The virtuous virtue of the virtuous
An investigation by the Telegraph has found examples of literary agencies making clear their preference for authors deemed under-represented or marginalised – normally meaning people of colour, disabled writers and those from the LGBTQ+ community – prompting concern that authors who do not meet the criteria are becoming “ostracised”.
Ash Literary, an agency looking “for extraordinary stories for children that reflect and celebrate the diversity of our world”, states on its submissions page: “We are not interested in stories about white able-bodied WW2 evacuees but would welcome that story from a disabled, LGBTQ+ or BIPOC [black, indigenous, and other people of colour] perspective.”
Which is absurd as well as disgusting. How many indigenous lesbian gay trans queer disabled people were WW2 evacuees? My quick back of the envelope calculation yields the approximate figure of zero.
It adds: “If your book is about an identity that is not yours, we will not be a good fit. This includes books based [sic] the experiences of family members and friends.”
By “books” they mean “novels” – it’s apparent that they’re an agency for fiction writers, not writers of all kinds. They want fiction writers but they don’t want fiction. Seems like a stumbling block.
The Good Literary Agency, which receives funding from Arts Council England’s National Portfolio 2023-26, was set up “to explicitly represent British writers from backgrounds under-represented in UK publishing.” It lists jobs that ask for applicants who understand “the issues within publishing and society more generally that have led to structural inequality and writers who are BAME, working class, disabled and LGBTQ+ being under-represented”.
So it’s not so much a literary agency as…what? A minor political party? An agenda? A campaign?
Hat pin woman found this fragrant gem for us:
I recommend playing it to get the full effect of the disdainful smug Virtue of this “literary agent.”
Weird. I – perhaps naïvely – thought that white evacuees like my mother, able-bodied or otherwise, were indigenous to England. If not, then I have to ask who actually counts as indigenous to the country of my birth.
If anyone needs me, I’ll be prepping for my next round of Centrifugal Bumble-puppy…
Maybe it’s different in England, but a study reported in The Atlantic recently showed that, from 2019 through 2023:
So I’m skeptical of claims that non-minority authors can’t catch a break.
It really depends though, doesn’t it? YA seems dominated by people at least claiming to be non-white (with sugar frosting of “queerness” over everything) but YA is only a slice of the pie. None of them are writing military fiction I bet.
Tigger: AFAIK (which probably isn’t very far) the Celts are the indigenous people of Britain. So if your family’s origins are Saxon, or even worse, Norman, you and your mum are colonizers!
So says this Real American™.
Sure, and no doubt the vast majority of books accepted for publication are by established authors, so the opportunities for first-time authors look different. And particular literary agencies might choose to focus on recruiting certain demographics and be pretty blunt about it.
I’m just saying, let’s be wary of anecdotes in the absence of data (or contrary to what data we do have). The incentives for sharing anecdotes here mostly point in one direction: publishers and literary agents want to play up how focused they are on minority authors, DEI advocates and consultants want to cheerlead those efforts and declare that nobody wants to read straight white male authors anyway, and straight white male aspiring authors want to complain that their “brilliant” novel has been unjustly overlooked because of wokeness and not because it’s a turgid thinly autobiographical wankfest.
tigger, that’s something I’ve been banging on about for years now. What counts as indigenous or native to a region or nation? If merely being born somewhere is insufficient to qualify, what does? When people first arrived on the British Isles, they weren’t indigenous to that region. Neither were those who first arrived on any continent after leaving Africa. At what point did their progeny become indigenous? Many peoples called indigenous controlled territory that once belonged to others, obtained through conquest. When did they change from conquerors to natives? How many generations did it take for the soil of their new homes to replace the sin in their blood?
If it ever happened, and it must have for there to be any indigenous peoples at all, then that’s something of a problem for those who speak with such virtuous concern for native and indigenous peoples. For one thing, it means that indigeneity isn’t a fixed trait. Time and action can change it. For another, indigeneity is not limited to those whose family and ethnic history bears no connection to colonial, settler, or conqueror cultures, for that would exclude nearly every human population to ever exist. It means that the most recently dominant group can be indigenous, otherwise those who resist colonization (from a not yet dominant group) cannot be indigenous. Ultimately, it means that the category of indigenous peoples is and must be far broader than those who typically employ the term would like.
For example, here’s the UN trying to define indigeneity:
Just look at how non-intuitive these criteria are. They manage to explicitly run afoul of some of our previous conclusions, such as requiring that indigenous cultures not be dominant. Somehow being indigenous is also a matter of attitude, behavior, and self-identification. Indigeneity becomes both a status conferred to the weak by the strong through cultural dominance and a status that is conferred by the self and the community.
That non-dominance criterion really gets me. If a currently indigenous people somehow rose to dominance, it would cease to be indigenous. That’s just absurd.
I’d say that TiM’s experience of claimed “womanhood” is not theirs. Though it certainly is fictional.
Throughout art, this is happening. In theatre, people of color have reached representative status in at least some of the categories; this is good, and should be celebrated. Instead, theatre people continually berate themselves and others (especially others) over these under-represented groups (which are not under-represented). Gay men are over-represented by a large margin in theatre, and yet I can read about (1) how gay men have no voice in theatre and (2) theatre is dominated and run by gay men (in the same book, no less!). Meanwhile, Asians and white women remain highly under-represented in theatre, while white women are being sent away with garlic and silver bullets because of their dominant status!?!
Success is not an option for many of the activists. Success means an end to their reason for existence, or at least their reason for shouting at other people who are very much like a lot of the shouters, but the shouters don’t want to admit that. They want to be non-white, non-able bodied, non-straight, non-“cis”…but they don’t want to actually go through any of the shit those groups might have to take. TiMs don’t want to have people disrespecting them, even though they want to be women. White activists don’t want to be lynched, though some of them seem to desire not to be white. And so on.
Success? Get back! See this cross? Back! I’ve got garlic! Don’t you dare claim we’ve had success!
To point out the successes, and suggest we use those to figure out how to have successes that are broader and encompass other parts of society, is to deny their identity, which is…I don’t know. I guess virtuous, non-white white person? Someone who is white, but doesn’t act white? And we all know that denying someone’s ‘lived identity’ is to deny their existence, which is to genocide them, or worse, not pay appropriate fawning attention to them.
Okay, I’m looking at Screechy Monkey’s quote, and I’m just not reading it the same as most of you:
So by the data, five years ago, racial demographics in publishing had minority representation among authors at less than half what they would be if they matched the population, and even now, with all this excessive effort to course-correct, they’re still short. That tells me that the efforts absolutely were needed, and that they’ve been mostly, but not quite, successful in their aims, at least broadly speaking.
Yes, I’m sure there’s some travesties of judgement in this process. And it may be time for some general acknowledgement that we’re on the right course. But I’m seeing a lot of (to me) unnecessary hand-wringing on this subject here.
And I’m inclined to reject the quibbling over the term “indigenous”. Denying that the effects of European colonization of much of the planet was a genuinely unique impact on global history, and downplaying how that period reset and then fixed in place the board is just silly. I know the practical meaning of “indigenous” with almost the same clarity that I know the meaning of “woman”, and I sincerely doubt that most folks here don’t.
Freemage, I was reading it the same way, but while the efforts might be needed, there are other groups of under-represented authors that are ignored. And it is my experience that the increase is not recognized by the activists. They cannot have their work succeed. It would destroy their psyche.
My mother is three quarters Irish, my father was half Welsh. That would certainly make me mostly Celtic, and my appearance would confirm that.
According to UK government statistics from the census of 2021, England and Wales have a combined population of 59.6 million; of which:
81.7% are white (74.4% white British, 6.2% other white nationality);
9.3% are Asian (3.1% Indian, 6.2% other Asian);
4.0% are Black;
2.9% are mixed; and
2.1% are of other ethnic groups.
https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/uk-population-by-ethnicity/national-and-regional-populations/population-of-england-and-wales/latest/
By the way, 51% of the population is female. When are the publishers going to reflect that?
Addendum:
Ethnicity wasn’t recorded in any census before the nineteen seventies, so it’s not possible for the publisher to demand any kind of proportional representation, by race, of children billeted out during WWII. The data do not exist.
If I’m asked what are my pronouns (in an on-line survey, for example) then I decline to answer. If an answer is obligatory I say “he, her, hers, him, his, it, its, she, theirs, them, they, whichever you like best”, or if I need to be brief “he, it, she or they”.
This reminds me somewhat of the experimental novelist BS Johnson.
One of his maxims was that writers should strive only to tell the truth: that making up stories was a kind of self-indulgence at best, but also outright deceit. This, you will appreciate, is somewhat limiting for a novelist. And so – as Jonathan Coe tells it in his biography of Johnson, Like a Fiery Elephant, pp 203-4 – one of his novels was rejected by Frederic Warburg with the rather gentlely joshing “Aren’t you rather young to be writing your memoirs?”
Although in this case, it’s not experimentalism that’s behind the collapse into solipsism, but the poisonous moralism of the timid.
Somewhat limiting for a novelist and for the novelist’s readers. “How the hell do you know that??” with every sentence.
iknklast: I agree with you on that point–we should be celebrating these victories, so that we can use them as models for further work of this kind in other fields, or on behalf of other under-represented groups. (And, of course, we can all think of a case where folks went looking for a ‘new group’ to represent and kinda missed the mark.)