Against Conglomeration

Abstract

In the 1980s, anxiety about the extensive and ongoing conglomeration of the publishing industry led to the emergence of a movement of nonprofit publishers. It included counterculture figures like Coffee House's Allan Kornblum and Milkweed's Emilie Buchwald, who got their start with boutique letterpresses; political and aesthetic activists like Arte Público's Nicolás Kanellos, Feminist Press's Florence Howe, and Dalkey Archive's John O'Brien; and refugees from conglomeration like Fiona McCrae and André Schiffrin. Nonprofits often defined themselves by their support for literariness, and which they depicted as under threat from commercial houses, which helped them gain support from private foundations, philanthropists, and government agencies like the National Endowment for the Arts. We discovered that these two different ways of structuring publishers' finances-conglomerate and nonprofit-created a split within literature, yielding two distinct modes of American writing after 1980. This essay characterizes the two modes, explains how the split between them happened, and illustrates the significance of this shift for the rise of multiculturalism. We pay particularly close attention to the careers of

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

“…Though a comprehensive exploration of that inequality falls outside the scope of the present project, it is worth noting that recent computational and data-driven research has been particularly valuable in illuminating its depth and historical breadth at scale (see, e.g. Grossman et al ., 2021; Le-Khac and Hao, 2021; McGrath, 2019; Ramdarshan Bold, 2021; Sinykin and Roland, 2021). So (2021), for instance, demonstrates the severity and relative resilience of racial disparities in 20th and 21st century trade publishing in the United States.…”

“…Although this paper has focused on comp titles as a case study, there are many more systemic threats to the freedom to read deserving of similar treatments and posing some similar problems: the conglomeration of the publishing industry (Sinykin and Roland, 2021); labor inequality within that industry (Grady, 2023); pervasive algorithmic bias (Daniil et al, 2022;Murray, 2021); the rise of Amazon and bookseller automation (McGurl, 2021;Murray, 2018;Miller, 2006); culturally imperialist representations of "non-literary people" (Hurston, 2000;So, 2021) and deficit approaches to literacy education (Stornaiuolo and Thomas, 2017;Hamilton and Pitt, 2011), to name a few.…”