Last week, the front page of the Telegraph featured a photograph of a young black woman, with a line declaring, “Student forces Cambridge to drop white authors”. In addition to painting a deliberately misleading picture, their irresponsible and inflammatory singling out of Lola Olufemi, the Cambridge Student Union Women’s Officer and one of the many co-signatories of the letter, made her the target of abuse online. The Telegraph then issued a much less prominent “clarification”, explaining that their story had been altogether incorrect.
In fact, the open letter from Cambridge University students to the English Faculty in question simply drew attention to the comparative lack of writers of colour on their undergraduate reading lists. The letter explicitly emphasized that this was not a call for the wholesale exclusion of canonical white male authors, but a call for comprehensiveness and accuracy. Britain’s legacy of colonialism means that English literature is also a literature of the Global South, and the two are inseparably bound together. This call was then considered by the English faculty, in which similar discussions were already taking place. This request by students is an example of the kind of open debate and intellectual honesty that helps British higher education to retain its global reputation. For a trigger-happy right-wing press, however, it was just the thing to seize on and take out of context in order to create the illusion of a race war.
Accurate sense
The coverage by papers including the Telegraph and the Daily Mail has had grim undertones of white racial panic, while also appearing ignorant of the very thing they purportedly want to safeguard. To give an accurate sense of English literature and its context, one must abandon the image of an untouched lineage of white English literary development. That development is inextricable from Britain’s history of imperial conquest, slave-trading, colonialism and migration. It is only by expanding the teaching of English literature to include this full spectrum of influences that we can do justice to those canonical works that sceptics have suddenly made it their mission to rescue.
The figures that conservatives no doubt consider to be the pillars of the discipline – from Donne to Dickens, Shakespeare to Hardy – were living in times of maritime exploration; cross-continental trade; rapid industrialization financed by colonial exploitation; and the very construction of that relatively new, heterogeneous “British” identity.
The historical moment that preceded the establishment of English as an academic discipline (1894 at Oxford, 1919 at Cambridge), was the high point of nineteenth-century British imperialism in which it became the global hegemon.
The quintessentially English, white, male canonical writers from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries that we see in core reading lists across the country were great precisely because many of them revealed the social, political and economic undercurrents in their societies. To do this, they were certainly utilizing, if not actively profiting from, the stories, ideas and goods trickling back home from Britain’s imperial pursuits.
Rule Britannia
For instance, Shakespeare’s complex treatment of Othello – a non-white foreigner of high social status in Venetian society – is what makes the play one of his great tragedies. Othello is subject to a gradual racial and cultural othering by European men who seem to accept diversity, yet who are profoundly threatened, racially and sexually, by his inclusion in their ranks. Can any nuanced reading possibly gloss over the racial history and politics of the play’s performance, of blackface and of the lead role’s symbolism for black actors through the centuries? The idea of “Britishness”, forged in the eighteenth century, was itself often helped along by the narration of a romantic, imperialist dichotomy between Britain and the world. James Thomson’s “Rule Britannia”, a poem that starts with the great English oak that creates its all-conquering ships, and ends with the Muses finding freedom on this “blessed isle”, gives us the imperial imaginings behind today’s “British values”. Its cities shine with “freedom” and “commerce”, home to Britons who “never shall be slaves” – while many others were.
Such are examples of postcolonial readings: there is no desire to erase or trivialize the canon, but rather to engage critically in a manner that enriches our understanding of literary works’ creation, reception and afterlives. Somehow, this is still contentious, so we must keep calling out the deliberate misinterpretation of this as “political correctness” or the facile attempts to address it through tokenism. But a simple reason to broaden the range of texts and interpretations brought to bear is that this is just good pedagogy. Syllabuses that put Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea into conversation with Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre; Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart with Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness; or E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India with Rabindranath Tagore’s Home and the World will only result in better thinking and writing on both. When studying the contemporary British novel, the inclusion of works such as Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia, Zadie Smith’s On Beauty and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane provide a more representative picture of both British writing and society today. There is, in short, more to learn, and more critical gains to be made, from encouraging students to read a greater variety of literature.
Moreover, decolonizing the curriculum does not stop at handling the canon through more historically-informed and non-Eurocentric viewpoints. That is only the critical mindset – this clarity about the exploitative nature of Empire – that precedes the real work that needs to be done. At Cambridge as at many English faculties throughout the country, three-quarters of students still graduate without ever having read a BME (black and minority ethnic) writer as part of their curriculum.
A vocal undergraduate demand, like the Cambridge students’ open letter, is a start. But the sense of inevitability that prevails even among faculty – that they must spend the overwhelming majority of their time on certain (white, male) names out of convention and expectation – tells of the weight of institutionalized norms. When something is a norm, it needs to be constantly interrogated and, if necessary, changed. Appointing more specialists in minority literatures, non-Western histories and postcolonial studies to the English faculty could be a valuable step here.
- Times Literary Supplement
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