This is the Canon, written by Joan Anim-Addo, Deirdre Osborne and Kadija Sesay, is a book that aims to decolonise what we think of as the literary canon, which is all too often dominated by white authors. In this week’s episode the authors talk to writer Thomas Glave about disrupting the accepted norm, highlighting different cultures and stories and their favourite books to add to your bookshelves.
You can download our podcast episodes from all the places you would normally get your podcasts every Thursday and follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest. All of our festival events can be found on our website www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org.
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Credits
Curator: Shantel Edwards (Festival director)
Production: 11C/ Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands
TRANSCRIPT
BLF Series 2, Episode 7: This is the Canon
Intro
Welcome to the second series of the Birmingham Lit Fest Presents…podcast. We are really excited to be back for a second season and to continue to connect readers and writers in the Midlands, and far beyond.
You can download our podcast episodes from all the places you would normally get your podcasts every Thursday and follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest. All of our festival events can be found on our website www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org.
This is the Canon, written by Joan Anim-Addo, Deirdre Osborne and Kadija Sesay, is a book that aims to decolonise what we think of as the literary canon, which is all too often dominated by white authors. In this week’s episode the authors talk to writer Thomas Glave about disrupting the accepted norm, highlighting different cultures and stories and their favourite books to add to your bookshelves.
Thomas Glave
Hello, welcome to another episode of the Birmingham Lit Fest Presents. Today we're very thrilled to have three fantastic guests discussing their new book, This is the Canon: How to Decolonise Your Bookshelves in 50 books. Our guests today are the co-authors of this title, Professor Joan Anim-Addo, who is Professor Emeritus of Caribbean Literature and Culture at Goldsmiths University, and the co-founder of the world’s first MA in Black British literature. Also Dr Deirdre Osborne, who is a Reader in English Literature and Drama at Goldsmiths University, and the co-founder of the world's first Black British literature MA. She is also associate editor of the journal Women's Writing, and she edited the Cambridge Companion to British Black and Asian literature. Our third co-author is Kadija Sesay, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Kadija Sesay is a writer and editor of several anthologies, and is the founder of Sable literary magazine, and Afro poetry app. She is also co-founder of the Mboka Festival in The Gambia, and as a co-editor of IC3 published by Penguin, which will soon celebrate its 20th anniversary. We're very happy to tell you that This is the Canon is now out and available in bookshops and online everywhere. Welcome to our three guests. Thank you very much for joining us today. I'd like to start by asking you in sequence some questions just about this idea of decolonising. Starting with you, Professor Anim-Addo. What is decolonising exactly in the context of this book project?
Joan Anim-Addo
Thank you very much, Thomas. I think that decolonising has been a subject on the lips of lots of people and it's always seemed as if it's something that someone else is doing. And as readers, it seemed to us that we have a task also too. As readers, it seemed important for us to read a range of books, and insist on reading a range of books with different ways of storytelling, different characters, different rhythms from different spaces, not just Britain, for example, but to read as well as we possibly could. So, decolonising the canon, in a way opens up the way for the reader to take on that possibility, equips the reader to find a range of books to begin thinking about reading much more widely.
Thomas Glave
Thank you, Professor, very intriguing, very provocative indeed. And Dr Osborne, could you expound on this question as well? What is decolonising for you as a co-author of this book?
Deirdre Osborne
Well, I guess what's so wonderful about the book is that Joan and Kadija and I work from three very different locations in terms of perhaps how we were raised, when we were raised, where we were raised, and where we ended up living. And so decolonising is something that we have had, I think, to embrace really with all our work in literature and academia and also in a sort of literary activism that we've all been pursuing throughout our careers. And so, for me, I think it's an unquestioningly transnational idea of the capabilities of literature, that we need to open up our horizons because one person's canon, which is the sort of agreed list that gets consolidated throughout education - everyone must read these books to be an educated or learned person, which as we know, has had quite a limited framework around it - so one person's canon in another part of the world is an unknown book. And so, what we're doing with our work is to sort of make that more porous, to bring that together. So, something that might be canonical in Britain or in Senegal, and isn't in either of the other spaces, that we understand that actually, they can be read and enjoyed and also, they can serve as an inspiration to just how pluralized human beings are in the way they create and represent their experiences. So, decolonising, for me, is very much I suppose, opening up those borders of reader awareness.
Thomas Glave
Thank you, Dr Osborne. Excellent, really fascinating. Then Miss Sesay, I'd like to ask you as well. What is, for you, decolonising?
Kadija Sesay
What's been interesting, as I've just been kind of finishing up my own research for my PhD as well, which has been around Black British publishing, I actually think of it very much in a publishing context, as well. So, working with a major publisher, on such a book, when my whole work has been around decolonising publishing has been very interesting, as I'm sure you could imagine. But also, I won't go over what Joan and Deirdre have said, but I think one of the things that really, that came out of working on this in terms of an extension of thinking around decolonising, which is very easy to forget, is that this is just the first step. I think, as Deirdre mentioned, this is just a selection of books, that could be decolonising your literature, but it goes past the selection of books, it goes past showing your guests who come to dinner how decolonised you are by showing them what's on your bookshelf, it goes then to the reading, how are you reading this work and interpreting it? You have to then start shifting your mind about how you interpret it, yes, you're going to come to it from your own background and your own understanding of literature. But then you have to start thinking ...
