To hell with woke publishers
by Gareth Roberts, spiked:
The gatekeepers of the creative industry are riddled with a nasty strain of identity politics.
ASH Literary is on the hunt for budding children’s book authors. ‘We are actively seeking voices that have historically been underrepresented’, the submissions section of the agency’s website tells us. ‘For example, we are not interested in stories about white, able-bodied [Second World War] evacuees, but would welcome that story from a disabled, LGBTQ+ or BIPOC [black, indigenous or people of colour] perspective’, it explains.
Leaving aside for a moment the big question of what on Earth the term ‘indigenous’ could possibly mean in a British context, this reads like a sophomoric parody of the modern publishing industry. But I’m afraid it is real. And when we stop laughing at the thought of a blue-haired ‘nonbinary’ stepping nervously off a train at a remote rural station in 1940 – which would be rather like Neville Chamberlain bopping along to some Chiptune – there is something quite troubling about this stuff, uncovered among other examples by Charlotte Gill in the Sunday Telegraph.
The nub of things comes a little later on the same page of the ASH agency’s site, which reads: ‘If your book is about an identity that is not yours, we will not be a good fit.’ What a grim traducement of the power and the purpose of literature – of humanity, even – that nasty little sentence is.
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