HxA Event: "How the Culture Wars are Remaking Publishing"

Event Title:
“That Book Is Dangerous! How Moral Panic, Social Media, and the Culture Wars Are Remaking Publishing"

How to Watch:
This online event is FREE - no need to register, just use the Zoom link listed below.
Meeting ID: 873 1828 8668
Passcode: 292236

Event Topic:
Dr. Adam Szetela will be discussing his book, which explores the self-censorship happening behind closed doors inside the biggest publishers and literary agencies in North America, ostensibly in the name of progressive values.

In his new book, That Book Is Dangerous!, Adam Szetela investigates how well-intentioned and often successful efforts to diversify American literature have also produced serious problems for literary freedom. Although progressives are correct to be focused on right-wing attempts at legislative censorship, Szetela argues for attention to the ways that left-wing censorship controls speech within the publishing industry itself.
Szetela draws on interviews with presidents and vice presidents at the Big Five publishers, literary agents at the most prestigious agencies, award-winning authors, editors, marketers, sensitivity readers, and other industry professionals to examine the new publishing landscape.

What he finds is unsettling: mandatory sensitivity reads; morality clauses in author contracts; even censorship of “dangerous” books in the name of antiracism, feminism, and other forms of social justice. These changes to acquisition practices, editing policies, and other aspects of literary culture are a direct outgrowth of the culture of public outcries on X, Goodreads, Change.org, and other online platforms, where users accuse authors—justifiably or not—of racism, sexism, homophobia, and other transgressions.
But rather than genuinely address the economic inequities of literary production, this current moral crusade over literature serves only to entrench the status quo. “While the right is remaking the world in its image,” Szetela writes, “the left is standing in a circular firing squad.”

About the Speaker:
* Adam Szetela is an author who earned his Ph.D. in English from the Department of Literatures at Cornell University. Before that, he was a visiting fellow in the Department of History at Harvard University. He writes for The Washington Post, The Guardian, Newsweek, and other publications.

About the Event Host:
The Heterodox Academy (HxA) is a nonpartisan collaborative of thousands of professors, administrators, and students committed to enhancing the quality of research and education by promoting open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement in institutions of higher learning. It was founded in 2015 by Jonathan Haidt, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia, Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz, a Georgetown University law professor, and Chris Martin, an Emory University sociologist.

To learn more about their mission, go to https://heterodoxacademy.org/our-mission/