Last week I took part in a debate on one of the most important issues affecting education and culture. Hosted by Intelligence Squared, the motion was: ‘It’s time to ditch the canon of Great White Men’. I was against; the teacher and author Jeffrey Boakye was for it. I lost. Boakye is a better speaker than I, and he made his points more effectively. The audience rightly rewarded him with victory.
The point I tried to make in the debate is that studying literature should not be about relevance or works that reflect my identity as a ‘marginalised person’; it should be about works that transcend categories and speak to a common humanity. Boakye, by contrast, put a greater emphasis on subjectivity. The canon, he argued, lives in all of us. It is not out there. It is in here.
