Armstrong: A Likely Story: The “Diversity” Myth Consumes the Canadian Literary Scene

Of note:

….I am not calling for contracts, publicity and awards to be given out on a demographically proportional basis. Women buy more books than men, so it’s no surprise if more women want to write and there’s no injustice in the industry catering to women’s interests when it comes to signing and promoting authors. The experience of being in a racial or cultural minority might be more likely to inspire people to become writers – witness the flowering of American Jewish literature in the 20^th century. The desire to write and the talent to do it very well make for a rare combination and we can’t expect that combination to show up by quota. Maybe the “disproportionate” results I see are purely innocent, based on the merit of authors and the demands of the marketplace.

Except that they are accompanied by countless indicators of a literary culture that is working to create much more disproportionate results in the future, once all those current beneficiaries of race-based emerging writer awards and mentorships are ready to move into positions of literary leadership. If literary gatekeepers – the publishers, editors, conference organizers and the like behind those exclusionary measures I referred to above – are going to use race-based criteria to bar the majority of the nation’s population from many of their programs and publications, there had better be compelling evidence to justify those measures.

But the success of BIPOC writers over the last two or three decades, and especially in the last five years, suggests that these extraordinary measures are not justified. Remember, books promoted between 2018 and 2020 were written and landed publishing deals before the affirmative action initiatives I listed above, and yet BIPOC writers already managed to be moderately over-represented in Canadian literary circles. (And that some of these measures target women generally because they’ve been excluded from Canadian literature is so preposterous as to be laughable.)

If you look up Canadian writers online, increasingly you find that they define themselves immediately in racial terms, whether they are black or white, Asian or Indigenous or any combination. Often, the writer will include a health diagnosis of some sort, especially in cases where there’s no other potential affirmative action hook.

But far from easing off the affirmative action, the people piloting the good ship CanLit are pushing the throttle harder. Jesse Wente, “chairperson” of the Canada Council, in an interview with the Toronto Star called the institution he headed a “colonial” organization and described his mission as reducing the harm it causes to Indigenous, black and other communities. Given that this is the man who campaigned to destroy the career of author Hal Niedzviecki over an awkwardly worded call for writers to bridge cultures (the so-called Appropriation Prize kerfuffle of 2017), we can guess what this might mean.

In my own province of Manitoba, the government-funded arts council recently announced a new set of “strategic priorities” focused on equity, diversity, reconciliation and projects that “build communities.” The money quote in this document: “Refine program assessment criteria that favour a Eurocentric concept of excellence to instead focus on impact.”

What could possibly be done when so many publishers, agents, editors, academics, prominent authors and funding bodies are pushing harder than ever for identity-based affirmative action? A change in the federal government, which seems likely, might bring in new leadership at Canadian Heritage and the Canada Council that is less sympathetic to race-based program criteria. So the next federal election may put the brakes on some of these measures.

Perhaps more significantly, though, we may be able to count on boredom and frustration among readers and writers who are tiring of literature becoming a mere subsidiary branch of the greater social justice movement. How many Canadian Percival Everetts are there who are just as tired of trauma narratives as the protagonist of American Fiction? And how many book buyers have grown tired of being told again and again that equity and diversity are good and racism is bad?

It will be, admittedly, a steep and long mountain to climb. If you look up Canadian writers online, increasingly you find that they define themselves immediately in racial terms, whether they are black or white, Asian or Indigenous or any combination. Often, the writer will include a health diagnosis of some sort, especially in cases where there’s no other potential affirmative action hook: “Jane Smith is a settler of mixed Finnish and Irish ancestry living with long Covid and bipolar disorder on the unceded lands of the Anishinaabe.” Perhaps a culture that encourages writers to view themselves as individuals first and group members second would be more likely to produce the kind of exciting, unpredictable literature that encourages readers to shell out cash and turn the page.

Bob Armstrong is a Winnipeg-based novelist. His last novel, Prodigies, was published in the United States by Five Star/Gale after Canadian publishers and agents turned it down, going on to win the 2021 Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction. Armstrong previously wrote a weekly book news column for the Winnipeg Free Press for 12 years.

Source: A Likely Story: The “Diversity” Myth Consumes the Canadian Literary Scene