Robert Scholes has argued: “the literary canon is a social, and therefore a political

object the result of a political process, like so much else in our world” (Scholes
147). The canon is not a fixed, stable, definite object and it actually was never a
fixed one. Canon epitomizes legitimacy, authority, hierarchy, and value, that are
constantly shaped and reshaped through the exercise of (symbolic) power. Some
questions tries to destabilize the roots of established canons: How the works having the
greatest values are categorised? Who or what has the authority to establish the
categorization? Where does this authority find its legitimacy?
Advocates of a multicultural canon have paved the way for a more de-
centered, eclectic, pluralistic approach rather than the established canon. The
multicultural canon has tried to denaturalize and eventually complexify, contextualize
and expand the existing canon. The multicultural canon and the multicultural rewriting
of U.S. history were advocated, in the 1980s and 1990s. Academic institutions are not
the only forces active in delineating the contours of the canon but government agencies,
private foundations, libraries, other cultural institutions, the publishing world also
played their role. Ralph Ellison, in his essay “Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black
Mask of Humanity,” had written: “if the word has the potency to revive and make us
free, it also has the power to blind, imprison and destroy. […] Thus it is unfortunate for
the Negro that the most powerful formulations of modern American words have been so
slanted against him that when he approaches for a glimpse of himself he discovers an
image drained of humanity” (Ellison 81-82).
The proponents of the New literature talks about the (re)construction of the
literary canon and the (re)mapping of the critical field and opposite to this it also
encouraged looking at the former canon as the institutionalized manifestation of a
cultural stance expressing a particular demographic makeup, a specific cultural politics,
and a given intellectual paradigm—a perspective from which “the canon is taken simply
as the name for that body of works which best performs in the sphere of culture the
work of legitimating the prevailing social order” (Krupat 22). “ But a multicultural
curriculum recognizes that our world is made up of many groups—ethnic, cultural,
racial and social—each of which has contributed to our society in valuable ways. These
groups are not only related to one another but also dependent on each other.
 Many scholars considered the year of 1964 as the year of the Civil Rights Act. It was
the turning point, the moment when the “liberal” fantasy of an all-inclusive, equalitarian
and individualistic paradigm of national identity was abandoned in order to
acknowledge effective group distinctiveness on the basis of “race, color, religion or
national origin” (in the words of the Civil Rights Act). In this context, cultural demands
voiced first by Civil Rights, then by Black Power activists, recognized that cultural
stereotypes popularized by literature, the arts, and the media had been instrumental in
rationalizing and comforting the social and political subordination of Blacks, to the
point of having them develop pathological forms of “slave mentality” or “negative
identity”.
The very emergence of alternative canons was evidence that literary demarcations
were bound to be disrupted.

Works cited

SCHOLES, Robert. “Canonicity and Textuality”. Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and

Literatures. Ed. Joseph Gibaldi. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1992.

ELLISON, Ralph. Collected Essays. New York: The Modern Library, 1995.

KRUPAT, Arnold. The Voice in The Margin. Native American Literature and the Canon. Berkeley, CA: U

of California P, 1989.