The West Has An Identity Crisis?

 Last night I listened to a podcast from Englesberg Ideas,  The Roots of the West's identity crisis. The podcast is described as :

Marie Kawthar Daouda, author of Not Your Victim: How our Obsession with Race Entraps and Divides Us, speaks to EI’s Alastair Benn about the historical illiteracy of attempts to ‘decolonise’ Western culture. Instead, she argues that the moral complexities of history must be accepted in order to develop a genuine appreciation of the Western tradition.

When was it we started railing against Dead White Men in the Literary Canon? Thirty years ago, even more? As a non-dead white man, I ought to have been more annoyed. Instead, I went looking for those who may have been excluded. I found Joyce Carol Oates, Toni Morrison, Willa Cather, Junot Diaz, and Ralph Ellison; I had already been exposed to Richard Wright and Edith Wharton. Then there were foreign writers I knew of but did not read until I had passed my fiftieth birthday: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Alasdair Gray, and Milan Kundera (to give an abbreviated list). I would add these to the canon for these reasons: they could write, and their works made us take a different view of what writing could do.

But history is complex on this issue and decolonization. Writers cannot be influential if they are not read, and to be read requires publication. Obscure writers may have qualities that we should recognize, but they have created the framework for literature upon which we labor. At best, these non-canonical writers can give us the means to diverge from the canon and to criticize the canon.

Colonization was bad, but its effects are complex. I write that with cinnamon in my spice rack and tomatoes on my shelf. It is also a lesson in the narrow-mindedness of human beings - how ostensibly Christian nations broke the Golden Rule searching for profits.

sch 4/20