Global publishing expansion keeps power concentrated in Western metropolitan centers

Evidence

Despite the dangers of distance, world literature’s attention to the circulation of texts as commodities subject to exchange in a global market does connect usefully with our interest in a market for the Muslim and how certain textual and critical preoccupations travel and recur in different contexts. As Waïl Hassan puts it, the “notion of world literature … is linked in an important way to the internationalization of culture that resulted from the emergence of capitalism as the dominant mode of production in Europe. Similarly, our contemporary notion of the globalization of literary studies is affiliated with the globalization of capital, or late capitalism in the post–Cold War era.” Literature is subject to the forces of globalization in the same way as all other cultural activities. We can see this process beginning even before the age of empire, when literature and its dissemination became a tool in the colonial project. More recently, as Brouillette observes, we have seen a proliferation of postcolonial writing as part of an expansion but also a niche fragmentation of the global book market. However, this expansion has still operated to keep power in the metropolitan centers, with the result that the publishing industry remains unrepresentative of non-Western and minority ethnic communities. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 57

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the market-for-the-Muslim frame the reader is using for Hamid and Naqvi — offers a structural explanation for why their novels circulate as they do. — connects to: Third-world literature reaches metropolitan readers through metropolitan-controlled grids — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 190; Metropolitan institutions staffed by Westerners generate most Third World knowledge — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 309
• SEED: Angle: how the expansion-and-fragmentation of the book market positions ‘Muslim fiction’ as a niche commodity while keeping editorial power in the metropole.