By Ava Vakil, Year 12.
If the purpose of literature is to represent the culture and tradition of a language or a people, can we really profess ourselves to be true students of literature when seemingly only focusing on a single culture and its peoples?
Such has been the question of a group of students from Cambridge University these past few weeks; there has been a cry from undergraduates to “decolonise” their English Literature syllabus by taking in more black and minority ethnic writers, and bringing more expansive post-colonial thought into the curriculum.
A kindred instance occurred at Yale University in May of last year, where there was widespread criticism of the requirements to graduate as a Yale English major. As it stands, a student is able to fulfil the requirements of the revered course without studying the literature of a single woman or minority writer.
However, as always after a plea for diversity, there comes the inevitable “But…(insert the name of any women/minority)!”.
And whilst this may be true – and the likes of Austen and the Brontës have themselves a fairly fixed place within the Canon of English Literature – it is simply not good enough; not only are women and minorities few and far between, but they tend to offer what I consider ‘one-step diversity’. This being white women, or gay men, or anyone who represents only one shift away from the ‘norm’ of the straight, white cis-gender men. Where are the black female trans writers, and why aren’t they a key part of our education?
There is an urgent need to address the homogeny of the curriculum within many universities and schools, along with the canon itself. The reason for this is not just diversity for diversity’s sake (though this has many benefits in itself), but because we are narrowing and constricting our understanding of literature and context by ignoring writers simply because they don’t have a place in the literary canon.
This does not mean refusing to study Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, Frost etc. but simply broadening our conceptualisation of what English Literature is.
As Dr Priyamvada Gopal, a teaching fellow at Churchill College (Cambridge) puts it:
“It is not just about adding texts but about rethinking the whole question of Britishness, Englishness and what they mean in relation to the empire and the post-imperial world… questions of race, gender, sexuality and so on.”
We are hampering and inhibiting our own knowledge under the colonial guise of the canon. Surely it should be impossible to study Othello or Jane Eyre without considering the post-colonial context? Or Twelfth Night without a wider multidisciplinary study of gender and sex?
Though it is against the nature of universities to want to politicise their curriculum, this happens by default when the syllabus simply reflects the age-old and continuing social, literary (and political) repression of anyone classified as “other”. Hence, cries from Twitter trolls about this being a ‘patrolling’ of the curriculum to suit and accord to the views of particular women and minority groups are intrinsically hypocritical.
The canon of literature has forever accorded to the politics of the majority, and appeals to change this are no more political than the sexist, racist and colonialist nature of the canon in the first place.
The need to change this system of subtle repression of writers within education must come from both professors/teachers and students alike. Though there are concrete changes which need to be made in terms of legislation of the actual syllabus, as students we have a large part to play.
Read widely and read critically; consider racial and gender context; rewrite and reclaim what you consider “classic”. Most importantly, investigate the hidden under-belly of the canon of English literature – the texts that are excluded have just as big a part to play in the shaping of our society as the texts which sit smugly on the exclusive list.
“Let’s make our bookshelves reflect the diversity of our streets.” – Phil Earle