Title: “Against Conglomeration”
Author: Dan Sinykin and Edwin Roland
Publisher: Journal of Cultural Analytics
Date: April 20, 2021
Form: Research Article
Keywords: Publishing, Nonprofits, Conglomerates, Diversity, Literariness, Digital Humanities
I didn’t write a post last week, since I was moving to a new apartment, but this week, in between bouts of unpacking, I read “Against Conglomeration,” a new piece in Cultural Analytics by Dan Sinykin and Edwin Roland. It’s an article that does a bunch of different things:
It’s an institutional history of nonprofit indie presses like Graywolf and how they differentiated themselves from the big commercial publishing houses (the answer: by emphasizing their lists’ cultural diversity and literariness).
It’s a digital humanities project that uses a text classification model to analyze the stylistic differences between literary and commercial fiction (in sum: commercial fiction tends toward the language of power and institutions, while novels published by nonprofit indies are full of words associated with bodies, aesthetic craft, and rural community life).
It’s a literary analysis of the work of two nonprofit-published authors, Percival Everett and Karen Tei Yamashita (which brings out their suspicion toward the same rhetoric of multiculturalism and diversity that their publishers relied on to win funding).
Rhetorically, there are a couple of notable things about it. For one, I really like the title: “Against Conglomeration” sounds like a provocation or polemic, but it’s actually a description—of the disposition of the nonprofit presses that the article analyzes. Another feature is its direct and methodical use of open questions: several of the sections end or begin with a paragraph full of research questions, which the text that follows diligently answers.
Here’s the paragraph I want to highlight, though:
Two keywords defined the field [of nonprofit publishing]’s self-understanding: literary and diverse. Nonprofits used these words to differentiate themselves from commercial presses and the homogenizing force of conglomeration. This narrative of literature in crisis was habituated and institutionalized through the perennial documentation required by state and philanthropic funding. Crisis was good for literature because that made the mission of the nonprofits—to sustain literature’s otherwise endangered diversity and literariness—urgent. Conversely, claims to having successfully implemented multiculturalism gave the impression to readers that the literary world was more diverse, equal, and democratic than it was. The celebration of Sandra Cisneros, Louise Erdrich, Toni Morrison, and Amy Tan masked the profound whiteness of the industry.
To summarize: nonprofit presses in the 1990s emphasized that literary fiction, especially by non-white authors, was endangered by the increasingly commercialized and conglomerated Big Six publishing houses (later the Big Five; now the Big Four). Emphasizing the problem gave their mission urgency. The conglomerates, by contrast, might point to non-white authors like Cisneros, Erdrich, Morrison, and Tan (all of whom published with big trade houses) as supposed proof that literature and diversity were doing just fine. Emphasizing that everything was fine (even when it wasn’t) could help varnish the reputation of the commercial publishers and the industry as a whole.
What interests me here is the “conversely” that links those two claims. I don’t pretend to understand the precise difference between the converse, the inverse, the obverse, and the reverse (I think contrapositives are involved, but I don’t really understand them either). If you pushed me on it, I’d hazard that, according to their usage in logic, this passage might be describing an inverse rather than a converse. It doesn’t really matter though. What I think is effective about this passage is the way it attends to a phenomenon (in this case, the discourse over fiction’s literariness and its diversity), and then rotates it 180 degrees to view it from the opposite angle. Seeing two opposite sides—the nonprofits emphasizing how commercially driven and white the industry is and the big presses pointing to their prize-winning authors of color—provides a fuller understanding of the phenomenon.
This description might make the move I’m talking about sound a bit too much like both-sides-ism, but it’s not really that at all. A couple of years ago, Jia Tolentino and Doreen St. Félix had a conversation about cultural criticism at the launch of Tolentino’s Trick Mirror, and they described the work of criticism as a process of holding one’s object up to the light and rotating it, observing the light bouncing off its different facets. I think that’s what Sinykin and Roland are doing here.