The uses of culture: canon formation, postcolonial literature and the multicultural project

Abstract

This essay directly challenges the easy opposition of the canon to non‐Western and Third World literature and the curricular project of content addition and replacement that now guides mainstream multicultural frameworks. The authors argue that this opposition is illegitimate and that, further, it is not empirically based. Instead, they insist that even a cursory glance at the literature of the Hispanic, African American and Caribbean writers reveals a picture of a free play of ideas and a vigorous dialogue with Western literature over themes of authority, privilege, freedom and culture. In this study of the intertextual relationship between key Western and post‐colonial literary texts, the authors problematize the line of demarcation between ‘West’ and ‘non‐West’ currently being drawn down in curricular debates opposing the West to multiculturalism. In so doing, the authors make the case for a curricular reform that foregrounds the heterogeneous basis of school knowledge, nurtures the autonomy of student inquiry, and links the parochial reality of educational life in the United States to broader political and cultural forces operating ‐within the global setting. For those who really made the breakthrough, it was T. S. Eliot's voice — or rather his recorded voice, property of the British Council — reading ‘Preludes’, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, The Waste Land and the Four Quartets — not the texts — which turned us on. In that dry, deadpan delivery, the ’riddims’of St Louis (though we didn't know the source then) were stark and clear for those of us who, at the same time, were listening to the dedications of Bird, Dizzyand Klook. And it is interesting that the whole establishment couldn't stand Eliot's voice — far less jazz (Edward Braithwaite, The History of the VoiceNew Beacon, London, 1984, pp. 313‐314). To ‘establish his own identity, Caliban, after three centuries, must himself pioneer into regions Caesar never knew...’ (James 1983: xix). In Latin America , ‘epic events (terrible and wonderful) are commonplace’ (Alejo Carpentier, “The Latin American Novel’, New Left Review Vol. 154, p. 163).