The New York Times’ “Best Books of the Century” List Was an Unforgivable Erasure of African Literature ‹ Literary Hub

The New York Times recently released a list of the “100 Best Books of the 21st Century.” As is typical for the Times, the list quickly went viral and was widely debated and celebrated on social media.

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However, 61 of the writers on this list are American. The two African books on the list are Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah, which has the word “American” in the title and focuses on the immigrant experience in the US, and The Return by “American-born British-Libyan” writer Hisham Matar. Even though there is a strong presence of female writers and close to ten percent of the writers featured on the list are Black (American) writers, the list is overwhelmingly Euro-American. Italian novelist Elena Ferrante accounts for three of the thirteen translated books on the list. Twenty-three books are published by the same ten authors. Over half of the books on the list are published by the same five publishers in the US.

On social media, where “100 Best Books of the 21st Century” is splashed on colorful graphics in bold letters, users are not seeing it as the “best of, according to the NYT.” The fact that the poll was limited to books published in the United States gets lost in the fine print. The NYT asking American industry insiders to only consider books published in the US has predictably produced an outrageously Euro-American list. Yet, the NYT asks us to take these books as “the most important, influential books of the era,” not as the preference of a limited and statistically insignificant pool of writers, as far as the global literary space is concerned.

If this list is an attempt at writing the story of the last 25 years of publishing in English, it is a story that falls flat. It does not reflect the diversity and scale of global publishing. It misrepresents the 21st century, one of the most productive and diverse periods in the history of literature. An epoch wherein markets and reading publics have become so interconnected and crowded is reduced to the preferences of American literary celebrities. The story that American books define the century is also the opening act of what, if left uncriticized, could become a replay of the cultural ethnocentrism that plagued 20th-century publishing.

For someone like me, an African reader, literary scholar, and book culture curator, the exclusion of African writers from the list of the most influential books written in English in the last 25 years is an unforgivable oversight, given the glaring evidence otherwise. The meteoric rise of African publishing is one of the most remarkable stories of the last 25 years. If you want to capture how the 21st century has reinvented what it means to read, write, and publish, go to African literature.

What kind of blinkers did it take for it to imagine that it is okay to write a history of the 21st century in which most of the world is absent?

The 20th century saw a gradual increase in global influence from African writers, but the century ended in crisis due to widespread political unrest and economic downturns. The 21st century, however, marked a dramatic reversal. With the advent of digital technology and the culmination of a century of capacity building, African writers have burst onto the global stage. In terms of growth, the publishing market centered on African books has expanded more rapidly than most.

African writers have always brought unique innovations to the English language. They create rich world-building, layered cosmologies, and brilliant storytelling. With a robust social media presence and the support of a literary culture that unites the diaspora and the home continent, African books are read by diverse, global audiences. Writers like Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, Akwaeke Emezi, Namwali Serpell, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, Yaa Gyasi, Bernardine Evaristo, Helon Habila, Chimeka Garricks, Aminatta Forna, NoViolet Bulawayo, Namina Forna, Nnedi Okorafor, and Teju Cole, in addition to Scholastique Mukasonga, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, and Sharon Dodua Otoo, whose works are translated into English, are at the forefront of this literary renaissance. Add to that the likes of Abdulrazak Gurnah, who won the Nobel Prize in 2021, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Ben Okri, Zakes Mda, and many others who have produced several works during the 21st century.

It is not possible to tell the story of the last 25 years of publishing without giving the African continent its due. Ignoring its contributions not only overlooks a key part of contemporary literature but also fails to recognize the dynamic and evolving nature of the English-speaking literary world. The New York Times’ “Best of the Century” list is not a list; it is an act of cultural erasure. The world is not limited to the US by way of New York City. The 21st century did not happen only in the US. You can’t ignore an entire global literary culture that has made the last 25 years a powerful era for literature.

In the past few weeks, I have thought hard about why the NYT would publish a list like this. What kind of blinkers did it take for editors to imagine that it is okay to write a history of the 21st century in which most of the world is absent? During one of our many recent conversations, Bhakti Shringarpure, founder of Radical Books Collective, reminded me that the New York Times is “committed to preserving the last vestiges of white culture in a world that feels unmoored to them and saturated with so many diverse voices.” I agree.

While it is entirely the NYT’s prerogative to create whatever list it wants, it should not be allowed to present subjective, bad “statistics” as cultural truth.

The New York Times launched its book section in 1896. Since then, it has influenced what and how Americans read. All through the 20th century, it was one of the major spaces for the Anglophone reading world. Writers like Amos Tutuola and Chinua Achebe, who helped bring African writing to the Anglophone world, were both reviewed in the NYT, though at a cost. The consistently negative and condescending reviews of Achebe’s work in the Times are well-documented in Charles Larson’s The Emergence of African Fiction.

But the influence of the NYT has waned in the 21st century with the rise of digital culture and their increasingly questionable politics. In a world where the BookTok community is orders of magnitude more powerful than the NYT and similar book media institutions in deciding what the masses read, I can see why a list like this seemed like a good idea. Legacy institutions like the Times are plagued with the “great-again” syndrome. Feeling out of touch and irrelevant despite their wealth and institutional influence, they become desperate and double down on the ethnocentrism that is making them irrelevant in the first place. The publishing space has become more diverse and crowded, but the NYT seems less and less capable of making space for literature that is not Euro-American and unabashedly white.

While it is entirely the NYT’s prerogative to create whatever list it wants, it should not be allowed to present subjective, bad “statistics” as cultural truth. The issue with this list has little to do with the questionable labor of compressing 25 years of publishing into a hundred books. There is a place for that kind of list despite it being so culturally triggering. Lists are never perfect, nor are they supposed to be objective. They are actually quite ridiculous things and are inherently flawed. But we love them nonetheless, if for nothing else, at least because they give us something to argue about while extending our to-be-read lists. In fact, their imperfections and incompleteness are what make lists, or similar canonical gestures, powerful historical documents. The problem with this list is not that it didn’t include everyone (no list can), but that it includes no one who has not already been read by the NYT-approved literary establishment.

Do we still need these epic, period-oriented lists? Maybe not, given how markets and readerships have become so fragmented and rhizomatic. But if the answer is yes, a list that purports to capture the century has to reflect the global literary market and the myriad reading publics that sustain it. The polling process has to be ambitious enough to take into account diverse communities of knowledge workers in the literary space: writers not published by the Big Five, writers from other countries, critics from small publications, podcasters, BookTokers, Bookstagrammers, and so on. The old way of making western publishing stand in for the world, is clearly no longer defensible.

We must call out the ethnocentrism that allows the NYT to pass off an overwhelmingly Euro-American list as representative of the century. There is no universe, even in the most delusional context, where a list with 61 US titles could be considered the best books of the 21st century. The NYT is leading people to celebrate a century in which only Americans have lived and read—leading people to celebrate a lie.