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Redlining Culture: A Data History of Racial Inequality and Postwar Fiction
The canon of postwar American fiction has changed over the past few decades to include far more writers of color. It would appear that we are making progress―recovering marginalized voices and including those who were for far too long ignored. However, is this celebratory narrative borne out in the data?
Richard Jean So draws on big data, literary history, and close readings to offer an unprecedented analysis of racial inequality in American publishing that reveals the persistence of an extreme bias toward white authors. In fact, a defining feature of the publishing industry is its vast whiteness, which has denied nonwhite authors, especially black writers, the coveted resources of publishing, reviews, prizes, and sales, with profound effects on the language, form, and content of the postwar novel. Rather than seeing the postwar period as the era of multiculturalism, So argues that we should understand it as the invention of a new form of racial inequality―one that continues to shape the arts and literature today.
Interweaving data analysis of large-scale patterns with a consideration of Toni Morrison’s career as an editor at Random House and readings of individual works by Octavia Butler, Henry Dumas, Amy Tan, and others, So develops a form of criticism that brings together qualitative and quantitative approaches to the study of literature. A vital and provocative work for American literary studies, critical race studies, and the digital humanities, Redlining Culture shows the importance of data and computational methods for understanding and challenging racial inequality.
Richard Jean So draws on big data, literary history, and close readings to offer an unprecedented analysis of racial inequality in American publishing that reveals the persistence of an extreme bias toward white authors. In fact, a defining feature of the publishing industry is its vast whiteness, which has denied nonwhite authors, especially black writers, the coveted resources of publishing, reviews, prizes, and sales, with profound effects on the language, form, and content of the postwar novel. Rather than seeing the postwar period as the era of multiculturalism, So argues that we should understand it as the invention of a new form of racial inequality―one that continues to shape the arts and literature today.
Interweaving data analysis of large-scale patterns with a consideration of Toni Morrison’s career as an editor at Random House and readings of individual works by Octavia Butler, Henry Dumas, Amy Tan, and others, So develops a form of criticism that brings together qualitative and quantitative approaches to the study of literature. A vital and provocative work for American literary studies, critical race studies, and the digital humanities, Redlining Culture shows the importance of data and computational methods for understanding and challenging racial inequality.
- GenresNonfictionHistoryRace
240 pages, Hardcover
Published December 15, 2020
8 people are currently reading
232 people want to read
About the author
Richard Jean So
3 books4 followersHi, I'm Richard Jean So and I'm a professor of English and digital humanities at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. I research contemporary literature and culture, online and digital cultures, and AI and culture. I enjoy reading contemporary fiction and popular science and social science trade books.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
January 8, 2021
Beyond the headline–postwar US lit saw virtually none of the diversification over time that most literary scholars have assumed–this book also functions as an introduction to a variety of computational techniques of use to humanists. I am particularly intrigued by the prospect of applying some within intellectual history.
The principal argument is convincing given the four different dimensions that So investigates: publishing, reviewing, bestseller lists and literary prizes, and academic canonicity. One criticism I had that popped up in each chapter, however, was how So contrasted massive racial inequality (usually at about a 9:1 ratio in favor of white authors) with what he characterized as something much closer to parity between men and women. The trends varied and in one dimension, something like parity actually was achieved (in the number of "elite" books being reviewed, see Figure 2.2), but to intimate (as So does) that an 80-20 or 76-24 split (men to women) is not worth dwelling on is unjustifiable.
So writes, "The gender ratio for both bestsellers and prizewinners is bad (worse than ⅔ male), but the figure that most starkly jumps out is the 'white' ratio" and "the results suggest that the inequality of the postwar American literary field is driven primarily by race" (107). But 80-20 and 76-24 are meaningfully greater than "worse than ⅔ male," particularly if we consider how far these ratios diverge from the 50% that would be no more than an accurate reflection of women's share of the population. While the paucity of minority authors in the bestseller lists and among prizewinners is deplorable, arguably prize committees could "catch up" and reach a proportion reflective of demographics much more quickly in terms of race than they could in terms of gender. In other words, it would require much more work--many more years of women-only or POC-only prizewinners--to reach a total proportion equal to share of the total population for women than for people of color.
I do not mean to place gender and race in some kind of oppression olympics. They are thoroughly intertwined when it comes to inequality--that is the point I wish to make. Thus So's frequent dismissals of the need to incorporate more gender analysis and his insistence that gender inequality is not really that bad is not only unsupported by his evidence but also self-defeating when it comes to his own argument for the necessity of greater equality. So demonstrates over and over again the existence of gross inequalities, and he eloquently argues that literary scholars must do a better job of paying attention to the stark facts of their field. But he does not fully offer any kind of reparative vision, any sense of what equality would look like. Mere parity--a numerical equality between the proportion of a given demographic segment and its representation within the literary world--is not enough if the point is true institutional transformation. Women and people of color both need to be over-represented for this to happen, a principle enunciated most pithily by Ruth Bader Ginsberg (who, I know, was not always great on race): when asked by someone when there would be enough women on the Supreme Court, she said 'when there are nine.'
So is not required to offer a roadmap for how the whole literary field--from publishing to scholarship--ought to reform itself. The purpose he undertakes is to open literary scholars' eyes to the nearly unchanged numbers for Black authors between 1950 and 2000 (the period covered by his study), and at that he succeeds amply and admirably. He makes a strong case for the utility of various computational tools to the study of literary history. But by often taking a (strategically, perhaps) naïve definition of inequality as something that just looks wrong or that "jumps out" prima facie as unequal, So ducks some of the most important questions that his evidence raises.
The principal argument is convincing given the four different dimensions that So investigates: publishing, reviewing, bestseller lists and literary prizes, and academic canonicity. One criticism I had that popped up in each chapter, however, was how So contrasted massive racial inequality (usually at about a 9:1 ratio in favor of white authors) with what he characterized as something much closer to parity between men and women. The trends varied and in one dimension, something like parity actually was achieved (in the number of "elite" books being reviewed, see Figure 2.2), but to intimate (as So does) that an 80-20 or 76-24 split (men to women) is not worth dwelling on is unjustifiable.
So writes, "The gender ratio for both bestsellers and prizewinners is bad (worse than ⅔ male), but the figure that most starkly jumps out is the 'white' ratio" and "the results suggest that the inequality of the postwar American literary field is driven primarily by race" (107). But 80-20 and 76-24 are meaningfully greater than "worse than ⅔ male," particularly if we consider how far these ratios diverge from the 50% that would be no more than an accurate reflection of women's share of the population. While the paucity of minority authors in the bestseller lists and among prizewinners is deplorable, arguably prize committees could "catch up" and reach a proportion reflective of demographics much more quickly in terms of race than they could in terms of gender. In other words, it would require much more work--many more years of women-only or POC-only prizewinners--to reach a total proportion equal to share of the total population for women than for people of color.
I do not mean to place gender and race in some kind of oppression olympics. They are thoroughly intertwined when it comes to inequality--that is the point I wish to make. Thus So's frequent dismissals of the need to incorporate more gender analysis and his insistence that gender inequality is not really that bad is not only unsupported by his evidence but also self-defeating when it comes to his own argument for the necessity of greater equality. So demonstrates over and over again the existence of gross inequalities, and he eloquently argues that literary scholars must do a better job of paying attention to the stark facts of their field. But he does not fully offer any kind of reparative vision, any sense of what equality would look like. Mere parity--a numerical equality between the proportion of a given demographic segment and its representation within the literary world--is not enough if the point is true institutional transformation. Women and people of color both need to be over-represented for this to happen, a principle enunciated most pithily by Ruth Bader Ginsberg (who, I know, was not always great on race): when asked by someone when there would be enough women on the Supreme Court, she said 'when there are nine.'
So is not required to offer a roadmap for how the whole literary field--from publishing to scholarship--ought to reform itself. The purpose he undertakes is to open literary scholars' eyes to the nearly unchanged numbers for Black authors between 1950 and 2000 (the period covered by his study), and at that he succeeds amply and admirably. He makes a strong case for the utility of various computational tools to the study of literary history. But by often taking a (strategically, perhaps) naïve definition of inequality as something that just looks wrong or that "jumps out" prima facie as unequal, So ducks some of the most important questions that his evidence raises.
September 30, 2021
I will be citing this book for the foreseeable future. Surprisingly accessible, making data history a important facet of quantitative data interpretation that really makes me think about to qualify numbers to mean something more.
January 30, 2024
https://www.chronicle.com/article/dig...
This book is a joke. Read the link about. Also, So's dismissal of the 'gender' question because it doesn't serve his race lens is so manipulative.
This book is a joke. Read the link about. Also, So's dismissal of the 'gender' question because it doesn't serve his race lens is so manipulative.
April 7, 2021
Groundbreaking~
September 17, 2021
A second generation "distant reading" monograph, Richard Jean So shows powerfully how such methodologies can uncover systemic racism in literary culture.
Want to read
October 14, 2022Recommendation from digital humanities class
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews