Depoliticising literature, politicising diversity : ethno-racial boundaries in Dutch literary professionals’ aesthetic repertoires

Through indepth interviews, authors analyse how gatekeepers mobilise specific cultural repertoires and by doing so draw ethno-racial boundaries when discussing acquisition, assessing quality and positioning themselves in the literary field. They argue that literary publishers and other professionals (selectively) employ an‘old school’ modernist repertoire that especially values the formal aspects of literary products, by which non-white writers and publishers concerned with diversity are often positioned in an identity politics framework. Their work is said to take in a less prestigious ‘political’/’subjective’ position rather than a ‘literary’/‘universal’ one.