Off the charts: the whiteness of bestsellerdom in French publishing

Abstract

While much of current scholarship on best-selling novels explains this corpus’s singularity as being found within the text at the level of form, this article postulates that whiteness is a major yet unspoken criterion for inclusion on French betseller lists. In order to make visible the salience of whiteness in French publishing, the article first presents four sets of data on recent French bestseller lists. It then provides a case study of the novelist Douglas Kennedy as evidence of whiteness as the essential ingredient of bestsellerdom. In this article, I analyze Kennedy’s critical reception in order to show how whiteness functions in the French literary field. White authors are given full latitude to write about any topic they want, they are perceived as neutral, even apolitical experts, and do not have to negotiate editorial labels the way non-white writers must. Analysis of Kennedy’s journalism and most recent novel Et c’est ainsi que nous vivrons argues that both set up the white writer as the victim of Black social movements and far-right politicians. Ultimately, the article contends that Kennedy’s writing reifies the often tacit but nonetheless powerful image of the French writer as white.