It’s great if this is actually a permanent change and fewer writers will face barriers to getting published based on their background ir topic. I am not sure this article finds any very likely- looking long-term cultural change in publishing industry at present though. Not if tokenistic representation with rules placed over creativity have been the industry’s response so far. I obviously hope that’s wrong and it’s a pendulum swinging that will permanently settle into a more equitable place.
It’s profoundly racist to expect or require writers from ethnic minority backgrounds to only write about race if they want to be published, or to encourage that these authors only be ‘read’ as writing about race, whatever it is they are saying. I’ve noticed that publishers allow white writers to write about ‘non-race’ issues but don’t often allow writers of other ethnicities that same privilege even when they’ve authored a book about something else, which reinforces a white default or norm.
It’s also wrong and fruitless to try to prevent any writer from imagining the experience of others in fiction, provided what they write is within the law. It might be crap writing but that’s a different issue. Perhaps it might be great or illuminating or anything else.
The industry reaction the article describes is ultimately self-defeating, if published authors according to their background have to write exclusively about (their) race (but different rules dependent on their own background) or must avoid referring to it at all, and if fiction will be killed off, with autobiography becoming dominant (whether expressed as such or not).
That backwards-looking centring life experience approach feels also an opportunity cost, at a time when imagining about the future is a really powerful contribution to a culture with a lot of uncertainty and division in it. We need books exploring race issues in detail which won’t be easy reads for many of us but we also need the same writers to be free to write what they want to write about that may not be related to race at all. We need others to be free to critique all of that writing or to write their own responses and get them published.
It’s another example of identity politics in combination with the market appearing to free people or offer a new better way of working, but in reality potentially trapping and dividing them away from each other into smaller and ever more specifically labelled boxes. We need to recognise and celebrate difference, but also we urgently need to work out how to bring about more social cohesion, though I recognise it will need a much bigger approach than publishing books.
There’s a whole interesting other question underneath this about why, as readers, we often want to know ‘who’ is writing, when we read the work, and it would also be interesting to think about other issues like sexism and able-ism and how they play into this, but that’s for another thread..