I I am ashamed to admit how deeply affected I was when I found the research by Gauri Viswanathan, an English professor at Columbia University in New York. In Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Dominance in India, she traces the history of English since it was systematically taught as a secular discipline. I ask my students: where do you think English was first taught as a subject? “England?” someone will always guess, realizing that it seems so obvious that there must be a trick.
And yes, they are right. It’s a trick.
Viswanathan describes the development of English in India, where the subject was part of a deliberate colonial strategy to teach the Indian people how to be English and put aside local literary traditions as an imperial bonus; during the same period, people in England were studying religious and “classical” texts (Latin, Greek) instead of English literature.
The relief I felt when I first read this! It was no longer a coincidence that the British felt so colonial. I was surprised by the fact that English as a discipline is nowhere near as old (or politically neutral) as I thought. Many of the disciplines we now regard as right at Western universities are barely a century old and, surprisingly, few are older than the Treaty of Waitangi. With the possible exception of anthropology, which has to be blunt about its colonial roots because they are so difficult to obscure, most disciplines in the social sciences and humanities emerged in response to – or as part of – European colonialism, and yet they rarely admit the time and place of its origins.
Many of the parts (and people) of the university who despise Māori studies, indigenous studies, Pacific studies and indigenous scholars and students working in other disciplines, as if we were newcomers, latecomers, intruders, outsiders or Johnny-come -latelies, would benefit from a reflection on the history of their own disciplines.
As a student, I never considered that English as a discipline did not exist “forever” because it seemed logical that it was as old as the canon. The English literary canon is the list of “greats” that we receive in so many ways. It is written by mostly white men who go back along a literary timeline from Ezra Pound and Virginia Woolf to Victorians (like Dickens, Thackeray, Yeats and the Brontë sisters) and then to Romantics and alongside Shakespeare and his team and finally back to Chaucer and the medievalists and so on.
There is a way that English has to present this programming of writers and texts as if the canon were based on an objective measure of literary merit; as if people who raise questions about race or imperialism or gender or sexuality or class are somehow trying to add something that didn’t exist all the time, or trying to argue for texts that may have political merit, but dubious literary “quality”. Canons make certain texts and writers seem familiar to people – oh yes, i know it’s an important text / writer – even if they’ve never read any of them. Most of the people reading this probably read the third sentence of the previous paragraph and nodded in recognition to these writers and literary periods, regardless of whether they read (much less appreciated) any of their literary works.
Canons – the idea that there are “great” and “the rest” – do not belong only to the English or the dead whites. We also have a Māori canon: Ihimaera, Grace, Hulme, Tuwhare. Maybe Duff. These are the Māori writers that most people have heard of and that most teachers teach. The books most likely to be in your bookstore, on the pub quiz, on your child’s reading list at school. In 2012, the year my own book of literary studies Once Were Pacific: Māori connections with Oceania Out, three other books on Māori literature were published by non-Māori literary scholars based abroad, and all of them focused on Grace and / or Ihimaera.
There is nothing wrong with Grace and Ihimaera (Baby without eyes remains my favorite novel of all time), but what about everyone else? Who will write about them? Who will teach your books?
The purpose of challenging a canon is not to take the logic of the canon (that certain texts and writers are superior to any others) and to reverse it. Turning things upside down never undoes power structures – it just reinforces them! Ihimaera, Grace, Hulme and Tuwhare are incredible writers who have created so many solid, rich, thoughtful, engaging and beautiful texts and nothing would be gained by challenging the value or importance of their writings.
Instead, we challenge the canons by drawing attention to the way they work. Canons steal everyone else’s spotlight, implying that they are not as deserving of attention and / or they simply don’t exist, so we undermine canons by looking for other writers, trying to understand why other texts have been overlooked or ignored (whose purpose served to forget them). them?), and think about how this much more complete view of Maori self-representation allows a broader understanding of specific texts, or writers, or communities, or literary traditions.
Canons have effects in the real world. When I first spoke about teaching Maori literature in an English department in New Zealand, several people questioned whether there was enough writing to justify an entire course, let alone an entire assignment. This assumption is not accidental – it arises from a colonial view that indigenous cultures are not literate (evidence of our inferiority), as well as a colonial presumption of knowing everything about indigenous peoples (“if there were any other good Maori writers there I would know about them, so I assume they don’t exist ”), and it is fueled by the overwhelming whiteness of New Zealand literary culture, publishing, cultural infrastructure and book awards.
Canons also have subtle effects, which Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie describes in her 2014 viral Ted Talk as the “danger of a single story”. A narrow range of Māori representations can make people think that real Māori look, act or feel in many ways. The colonial project wants us to believe that we are not really Māori; since the attempts of the 19th century to extinguish us physically failed, the 20th century focused on extinguishing us culturally.
We find ourselves responding to a million voices (including those in our own heads) that tell us that we are not same Māori because real Māori people XYZ. Since we are no longer same here our land and waters are available. This is part of the power and toolkit of the English discipline: understanding representation, how it works, why it matters. To engage, seek and encourage a wider, deeper and wider range of Māori voices and perspectives.
This is an edited excerpt from an essay by Alice Te Punga Somerville published in Ngā Kete Mātauranga: Māori scholars at the research interface, edited by Jacinta Ruru and Linda Waimarie Nikora (Otago University Press, NZ $ 60)