PUBLISHING WHITENESS: RACIAL AUTHORSHIP, CULTURAL APPROPRIATION, AND MARKET-DRIVEN MULTICULTURALISM IN R.F. KUANG’S YELLOWFACE

Abstrak

This article examines how R. F. Kuang’s Yellowface portrays the contemporary U.S. publishing Indus­try as a racialized system shaped by market-driven diversity discourse. Although publishing insti­tutions increasingly promote diversity, questions remain about whether such initiatives distribute narrative authority or merely repackage inequal­ity. The research addresses this problem by ana­lyzing how the novel represents authorship, cul­tural appropriation, and institutional legiti­macy. Drawing on whiteness studies, sym­bolic an­nihilation, and neoliberal multiculturalism, this research employs a qualitative interpretive method based on close textual reading. The find­ings reveal that diversity in the novel functions primarily as a market strategy rather than a transformative commitment. Minority narratives remain commercially valuable even when minority authorship is displaced, while whiteness contin­ues to operate as an invisible norm that author­izes representation. The analysis also demon­strates how controversy, rebranding, and per­formative identity sustain institutional power within an attention-driven cultural economy. These dynamics show that inclusion can coexist with dispossession when authority over storytell­ing remains unevenly distributed. This article contributes to scholarship on contemporary cul­tural production by positioning Yellowface as a critique of neoliberal diversity discourse’s re­shaping of authorship and legitimacy in the twenty-first-century publishing industry.