The limits of diversity: how publishing industries make race

This article is a critical account of how diversity is understood and mobilized within cultural industries, based upon an empirical study of the UK publish-ing industry. Drawing from 113 qualitative interviews with people who work in trade fiction, we examine how diversity discourse shapes the acquisition, promotion and sale of authors of color. The article opens with a discussion of the limitations of the quantitative approaches that frame industry responses to the diversity “problem.” We then make the case for an alternative approach that focuses on how cultural production reflects and reproduces existing racial inequalities. In applying this approach, we demonstrate how diversity acts as a form of racial governance that commodifies authors of color while simultaneously devaluing them. Contributing to the project of 'race-ing' critical media industry research, the article argues that the publish-ing industry is characterized by the operation of whiteness as much as it is by its commercial imperatives, ensuring that the unraced dominant culture continue to profit the most from the commodification of culture.