Literary publishing is consolidated under five transnational media conglomerates
Evidence
Sarah Brouillette, Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), viii, 5–7, 60. Brouillette focuses on literary culture as a process of production and exchange, where books are commodities subject to the same trading conditions and requiring the same targeted marketing strategies as other commodities. Looking specifically at the publishing industry, she points out how it has been absorbed into a consolidated pattern of media ownership where five large transnational companies dominate the entertainment market: Time Warner, Disney, News Corporation, Viacom, and Bertelsmann. “Bertelsmann, for example, is the largest book publisher, with 10 per cent of all English language book sales worldwide.… In 1998 it acquired Random House, one of the largest publishers of literary fiction, with upwards of 100 houses in 13 countries under its umbrella, including Alfred A. Knopf, Pantheon, Fawcett, Vintage and Doubleday” (50). For our purposes, we can update this story by observing that The Reluctant Fundamentalist was first published by Hamish Hamilton, an imprint of Penguin, owned at the time by Pearson but since 2013 jointly owned with Bertelsmann under the name “Penguin Random House.” — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 920
Categorization
Category: Factual Claims
- XREF: Grounds the claim that even a ‘contesting’ novel like Hamid’s circulates through the global literary marketplace — connects to the reader’s argument that Hamid-as-evidence still carries market constraints.
Related
- Global publishing expansion keeps power concentrated in Western metropolitan centers (similarity 0.82)
- Anti-Islamophobic fiction is embedded in the very capitalist culture industry it contests (similarity 0.80)
- Literature embedded in global markets may be unable to contest capitalism’s Islamophobia (similarity 0.79)