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After my recent blog post about the near-universal dissatisfaction authors feel about their book covers - and the specific issues that arise in the case of books about "ethnic," non-white, or non-Western topics - the case of Justine Larbalestier's Liar caught my eye. 

As Publisher's Weekly documents, this young adult novel about an African American girl was originally slated to go on sale with a cover featuring the face of a white girl with straight locks.  Protests from the author, and the blogosphere, ensued.  "Justine's right about this one," says Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing.  Publishing houses "white-wash[] cover[s]," alleges Doctorow, because "black covers don't sell."

Fair enough.  But is the new cover for Liar (pictured left) actually a "Victory!" as Doctorow claims?  What is liberating or socially enlightened about juxtoposing a black woman with the word "liar"?  And, as a white woman, isn't Larbalestier open to criticism for reinforcing racist stereotypes about the untrustworthiness and dishonesty of black people?  Would a black author have named her book about an African American teen with "complex psychological makeup" (to quote PW) "Liar"?

Ultimately, my point isn't to criticize Larbalestier, whose desire to see cover art that accurately reflects the content of her book is entirely understandable and laudable.  Rather, the point I'm after is the complex interaction between intentions, marketing and consumer perceptions.  Here, the initial marketing judgment (white girl on the cover) looked racist to the author and may have been deceptive to consumers, while the second-attempt, "best intentions" cover (black girl) satisfies the author, and accurately alerts consumers that the book's protagonist is black - but I can't see this cover as pro-black.

Which is to say, whatever the solution to this thorny problem of book jackets, knee-jerk, PC-prescriptions don't seem to be it.

In a recent Publishing Perspectives editorial, Tolu Ogunlesi poses the question, "who exactly are the proper 'gatekeepers' of African literary tradition and production"?  In his analysis, the current gatekeepers are large, international publishers located in former-colonial countries - "outsiders," in his view, "that seem to possess fixed ideas about what African literature should or should not be, and what 'authentic' African 'characters' can or cannot do."

The evidence for this conclusion focuses largely on the selection of jacket covers for books by African authors:

Chinua Achebe, speaking about the early covers of his classic, Things Fall Apart said: "...I have a general sense that we, African writers, have been presented as oddities." He referred to the cover of the original 1958 Heinemann edition as a "questionable depiction of strangeness."
. . . .
Speaking during the Publishers' Panel at the 2009 Cadbury Conference at the Center of West African Studies at the University of Birmingham, British-Ghanaian Publisher (and former Commissioning Editor of the Heinemann African Writers' Series) Becky Ayebia-Clarke (who is now running her own press, Ayebia Publishing) described how her displeasure with the cover of Tsitsi Dangaremba's debut novel, Nervous Conditions (The Women's Press, England, 1988) - another questionable depiction of strangeness - led her to produce a radically different cover for the Ayebia edition (2004). She felt that the image portrayed on the original cover did not do justice to the strong, sassy characterization of the novel's heroine.

While Ogunlesi raises a good question, one worth exploring - and while I share his enthusiasm for the small, independent publishing houses and collectives like Storymoja and Kwani in Kenya that he champions - I think the "book jacket" evidence may be a tad weak for the conclusions it is expected to bolster.

To my knowledge, the book jacket selection process is one that anguishes just about every author.  For authors, the image on the book's cover is often as personal a matter as proposed edits to the book's text.  For the publisher, however - as Seth Godin noted in a recent blog post - the book's cover is a marketing tool.  The disconnect between "representation of the author's person" and "promotional vehicle" is bound to cause friction.

The friction is especially charged any time a book implicates questions of ethnic identity.  Hyphen Magazine ran a piece by Neelanjana Banerjee complaining about the stereotypical images on book covers by Asian authors (e.g., lotus blossoms, dragons).  Author Sonya Chung's post on The Millions documented her anxiety about whether the cover design for her upcoming novel depicted a white or Korean-American woman.

But as Henry Sene Yee, creative director for Picador Books, quoted by Banerjee in her article, explains, "the publishing industry is all about recognizable codes: 'Russian constructivist fonts for Russian books; torn paper and beige for Westerns; italics, diamond rings and legs for women's fiction.'"  In other words, the sterotyping isn't personal, nor is it racism.  It's marketing - reductionist, lowest-common-denominator, aesthetically-bankrupt, financially-astute marketing.

Ogunlesi is right to question the gatekeeper role that international publishers are playing with respect to African literature, but the "strangeness" of jacket covers of books by African authors doesn't support his conclusion that international publishing companies are too far outside African culture.  On the contrary, the book covers - as aesthetically abominable as they may be - may demonstrate that publishing companies are sufficiently savvy to sell African literature globally to audiences that are - by and large, around the world - provincial.