Kill the Canon (Gently)

Authority, taste, and who gets to decide.

I need you to hear me, and really, actually hear me when I say this: the literary canon is not a natural phenomenon. It is a record of power, preference, and exclusion. It begs the question – who chose what became ‘The Canon’, capital T, capital C, and what that tells us of the culture we have inherited.

The Canon is seen as a body of literary work, across mediums, considered to be the most important or influential works of our culture. Naturally, there isn’t just one list, but rather a rolling and evolving body that is deemed to carry the moral, aesthetic, or cultural weight of our current society. The problem is that this weight has almost never reflected the world we actually live in.

The literary canon didn’t emerge naturally. It was constructed. Critics, scholars, and educators, mostly white, male, and European, decided which books mattered, privileging certain styles, subjects, and voices while ignoring others. Institutions codified these choices, turning them into curricula and textbooks, and over time, what was celebrated became “timeless” or “essential.” These decisions were never neutral. They reflected the social, political, and cultural values of the decision-makers. The canon is, in short, a record of who had authority to decide whose stories counted.

I went to High School in the early teens, my sister shortly after me and then, much like now, they were still teaching books like Great Expectations, Moby-Dick, Heart of Darkness. Still revering books that are, at their core, racist, homophobic and endlessly prejudiced. Why? Simple: the decision makers, the powers that be, do not want their core to be shaken. It is what they were taught, and what their teachers were taught, and the cycle continues. That is not tradition, it is inertia. It shouldn’t be the standard.

Take Heart of Darkness, for example. It is highly praised for its prose, but it depicts Africa as a place of absolute savagery. It reduces Black people to background props. It centres whiteness as the moral lens through which the world should be viewed. It is, plainly put, racist and unacceptable. Or Moby-Dick, which is celebrated for its ‘narrative genius’, yet it is rife with patriarchal obsession and a worldview that pushes aside the labour, race, and the humanity of non-white characters. These are not just historical missteps; they are active choices preserved in our schools, shaping what we recognize as “important.”

By continuing to teach these works uncritically, we signal to students that some stories matter more than others, and whose stories are worth telling. We teach young readers to revere the voices of a very specific culture while marginalizing the rest.

Killing the canon, doesn’t mean burning books. It means expanding our definition of what is considered to be canon. It means deepening our understanding of what makes the current ‘cannon’ problematic and taking active steps to correct past mistakes. It means building a new, deliberate culture that centres diversity, celebrates our differences and chooses humanity over loyalty to a past steeped in hurt and pain. It is our duty to spotlight voices that have always been there but have been ignored for far too long.

Expanding the canon doesn’t call for us to erase history. Quite the contrary. It encourages us to amplify the voices that have been sidelined in that same shared history. Contemporary literature is rich with writers whose work gives us the platform to challenge and diversify our understanding of our human experience. Ocean Vuong, for example, redefines form and intimacy while unpacking the immigrant experience in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Zadie Smith, Jesmyn Ward, and Colson Whitehead interrogate history, community, and systemic inequality through stunning prose that is both urgent and lyrical.

Books in translation should also springboard us into a global understanding. Books like Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman, translated from Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori or Sin is a Puppy that Follows You Home by Balaraba Ramat Yakubu, translated from Hausa by Aliyu Kamal. These texts offer perspectives historically excluded from curricula, reflecting the complexity of the modern world. Updating the canon is not about replacing classics; it’s about creating a living, evolving body of literature that represents the diversity, resilience, and imagination of all readers.

This starts by challenging the way we read, both personally and as a society. It means consciously choosing books that represent the world we live in, that reflect the culture as it stands. It is up to us to bridge the gaps between people, to read in order to understand, and to uncover the divides that literature can help us mend — through beauty, freedom, truth, and love.

The canon is a choice, not a law. It’s time we choose differently.