Curating Midcultural Reading: The Case of American Dirt

Abstract Jeanine Cummins’s American Dirt (2020) had been pitched as the great novel of our times before an immediate critical backlash accused it of stereotyping Mexico and being complicit with ethnoracial gatekeeping by exploitative publishers. This article looks at the location of literary prestige as one of the major blind spots of the debate. American Dirt displays a style and sensibility that, from the viewpoint of prizewinning fiction, emerges as “middlebrow” or, in this article’s terminology, midcultural. The thesis is that the struggle over American Dirt sheds light on how institutional shifts in literature’s production and validation have changed a public sense of what can count as contemporary, as opposed to the midcultural, which is paradigmatically defined as belated and flawed. Hence, the author approaches the controversy not as a literary critic adding yet another verdict on American Dirt but as an ethnographer hoping to establish how the most dominant verdicts emerged. After establishing the institutional location of the midcultural as a contemporary formation, the article examines how its repertoires shape American Dirt and traces the debate and its transition from more literary criteria concerning quality fiction to civil-sphere questions about democratic justice and human decency.