Assimilation into the Literary Mainstream

This article addresses to what extent literary critics in the United States, the Netherlands and Germany have drawn ethnic boundaries in their reviews of ethnic minority writers between 1983 and 2009 and to what extent these boundaries have changed in the course of ethnic minority writers’ careers and across time? By analyzing newspaper reviews, we find that American reviewers less often mention the ethnic background of Mexican American authors than their Dutch and German colleagues refer to the background of Moroccan and Turkish minority writers. But while these relatively strong ethnic boundaries become weaker over time in the Netherlands (boundary shifting), Turkish German authors encounter particularly strong boundaries in subsequent book publications (ethnicization). In the U.S. the reverse is true: ethnic boundaries weaken after the debut has been reviewed (boundary crossing). The findings are related to (nationally different) chronic accessibility (U.S. and Germany) and specific field dynamics (Netherlands). Introduction and Research Question Mass immigration – particularly from non-western countries – has been a relatively recent phenomenon in the Netherlands and Germany when compared to the United States. Over the last sixty years however, the ethnic make-up of both European countries has changed dramatically, resulting in heated debates over the integration of immigrants into mainstream society (Roggeband and Vliegenthart, 2007; Thränhardt, 2002). The role of the arts – and more specifically, literature – in assimilation processes of ethnic immigrant minorities has largely been ignored (Berkers, 2009c), even though inclusion into such a high-status domain of society would indicate the conference of symbolic value on both the concerned individuals and the entire, previously excluded group (DiMaggio and Fernández-Kelly, 2010). Dutch and German ethnic minority authors – similarly to their American counterparts – have recently received some mainstream recognition, being ‘discovered’ by mainstream publishing houses and the reading public (Adelson, 2005; van der Poel, 2009), receiving state support (Berkers, 2009a), and being included in national literary histories (Berkers, 2009b). Yet, few studies have examined the ways in which ethnic minority writers in different countries are assimilated into the literary mainstream, and what role different – ethnic minority and mainstream – actors play in this process. To address this understudied topic, we combine two strands of boundary research that have been particularly fruitful in the past decades, but have remained relatively separate domains of sociological research (Levitt, 2005). First, building on the work of Bourdieu (1984 [1979]), sociologists of culture have focused on hierarchical (‘highbrow’ versus ‘lowbrow’) boundaries rather than more ‘horizontal’ classifications (Berghman and van Eijck, 2009; DiMaggio, 1987; Levine, 1988). As these studies have primarily examined cultural distinctions as the outcome of social class struggles, the role of ethnicity within cultural fields has received relatively little attention (Bennett et al., 2008; Lamont and Lareau, 1988). Second, studies in the sociology of race and ethnicity suggest that actors in all societal domains often rely upon ethnic classifications, because they are readily accessible and in many instances seem fit for understanding a complex social reality (Hale, 2004). Scholars of race and ethnicity have mostly looked at the boundary-work of powerful institutions (as the State) and everyday classifications of ordinary people (Brubaker et al., 2004). However, at the meso-level, boundary personnel such as critics play a crucial role in granting symbolic access into the literary mainstream (Bourdieu, 1993; Hirsch, 1972). Yet, we know little about the extent and ways these gatekeepers draw upon ethnic – instead of aesthetic – classifications (cf. DiMaggio, 1997). Thus, while acknowledging that assimilation – the attenuation of ethnic distinctions – is a two-way process (Alba and Nee, 2003), this study focuses mainly – but not exclusively – on how mainstream literary critics draw ethnic boundaries by acting as symbolic gatekeepers. The central question is therefore twofold: (i) to what extent have U.S., Dutch and German literary critics drawn ethnic boundaries in their reviews of ethnic minority authors between 1983 and 2009 and (ii) to what extent have such ethnic classifications by critics changed in each country in the course of ethnic minority writers’ careers and across time? We examine the critical reception of ethnic minority fiction authors by following the development of individual literary careers as well as changes in the literary field in general between 1983 and 2009. Through a content analysis of newspaper reviews of these authors’ complete oeuvres, we trace how and to what extent literary critics refer to an author’s ethnic background (cf. Ekelund and Börjesson, 2002). This design allows us to distinguish between ‘boundary crossing’ (individual-level assimilation of ethnic minority authors into the literary mainstream) and ‘boundary shifting’ (structural change in the position of ethnic boundaries, leading to group-level assimilation of ethnic minority authors into the mainstream) (Zolberg and Long, 1999). Such processes of boundary change will likely differ across time and place (Bail, 2008) – in relation to particularities of the literary field (Berkers, 2009b) and the salience of ethnicity as a classificatory tool within different societies. While a thorough historical comparison of different national literary fields is beyond the scope of this study, we do compare three Western immigration countries over a 25-year period. Whereas the United States – a traditional immigration nation – is largely organized around ethno-racial lines (Foner, 2005), mass labor immigration (‘guest workers’) – and the ethnicization of society – is a more recent phenomenon in the Netherlands (despite its colonial past) and Germany.