In his essay, “In Praise of Dead White Men,” Lindsay Johns argues that efforts to make education more “relevant” to black people can be both patronizing and harmful, and that western literary canon should be taught to everyone. While I agree with him in general, I think that teaching literature written by women and men of color as a genre separate from and in lieu of western literary canon. The importance of Homer, and Shakespeare, and Milton, andMelville to the culture of western civilization is undeniable, but it’s also about time that the physical and metaphorical shackles and chains applied to people who played as much a role in western civilization as those honored dead white men became an integral part of our literary tradition.
A few days after I posted The Art of the Novella: Seize the Day by Saul Bellow, my brief précis and commentary on Saul Bellow’s 1957 novella, I received an email from an old friend complimenting the piece, but also with an admonishment about my somewhat narrow view of what literature is all about. Tommy Wilhem’s fight against the abyss, a common theme throughout the history of western literary tradition, from Odysseus to Bloom (Leopold), is certainly one of the major themes of the book, but, as my friend pointed out to me, it is a theme largely owned by middle and upper class white men. It is one of the dominant themes of western literature largely because western literary canon has always been, and to a large extent still is, defined by Dead White European Males. Battling the abyss is a luxury of the privileged and empowered. Literature created by women and minorities, she pointed out, tends to be about more immediate and worldly challenges — poverty, discrimination, subjugation — human experiences not common to privileged white men, dead or otherwise.
In the sixties, when I was still in elementary school, retail businesses in the city stayed open later than they do now. Most stores closed at about 7:30 or 8:00. Drug stores, however, stayed open until at least 10:00. I remember summer nights when my friends, mostly Irish-Catholic kids from the apartment building up the street, and I would play on the sidewalk of Corona Avenue. For weeks on end, every night, we would ride our bicycles on the sidewalk, up and down the block, up over the bridge that crossed the Long Island Railroad, and then back all the way down Corona Avenue to Junction Boulevard, where the name of the neighborhood changes from Elmhurst to Corona. Then, one night, one of the kids would come out with their roller skates instead of their bicycles, and we would start roller skating for a few weeks. Then, we would switch back to bicycles.
