quality, which they perceive as a neutral criterion, existing outside of time and space. Such a
conceptualization of quality often obscures social disparities (Bourdieu 2008). With respect to the Dutch literature, this explains why the amount of diversity in this field is so often described as a ‘coincidence’. For example in the following quote:
The funny thing is, I have the largest portion of the, well, allochtones under my wing. (…) But that’s a coincidence – it’s not like I’m building a migrant list or something (editor from a large publisher)
Gatekeepers often construct diversity as incompatible with selecting on literary quality, whereby – given the desired autonomy of the literary field – the latter was favoured. Diversity, for that matter, is never described as intentional: it is not seen as a practice that is part of the acquisition process, but as something that is only visible in hindsight, the moment you look at the new catalog. Or, like an editor of a small, independent house said: “We acquire on quality. And then, afterwards, you may be confronted with the fact that there is no man or woman in your catalog.” The perception of literary quality as a neutral category thus permits the view that literature is an egalitarian system, which serves as an explanation for underrepresentation as well as overrepresentation. By talking about disparities as
coincidences, social and political explanations for misrepresentation become nearly impossible.
14 6. On modernist aesthetics and identity politics
In order to deepen our understanding of why selecting on diversity is seen as incompatible with selecting on quality, it is necessary to take a closer look at the various ways in which literary professionals classify literature. Frequently, editors and publishers employ a modernist literary-aesthetic discursive repertoire that defines quality around values such as individuality, originality, style, autonomy and neutrality, and sometimes universality.
Subsequently, the criteria for Letterenfonds-applicants are centered around similar values, as well as the standards for the CPNB’s prestigious assignment to write the ‘gift novella’ for the annual National Book Week. Within such a repertoire, gatekeepers distinguish between ‘pure’ literary themes and a novel’s ‘political’ content, which for them signifies a decrease in quality (concerning literary criticism, Vaessens (2009) points at similar tendency). As a result of this conceptualization of literature, diversity policies and practices, as well as the literary work of ethno-racial minority writers, often come to be defined as a form of identity politics (like Mirza 2011 does). When literary professionals employ this repertoire, writers are not seen as individuals but as representing a specific group. Following that, it is implied that their work is published because of its (political) content or out of emancipatory (and therefore ‘non-literary’) motives rather than its aesthetic quality. So, ethno-racial minority writers and their publishers are often said to adopt a ‘political’/‘subjective’ position rather than a
‘literary’/‘neutral’ one.
In the first interview I had, with a large, independent publisher that self-identifies as diverse, my respondent stated:
Politics is something that only sparsely finds its place in Dutch literature. That type of commitment, hey, we [in the Netherlands] generally tend to prefer pure literary themes.
Although this quote relates to a novel that is praised for its political commitment, it is interesting to see how the boundary between ‘pure’ literary content and ‘political’ content is constructed. A political theme stands in opposition to ‘pure’ literature, and is thus positioned ‘outside’ of literature. In other interviews similar claims were made. For example, an
acquisition editor of a large, independent publisher states: “It’s funny you talked to that publisher. They really look for something socially relevant, whereas I think: I just find this a good story.” Just like the opposition that is made between diversity policy and selecting
15 according to quality, ‘good’ and ‘socially relevant’ are in this quote formulated as not
necessarily compatible, whereby ‘social relevance’ (which relates to a novel’s political content) is seen as less adequate a selection criterion than literary quality (‘good’).
In general, publishers and editors posit that literature’s potential is to be “relevant” or to “ask other questions”, but usually in ways that show the primacy of form over content, stating that fiction should not become “too political”. For example, an editor from a small, independent publisher argues that when a writer’s message is too clear, it can be “fatal” for a novel’s storyline. On two occasions, the question was raised whether the personal was to some extent political, but always after claiming that politics should not interfere (too much) with literature. Other literary professionals generally do not diverge from this repertoire. The employee of the Letterenfonds, for example, elaborated at one point on how writers in his program used political themes in their narratives, but concluded with: “In the end, it is of course literary quality that is most important.” Quality, in this quote, is referring to form rather than content. Moreover, quality is treated as ‘given’ – the question who defines quality and whether that is of political relevance is not taken up. By perceiving literary quality as an apolitical value, the literary norm is being depoliticized.
Although not in all cases, the themes of novels by non-white writers are often placed in an identity politics framework, thereby becoming a genre. For example, a writer called her novel that describes various generations of one family a “typical migrant” story. By defining it that way, a history of migrants becomes ‘migrant literature’. This term comes to function as a genre label of which the characteristics are often made related to a writer’s personal
biography. When discussing these types of novels, one publisher remarked, pointing at migrant literature published in the early 2000s that “their value lay mainly in raising awareness”. Such a framework shapes the way gatekeepers differentiate, especially for
literary professionals that do not self-identify as diverse. For example, when the literary agent described the way he sold books to publishers, he used a white female writer and a Turkish-Dutch male writer as examples. The first novel was offered to prestigious, highbrow literary houses. The second novel was offered to somewhat less prestigious companies since it was, the agent said, “a family history”.
As a result of the dominance of modernist norms the presence of writers with a migrant background becomes something you have to defend yourself against, as captured in the following quote:
16 We have got a few authors with a – how do you call that – migrant background? So
they’re here, but they are not on our list because they have that particular background. The thing is, they write very good, and the theme, it can be an advantage, it can be interesting, but it’s not like you really direct towards [such a list]. We haven’t done that as far as I know. (editor from a large publisher)
This editor positions selecting on quality (“they write very good”) in opposition to diversity practices, and describes the outcome as something you do not explicitly “direct towards”. In this way, he makes clear that literary professionals not only draw boundaries between literature and politics when it concerns a novel’s content, but also as they reflect on their identity and, as we will see, their position in the field.
When publishers were asked to define themselves, some answered that their identity is rooted in a political or socially committed past. On the question whether that still plays a role, all of them told a similar story: at the time their houses were founded, they had a clear (usually left-wing) ideology. Over the years, however, their focus had shifted: they have begun to see themselves as increasingly ‘general’ - although they acknowledge that traces of their past could still be found in their company. It shows how a political profile for a
publishing house has become increasingly less desirable. In many respects, this relates to the way a publisher perceives its own position in the literary field. Two publishers that used to have a strong focus on “multicultural” or “new Dutch” literature relate their political profile to their symbolic position in the field, by pointing at stigmatization or lack of prestige.
Despite these arguments, they frame their shifting focus as an accidental “change of interest”. All in all, the idea that the literary domain should be autonomous and that aesthetics and politics are at odds resonates in these companies’ desire not to be seen as ‘political’.
The way a house positions itself often influences a writer’s decision to sign a contract. For example, one writer explains how the choice of house functions as a strategy to influence the reception of her literary work:
At that time I thought: if they [a publisher with a very diverse list] publish me, everyone will know the score, and even though I would write a totally different book, there will be a group who doesn’t pick it up and think: oh, it’s migrant literature, you know. So this publisher was somewhat more neutral (…) I thought that if I would publish a book there, it would be approached more neutrally.
17 This anecdote confirms the stigma diverse publishers and their writers face in the literary world. Since ‘white’ is used as a synonym for ‘neutral’, a division is made between migrant literature - that has the suspicion to be published out of ‘non-literary’ motives - and ‘neutral’ literature, of which the aesthetic features are viewed as unproblematic and where
sociopolitical factors are considered absent. As such, it becomes clear why ethno-racial minority authors frequently problematize neutrality. Set against a white norm, non-white writers are more often reviewed according to socio-cultural and political criteria (Minnaard 2008; Berkers 2009), that are seen as less prestigious by these same literary gatekeepers (Vaessens 2009).
I expected publishers and literary agents that identify as more strongly market-oriented to approach the dominant literary-aesthetic repertoire with more skepticism. But, contrary to my expectations, this does not seem to mean that these literary professionals have a more favourable attitude towards diversity policies. Among the publishers I interviewed one identifies as more market-oriented than others and clearly employs looser aesthetic criteria - more oriented towards the taste of specific publics. However, among respondents that declined my request, those houses that specialize in commercial fiction (who I expect to be more market-oriented) make similar claims to those with more literary prestige, when explaining their motives for not participating: quality is most important, “background does not play a role”, and they “do not have many writers with a migrant background on their list”. But, although artistic values again serve as the main strategy to legitimize the absence of ethno-racial diversity, it does not mean that other explanations are absent.
7. Imagining the audience: cultural capital and target groups
Apart from artistic criteria, literary gatekeepers often point at saleability: when deciding which books to publish, an idea of who its potential readers will be often plays a role. A lack of commercial viability (which is often the case for genres such as short stories collections or poetry) can, despite a work’s literary quality, be a reason not to publish. Likewise, a novel’s expected political impact can, despite its aesthetic classification, be an advantage in
marketing. In order to come to these decisions, literary professionals use various ways to make sense of their audience. As they cannot rely on excessive knowledge to form a picture of the readers’ public, they use fragmented sales figures, retailers’ stories, genre labels and both social and professional media. All these bits and pieces shape the various (sometimes contradictory) imaginations of who the audience might be. Readers are often perceived as
18 possessing a lot of cultural capital - which means youth, lower educated and ethno-racial minorities are not seen as frequent book buyers.
In the following quote the Dutch elite newspaper NRC is used as a metaphor for the literary audience, which demonstrates how the criterion of cultural capital mediates the conception of the readers’ public:
The NRC-reader thinks: what’s this? And younger readers will think: well if this is literature, then I don’t want it. Because it’s not cool, so to speak. But if you say: this is someone that writes for you, and that’s what I really like, to think how I can get people to read that normally don’t do that. (editor from a large publisher)
For literary professionals literary fiction, rather than books in general, frames their
conception of frequent book buyers, which explains how the idea that younger people hardly ever read is formed. As a result, people that read less prestigious genres, such as young-adult fiction (of which the literary agent claimed he sold huge amounts), are generally not
incorporated as part of the readers’ public.
In literary professionals’ repertoires, non-readers are usually attributed a lack of cultural capital, often formulated in terms of education. This is for example done by pointing at the educational trajectory one needs to cover before becoming a reader:
I think that, there are many youth with a migrant background that are very good at school, or at least can study at the right schools, and are you know, stimulated to do something with their talent. Ehm, but I’m not sure whether this target audience will increase. (editor from a large publisher)
By mentioning class and ethno-racial characteristics two symbolic boundaries are drawn simultaneously: lower educated are not part of the readers’ public, and as ethno-racial minorities are generally seen as part of that, they are not included by default. By claiming education will lead to reading more books, it is imagined as part of a higher educated consumption pattern. The last sentence of this quote is especially interesting: as non-white citizens obtain more cultural capital this can, but will not necessarily, lead to an increase in the number of readers.
It shows that although cultural capital is a determining factor, the way the public is imagined also reflects the whiteness of the publishing world. There are some notable
19 exceptions, but the readers’ public is generally not conceived as diverse. Rather, ethno-racial minorities are perceived as “hard to reach”. For example, one publisher relates this to the lack of ‘ethnic’ media in the Netherlands – trying to find a Dutch-Moroccan audience through specific websites was much harder than through magazines with a target audience, he explains. Next to that, it is frequently stated that certain non-white audiences, such as Dutch-Moroccans, “don’t read”, which the employee of the Letterenfonds attributes to the lack of “a reading culture”.
That might appear contradictory as, on the other hand, Dutch-Moroccan authors are more visible in the literary landscape than other ethno-racial minorities (Nijborg and Laroui 2013) and are in some academic studies treated as synonymous for all ethno-racial minorities in the Dutch literary field (like in Minnaard 2008). It is no coincidence then, that when talking about ethno-racial minorities, gatekeepers mostly discuss Dutch-Moroccan and to a lesser extent Dutch-Turkish authors and readers. As such, these groups come to stand for all non-white Dutch in the literary field. Only houses that published bestsellers of Surinamese-Dutch writers explicitly incorporate them as a part of the literary audience. Indonesian-Surinamese-Dutch writers, of whom a couple were commercially successful in the 1970s and 1980s (Berkers 2009), were only mentioned once. So, literary professionals generally not only imagine the public as white, but also frequently ignore the diversity among the non-white public.
In the Netherlands, diversity policies have often been formulated around the idea of target groups, in which diversity functions as a strategy to cater to diverse publics. Trienekens and Bos criticize target group policies by pointing at the ‘diversity paradox’ (2014): in order to achieve a more inclusive system, explicit attention needs to be drawn to diversity to make the arts sector more aware. However, by doing so, the gap between minority and majority art is reinforced. In the early 2000s authors with a migrant background, such as Anil Ramdas (2000) and Hafid Bouazza (2001), wrote essays in which they made a similar point: precisely by perceiving cultural identities as static, a writer’s individuality is neglected and existing boundaries are being reified. On a more abstract level, literary professionals often follow this repertoire, which is built upon the romantic notion of the artist as an individual, rather than as a representative of a specific group (Trienekens and Bos 2014). When doing so, they claim there is no link between writers’ backgrounds, their thematic choices and the background of their audience. However, publishers do so selectively: with regard to other types of diversity (age, class, and sometimes gender) this link is often established. I do not mean to treat target group-based policies as unproblematic, but I do want to point to the selective use of criticism
20 on these policies, and its unintended consequences. Although some audiences are perceived as hard to reach, literary professionals rarely say writers or genres are helpful in finding new publics, which is motivated by the claim that non-white writers cannot always be connected to non-white publics. As such, criticism on target group-bases policies functions to
delegitimize diversity policies, directed at both authors and audiences, in general.
Within the CPNB, target group policies are sometimes employed, which becomes visible in the following quote in which the employee sets out to discuss the criteria for the gift novella for the National Book Week:
Well, if we’re talking about young/old you look at a specific audience, at what audience it appeals to. I think that for younger authors, look, older authors can appeal to a younger audience, but for younger authors it’s just easier. But then, you look at which target audience you try to involve. And I think that these kind of issues are more complicated in a male/female discussion, or what I just said: choosing a homosexual writer, choosing a handicapped writer.
I: So: women wouldn’t pick up a book by a female writer faster.
Women are the readers anyway, so, eh, they are overrepresented, so we don’t have to do anything to involve them, it’s more so with men, but that’s not an argument to choose a male writer.
This quote shows how diversity policies directed at youth are made relevant as young writers, who deviate from the literary norm, can potentially reach a new public. That is why the CPNB started out a program trying to cater to this audience, that is perceived to be hard to reach. On the other hand, gender diversity among authors is not conceived as a strategy to reach another audience, which is motivated by the overrepresentation of women in the readers’ public. As such, overrepresentation serves as an argument to make gender diversity policies less relevant. With regard to ethno-racial diversity, a similar logic is employed: as non-white writers are perceived to be read mainly by a white audience, there is no need for explicit attention to this group of authors. For example, publisher of a small house explained that a diverse list does not mean that your audience is diverse, as “the readers’ public is not there”. Following this repertoire, one can conclude that disconnecting a writer from a specific public functions as a way to delegitimize diversity policies.
21 8. Conclusion
In this paper I analyzed how gatekeepers in the Dutch literary field draw ethno-racial boundaries as they define, classify and imagine both literature and publishing practices. I attempted to show how a modernist literary-aesthetic discursive repertoire is employed as a strategy to depoliticize the absence of ethno-racial diversity and delegitimize diversity policies and practices.
In describing the acquisition process, literary professionals often draw a symbolic boundary between a ‘white’ literary field and non-white Dutch citizens. Still, because literature is viewed as an egalitarian system where social and spatial factors are of little importance, and literary quality is said to be a ‘neutral’ criterion, diversity is usually defined as a coincidental outcome rather than an intentional practice. When assessing literary quality, gatekeepers draw a symbolic boundary between a ‘pure’, ‘neutral’ literary-aesthetic ideal of literature and a literature that is conceived as ‘subjective’, ‘diverse’ and related to identity politics criteria. That is why, when diversity is discussed in relation to literary quality, the former is perceived as a political intervention that threatens the artistic autonomy of the literary field. As a result, a diverse list is associated with a publisher’s less prestigious
position in the field. Ethno-racial boundaries are also drawn as literary professionals imagine the readers’ public. Ethno-racial minorities are, with some exceptions, not seen as part of the audience. For both gender and ethno-racial background – but not for youth – diversity is not seen as a strategy to reach more diverse publics, which is legitimized by a romantic notion of the artist as individual genius. To conclude, in both artistic and commercial terms, selecting on diversity is seen as incompatible with selecting on ‘quality’ and/or ‘saleability’. In that way, literary values and gatekeepers’ practices are depoliticized, while diversity as a practice and policy is politicized, and thereby discredited.
These findings do not stand on their own. With regard to Dutch journalism for example, Müller and Frissen (2014) find that journalists frequently see their professional ideology as incompatible with diversity. Such a comparison shows that, although this is a situated analysis specific to the Dutch context, further research – that is sensitive to circumstance and context – could find similar structures elsewhere, in other artistic and professional disciplines. As already pointed out in the introduction, earlier studies on the (institutional) presence of immigrants and ethno-racial minorities in specific artistic fields show that their presence cannot be generalized to all creative practices and professions. In other art forms, the argument that when art is classified as more political it is seen as less
22 prestigious, may take on a different shape. We could think about how that might be the case in other reputable disciplines like the contemporary visual arts – where political themes may be more desirable – or the popular arts, such as hip-hop, that are appreciated in ways that minimize its political content (Rodriquez 2006).
As a research on diversity in literary fields, this study has some limitations. One of the main limitations is that this study lacks ethnographic observations, and therefore tells us less about exclusionary practices. An institutional approach to Dutch literature that focuses in such a way on editors’ practices, could provide an additional conception of selection and decision-making processes, and locate more subtle mechanisms of exclusion. Likewise, the institutional trajectories of ethno-racial minority writers are something to take into account: what are the conditions under which they move from a smaller publisher to a larger, or vice versa? Research angles like these, embedded in a specific institutional, national and socio-historical context, may provide more room for comparisons between countries and artistic genres. Further research will, hopefully, make the presence of immigrants and ethno-racial minorities in the arts a less neglected area.
---
Some words of appreciation:
I would like to thank all respondents for their time and hospitality, Christine Delhaye for all her valuable advice, Yannick Coenders, Milda Saltenyte, Alrun Vogt and Simone van de Wetering for their insightful comments, and Imre van Son for lending me some important books.
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