Assimilatie in de literaire mainstream? - Etnische grenzen in dagbladrecensies van etnische minderheidsauteurs in de Verenigde Staten, Nederland en Duitsland

Abstract

Assimilation into the literary mainstream? Ethnic boundaries in newspaper reviews of ethnic minority authors in the United States, the Netherlands and Germany .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 ethnic boundaries in literary criticism have changed in each country in the course of ethnic minority writers’ careers and across time. By analyzing newspaper reviews, we find that American reviewers less often refer to the ethnic and/or majority background of Mexican American authors than Dutch and German critics refer to the background of Moroccan and Turkish minority writers. But while these relatively strong ethnic boundaries tend to weaken over time in the Netherlands, Turkish German authors encounter particularly strong boundaries in subsequent book publications. In the U.S. the reverse is true: ethnic boundaries tend to weaken after the debut has been reviewed.