Almost 40 years ago, I was thrown right into the heart of the canon wars. As a graduate student in the volatile 1960s, I was astounded by the overemphasis on literature from Britain in the English departments. It seemed rather elitist at a juncture when other cultures were beginning to claim their place in world affairs in the aftermath of the Suez Crisis (1956) when the reprimand of Britain by America brought Pax Britannica to its final downfall. Europe began its overseas trade and commerce almost 500 years ago culminating in two-thirds of the globe coming under its hegemonic decrees.
In the wake of the Bandung Conference of 1955, historians began the interrogation of western-centrism and its prejudiced accounts of the East. Aime Cesaire, the poet from Martinique, had already written Discourse on Colonialism (1950), an essay examining the conflict between the coloniser and the colonised. Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961) and Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) appeared a few years later targeting western-centric perspectives inherently derisory and predisposed in the understanding of other Latin American, African and Asian literatures and cultures.
Being aware of this history, as an Assistant Professor many years later, I went to the Chairperson of my department with a tentative plan for introducing postcolonial literatures in the MA syllabus. He took a fleeting look at it and indecorously, slid it across the table back to me, observing that it was extraneous to English studies. Like a true Leavisite, more English than the English, many like him in the department stood only for the great tradition of the canonical texts from Europe which the generation of my father had been fed on for all these years. Helen Gardner’s rebuke and rejection of George Steiner’s doctoral dissertation at Oxford on the grounds that comparative literature was outside the rubric of the English studies instantaneously flashed across my mind.
Cultural studies
I returned to my room disappointed but with the hope that the traditionalists in the department would gradually veer towards a more cosmopolitan curriculum. Well, as soon as a new chair took over, I succeeded and then went on to persuade the faculty towards a liberal view of cultural studies. I received opposition from a majority who argued that it was too elitist, not realising that their strict adherence to the syllabus from Britain resonated with Allan Bloom’s constricted, right-wing account of the importance of traditional pedagogy, expressed in his book The Closing of the American Mind . However, I persevered, and at the first opportunity succeeded in convincing a handful to back the idea of introducing cultural studies. The study of classical works of philosophy and literature are acceptable to a point but not at the cost of entirely overlooking world literatures.
I remember the University of Berkeley as one of the first to stand up against the supporters of Allan Bloom. A new course titled culture and value began to give equal emphasis to literatures from Africa, Asia and Latin America. In the late 1970s, we began to ravish both Middle Eastern and South Asian literatures. When student radicals across the world from Berkeley and Paris to New Delhi launched their attack on the authority of professors and the narrow limitations of being drowned in the western canon, a crisis in the Humanities became the fertile ground for the furtherance of an intertextual multidisciplinary programme where all cultures, races, beliefs and ways of life became uniformly legitimate.
shelleywalia@gmail.com
