Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity....The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.
—Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie,
OK. Literally trying not to cry (if you know me, then you know I really don't care for crying). I am beyond thrilled that my midterm prospectus for what I plan to research and argue was approved outright. It is "sharply focused, and highly relevant," my professor says. I'm gushing, I know. And I'm sharing “irrelevant” info on my blog, I know. But it isn't the first, and it won't be the last.
My excitement is through the roof because I am being approved for the first of many cases I hope to advocate for in the coming years. I'll describe briefly:
Currently the official canon of American Renaissance literature (defined by F. O. Matthiessen as literature written between 1850 and 1855) includes no women and no people of color. The writers whose works make up this collection are Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. This means that universities across the US and the world that include American Renaissance, or the like, as part of their curriculum study this time period with only the perspectives of white men (unless they are blessed to employ a professor like mine, and even still we need efforts like his made the rule and not the exception). But guess what? Both women and people of color wrote landmark, culture-shifting works during this time that embody the very meaning of renaissance, which is all about the rebirth and redefining of values, traditions, and culture.
My research this semester will argue the critical importance of including slave narratives written between 1850 and 1855 into the official canon of American Renaissance literature. Slaves narratives such as those written by Frederick Douglass and Harriet A. Jacobs challenged and redefined America's core values of equality, freedom, and individualism, and also gave rise to a new literary genre--the protest novel, e.g.
Uncle Tom's Cabin
. Though my focus is on the inclusion of the writings of black authors, my argument will inevitably include points for the value of women writers during the period.
Without a full and fair view of works that intersect during particular eras, we silence significant strains of expression and cheat future generations out of experiencing a broad landscape of thought, resulting in their narrowness of thought. This can be exceedingly damaging to a culture as we are seeing in ours at this very moment.
Excluding certain voices from discourse propagates stereotypes and fear because of the unknown and because of the incomplete and few stories we allow through the gate. I'd like to propose that we immediately stop being skimpy on what we call worthy and valuable.
The question is going around about how to grow diversity in all spheres of culture. One way is to just do it: intentionally increase the exposure of a multitude of heterogeneous voices. That's the movement I hope to be a part of.