Diversity Aesthetics: Figuring the Fate of DEI in Contemporary Black Office Fiction

Abstract For scholars and activists on the left, institutional diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) systems are often sites of ambivalence and disillusionment, yet recent right-wing campaigns to eliminate these programs necessitate new ways of evaluating their cultural significance. Has DEI changed American culture, and if so, how? The 2020s have already witnessed a wave of fictional narratives by Black writers addressing this question. This article focuses on an archive of texts I label DEI fictions, narratives that develop in contact with institutional diversity systems and represent those systems diegetically. Through DEI fictions, contemporary African American artists adjudicate the institutional legacies of multiculturalism, focalizing conditions of labor for racialized workers in majority white spaces. I analyze two bestselling novels about the publishing industry, Raven Leilani’s Luster (2020) and Zakiya Dalila Harris’s Other Black Girl (2021), as representative pieces of DEI fiction, in conversation with a wider archive of workplace media. Together, these texts offer insight into workplace diversity narratives as aesthetic formations, with entangled formal and affective qualities that shape their visions of everyday life under racial capitalism.