The Democratization of the Cultural Canon

Taking a second look: Aisha Harris annotates "The Cultural Canon Is Better Than Ever"

In 2020, Harris annotated her 2019 piece for The New York Times. Her original story examined Beyoncé's Lemonade, Harold Bloom, and Toni Morrison, and the democratization and organic evolution of the cultural canon.  

 

It’s not so much that canons have been completely obliterated, as [Harold] Bloom and others feared — in any given collection, the old guard and their descendants have remained. But canons have continued to evolve, and new ones have sprung up alongside them.

When Mr. Bloom died in October, Joe Karaganis and David McClure of the nonprofit research organization Open Syllabus wondered, in an Op-Ed in The Times, whether he or Toni Morrison, a proponent of more inclusive canonization, won the literary canon wars. Their examination of millions of college syllabuses found that both had won, in a way. Students are still being taught Shakespeare and F. Scott Fitzgerald, but now they are being read along with Joyce Carol Oates and Alice Walker.

 

 

Harris talks about how digital publications, social media, and streaming platforms have opened up the canon and transferred the gatekeepers' keys to a diverse network of consumers and content creators: 

In the past 10 years, the canon has been democratized. We’ve been able to observe this happening in real time: More mass art and culture has been created than perhaps in any other period, and by a greater diversity of artists. The rise of YouTube made it relatively easy for anyone with a small budget and a vision to make their own shows. (This helped Issa Rae transform from “Awkward Black Girl” to “Insecure” on HBO.) Netflix caught the ball and ran with it, venturing into original programming, eventually at warp speed; now Amazon, Hulu and other streaming platforms have followed suit. SoundCloud birthed an entire generation of rap stars.

Simultaneously, a wider range of critics and consumers are contributing to the conversation around these works than ever before, particularly through social media and digital publications. No longer do we have to take the word of the gatekeepers as a given.

In her 2019 piece, Harris noted the hypocrisy of canon gatekeepers like literary critics Harold Bloom and Peter Shaw, who cast aspersions on the new, democratically-elected cultural keyholders as"canon assaulters." Hypocrisy, because the gatekeepers themselves stressed the importance of perceiving the canon as constantly dynamic:"'imperfect at any particular point in time' and 'in need of constant reform' and 'revision'." 

Harris annotated her "canon assaulter" section with a reflective, #2020 addendum:

It was kind of wild, if unsurprising, to see how perfectly Mr. Shaw’s essay maps onto the many critiques that have been made against “woke” politics in the present, including of #OscarsSoWhite. He opens it with the rather dismissive sentence, “The debate over whether the classics of Western literature deserve their canonical status is a political rather than intellectual phenomenon.”