Black Voices in the Literary Canon
Growing up in the United States, my education of literature was VERY white and male and American. A lot of what is considered part of the literary canon (“the list of works considered to be permanently established as being of the highest quality”), which is lauded, taught in schools, and held up as classics–treated as crucial and universal–is white, male, and euro- or US-centric. A recent article posted in The New York Times…
