I feel sheepish to acknowledge how deeply I was touched when I encountered the research of Gauri Viswanathan, a professor of English at Columbia University in New York City. In Masks of Conquest: Literary study and British rule in India, she traces the history of English back to when it was first systematically taught as a secular discipline. I ask my students: where do you think English was first taught as a discipline? “England?” someone will always guess, and realize that it is so obvious that there must be a trick.
And yes, they are right. This is 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 to tilt local literary traditions as an imperial bonus; During the same period, people in England studied religious and ‘classical’ (Latin, Greek) texts rather than English literature.
The relief I felt when I first read it! It was no longer a coincidence that English felt so colonial. I was struck that English as a subject is not nearly as old (or politically neutral) as I assumed. So many of the disciplines we now take for granted in Western universities are barely a century old and surprisingly few are older than the Waitangi Treaty. With the possible exception of anthropology, which must be pre-eminent over the colonial roots because it is so difficult to obscure, most humanities and social science disciplines have emerged in response to – or as part of – European colonialism, and yet rarely recognizes time and place of their origin.
Many of the parts (and people) of the university who look down on Māori studies, indigenous studies, Pacific studies and indigenous scholars and students working in other disciplines, as if we are newcomers, latecomers, interlocutors, marginal or Johnny -com- latelies, would benefit from reflecting on the history of their own disciplines.
As a student, I never thought that English as a discipline did not exist ‘forever’ because it was logical that it was as old as the canon. The English literary canon is the series of “greats” that has served us in so many ways. It is written by mostly white men stretching along a literary timeline from Ezra Pound and Virginia Woolf to Victorians (like Dickens, Thackeray, Yeats and the Brontë sisters) and then to Romance and alongside Shakespeare and his crew and finally through to Chaucer and the Middle Ages and so on.
There is a way in which English can present this series of writers and texts as if the canon is based on an objective measure of literary merit; as if people who are asking questions about race, imperialism or gender or sexuality or class are somehow trying to add something that has not always been there, or to argue for texts that may have political merit, but does have dubious literary ‘quality’. Canons make certain texts and authors feel familiar to people – ah yes, I know this is an important text / author – even if they have never read one of them. Probably most people who read it read the third sentence in the previous paragraph and nodded in recognition of these writers and literary periods, regardless of whether they had read any of their literary works (who still enjoy it).
Canons – the idea that there are “big ones” and “the rest” does not only belong to English or dead white men. We also have a Māori cannon: Ihimaera, Grace, Hulme, Tuwhare. Maybe Duff. These are the Mori writers most people have heard of and most teachers teach. The books are probably in your bookstore, your bar quiz and your child’s reading list at school. In 2012, the year my own literary textbook Once Upon a Time in the Pacific: Maori Connections to Oceania came out, three other books on Maori literature were published by non-Maori writers based abroad, and they all focused on Grace and / or Ihimaera.
There is nothing wrong with Grace and Ihimaera (Baba No-Eyes remains my personal favorite novel of all time), but what about everyone? Who is going to write about them? Who is going to teach their books?
The point of challenging a canon is not to use the logic of the canon (that certain texts and writers are better than any other) and put it the other way around. Turning things upside down never undoes power structures – it only strengthens them! Ihimaera, Grace, Hulme and Tuwhare are incredible writers who have created so many rich, thoughtful, engaging, beautiful, cool texts, and would earn nothing by challenging the value or meaning of their writing.
Instead, we challenge cannons by drawing attention to how they work. Canons steal the spotlight from everyone, implying that they do not deserve as much attention and / or simply do not exist, so we undermine canons by looking up the other authors and trying to understand why other texts are forgotten or ignored is (whose purpose did it serve to make them forget?), and think of how this much more complete view of Maori self-representation enables a more comprehensive understanding of specific texts, writers, communities, or literary traditions.
Cannons have real effects. When I first spoke about teaching Māori literature in an English department in New Zealand, a number of people asked if there would be enough writing to justify an entire course, let alone of a whole work. This assumption is not accidental – it grows out of a colonial view that indigenous cultures are illiterate (proof of our inferiority), as well as a colonial presumption to know everything about indigenous peoples (‘if there are other good Maori writers was there I would know about them, so I would assume they do not exist ”), and is fed by the overwhelming whiteness of New Zealand’s literary culture, publishing, cultural infrastructure and book prices.
There are also subtle consequences of canons, which Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie describes in her viral 2014 Ted Talk as the ‘danger of a single story’. A limited series of Maori performances can make people think about it real Māori people look or act or feel in a narrow way. The colonial project wants us to believe that we are not really Maoris; once the nineteenth-century efforts to physically extinguish us have failed, the twentieth century focuses on extinguishing us culturally.
We speak back to a million voices (also in our own heads) telling us that we are not really Māori well real Māori people XYZ. As soon as we are no more really here our land and waters are available. It is part of the power and toolkit of the discipline English: to understand representation, how it works, why it matters. To engage, seek and encourage a broader, deeper and wider range of Maori voices and perspectives.
This is an edited excerpt from an essay by Alice Te Punga Somerville published in Ngā Kete Mātauranga: Māori Scholars on the Research Interface, edited by Jacinta Ruru and Linda Waimarie Nikora (Otago University Press, NZ $ 60)