“For many white narrators, it’s difficult because of fear. January LaVoy, a biracial narrator who identifies as Black, said that cross-cultural audiobook narration is freighted in different ways for white narrators and narrators of color. Meanwhile, like most narrators, they find themselves getting asked to voice marginalized characters from backgrounds that bear no resemblance to theirs. Amid a publishing boom in literature by writers of color, nonwhite narrators are being offered more work than they once were. But many who work in the industry still feel the tensions around casting acutely.
This is partly because it’s a low-profile, unglamorous field that doesn’t attract a lot of attention from the press.
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You would find a Latino narrator to do it.”Īpart from the amused response to the cartoonish accents Ronan Farrow rolled out when narrating the audio version of his 2019 exposé Catch and Kill, the audiobook world has so far been largely free of the sort of scandals that have triggered reckonings about representation in other creative industries, like magazine publishing and television. The narrator of that book is a Latino lawyer,” he told me. “I recorded Scott Turow’s Burden of Proof. There were hardly any narrators of color, and few female narrators back then, Gardner said. Gardner, who has been an audiobook narrator for four decades and also works as a producer, recalls that, for the first couple of decades of his career, “the whole industry was geared toward middle-aged white businessmen” who listened to “books on tape” while on the road for work. When audiobooks first rose to popularity in 1980s, the field was overwhelmingly white.
Yet most novels feature characters with an assortment of different backgrounds, and this can require narrators to voice characters with identities very different from their own.
It’s customary now in the audiobook business to try to match a book’s narrator to the gender, race, and sometimes sexual orientation of a novel’s author or main character.
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In an era of heightened sensitivity to issues of representation and misrepresentation, it’s no longer acceptable to cast a white actor as a character of color in a movie or TV show.
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