Monday, October 7, 2019

Dead White Males

The debate over diversity and gender is going to be going on for a long time, I suspect. As a followup to my comment on Clara Schumann vs Beethoven in the concert review, I want to draw your attention to this initiative: Columbia's library building features the names of only male authors. After 3 decades of trying, these students have fixed that. Yes, indeed they have, but in an interesting and not offensive manner. They could have chipped away or covered up the objectionable male authors, but instead, simply placed an alternative banner above. See the photo at the link.
Homer. Herodotus. Sophocles. Plato. Aristotle. Demosthenes. Cicero. Vergil.
Male. Male. Male. Male. Male. Male. Male. Male.
These are the author's names chiseled into the stone facade of Columbia University's Butler Library. In case it hasn't become clear yet, every single one of them is a man.
Yes, and not only male, but also Greek and Roman and all of them core thinkers in the Ancient world. Which you might think is even more important.
The new 140-foot banner emblazons the last names of Toni Morrison, Diana Chang, Zora Neale Hurston, Ntozake Shange, Maya Angelou, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gloria E Anzaldúa and A. Revathi across the face of Butler Library and directly above the original names.
To which I say "who?" Well, ok, I have heard of Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison, but the rest are a mystery. The names were selected by a small committee of students.
The original 1989 banner included the last names of Sappho, Marie de France, Christine de Pizan, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Brontë (meant to represent all three Brontë sisters), Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf.
I have heard of nearly all of those names, at least, though the list had to comb through a couple of millennia of literary history to find enough names. There was another list in 1994:
For the 1994 interpretation, the names of Sappho, Murasaki Shikibu, Mirabai, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Zora Neale Hurston, Simone de Beauvoir, Toni Morrison, Leslie Marmon Silko and Sandra Cisneros graced the northern face of the library.
You can see the tendrils of politics slowly exerting their influence, can't you?

Basically, what is going on here is a category error: the current banner is a demonstration that the students have not only no comprehension of history, they are also pretty weak in aesthetics as well. The new list is of those names that are fashionable among impressionable students in the humanities in the second decade of the 21st century. I would bet that those names will disappear in a decade or two to be replaced with other, equally ephemeral ones. But Homer, Herodotus and the rest of those vile males will continue to be just as important as they have been for the last two and a half millennia.

2 comments:

Wenatchee the Hatchet said...

concern about dead white males having so dominant a role in the academic canon can have an inverse declaration, that all of the best American popular music is in some way a reflection of the music of the African diaspora. It's not that I don't venerate the music of Scott Joplin or Stevie Wonder or Blind Willie Johnson, I do ... but the older I get the more I consider that declarations that "everybody is stealing" black music to be a countermythology that is not helpful.

Ian Pace has blogged about the hegemony of Anglo-American popular music over at Desiring Progress and the short version is that he's not against popular music, he's against Americans in New Musicology writing as if American popular music is the "real deal" compared to other styles. A variant of that concern I've expressed is that if the ideal of American popular music is considered the baseline of "authenticity" then a British-African composer like Samuel Coleridge-Taylor will get dismissed as basically not "black" enough. Flipping the script of the Romantic era artist-hero-prophet-genius from the white German symphonist to the blues musician in Chicago is still using the script. For a significally longer version of that concern ...

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2019/09/is-everyone-always-stealing-black-music.html

I'm not going to pretend I wouldn't rather hear symphonies by William Grant Still to Schubert symphonies, for instance, but I don't wish to tell people who love Schubert symphonies (because ... somebody has to ... )that they're white supremacist for loving Schubert.

The leo Brouwer two disc set is pretty remarkable, by the way.

Bryan Townsend said...

Good point. Jordan Peterson makes the very useful point that all ideologies are "low resolution" images of reality, which is always much more complex. This is how you get to such ridiculous ideas as "all mathematics is racist" or all of the best American popular music is stolen from black people.