Annotated by the Author: ‘The Cultural Canon Is Better Than Ever’ - The New York Times

Sofia Haziran 02, 2021

Annotated by the Author: ‘The Cultural Canon Is Better Than Ever’ - The New York Times

Posted: 05 Mar 2020 01:20 PM PST

On Dec. 29, 2019, as the 2010s came to a close, the Times Sunday Review looked back. In a special section called The Decade of Distrust, nine articles took on aspects of how factors like social media, the Great Recession and Donald J. Trump affected and changed us — and what the lessons learned in this decade might teach us about the future.

One of those nine essays was by Aisha Harris, a writer and editor in the Times Opinion section who covers culture and society. Her piece about the cultural canon points out that in the past 10 years, the canon has been democratized — and, at the same time, "a wider range of critics and consumers are contributing to the conversation around these works than ever before, particularly through social media and digital publications. No longer do we have to take the word of the gatekeepers as a given."

We've chose this as the latest in our Annotated by the Author Mentor Text series both because it is an excellent piece to include in our current unit on argumentative writing, and also because, at a time when teachers are reimagining curriculums to make them more relevant to students' lives, the essay seems perfect for classroom discussion.

Below, paragraphs from the original article are in bold, reproduced exactly as they were published, with the images and hyperlinks intact. Following each boldface section are her comments about how she came up with the idea, and how she researched and structured it to make her main points clear.

You can find more of Ms. Harris's writing here, and you can find all the essays in the Decade of Distrust collection by scrolling down to the bottom of Ms. Harris's original essay.

By the time Beyoncé released "Lemonade" — a sprawling film-and-album contending with the difficulties in her marriage to Jay-Z, and more collectively, generations of black American women's trauma — she had already won 20 Grammys, performed with Prince and Tina Turner, and upended the music industry with the surprise release of her 2013 self-titled album. But "Lemonade" was something different.

Aisha Harris: The idea for this piece came along during a conversation I had with one of my editors about how the cultural canon — what I define as the movies, music, shows, et cetera widely considered to be essential — had evolved alongside an increase in diverse representation in media over the last 20 years or so. The example I kept returning to explain this was Beyoncé's "Lemonade," which was such a phenomenon on so many levels when it initially came out. This, I felt, had to be the starting point for the piece.

The visuals evoked Southern Gothicism and Yoruba culture, with black women dressed in billowing white dresses, climbing giant, mossy trees, communing along the beach and in the water. The songs — of heartbreak, rage, vulnerability, braggadocio, reconciliation — were mined from country, blues, R&B, rock, bounce.

"Lemonade" was instantly dissected, analyzed and praised. At the end of 2016 it topped multiple lists as an album and found its place as a film on lists alongside "Moonlight" and "Toni Erdmann."

Key to establishing why "Lemonade" should be considered canon was examining its impact, and that impact was cross-disciplinary: It was an album, yes, but also an experimental film, and it won accolades in both realms, forcing film critics who don't usually write about music as their primary beat to pay attention.

It also forced people to discover — or rediscover — Julie Dash's film "Daughters of the Dust," just in time for its 25th anniversary. A sweeping, nonlinear meditation on the Great Migration as seen through three generations of Gullah women, "Daughters" became the first feature film directed by a black woman to have a wide theatrical release in the United States. Many were quick to observe the striking visual similarities between Beyoncé's opus and its critically acclaimed predecessor, and Ms. Dash herself would go on to describe being "enthralled" the first time she viewed "Lemonade."

Part of my research in preparation for writing this piece involved reacquainting myself intimately with many of the tenets and critiques of artistic canons by the old guard, which I hadn't really done since I was in undergrad. I came across the filmmaker Paul Schrader's own musings on the film canon in a 2006 Film Comment essay, in which he builds on the thoughts of T.S. Eliot and Harold Bloom and declares, "The greatness of a film or filmmaker must be judged not only on its own terms but by its place in the evolution of film." (I use this quote directly later in the piece.) This leapt out to me, and helped explain part of what makes "Lemonade" so great: It's inspiration from "Daughters of the Dust."

Yet unlike "Lemonade," Ms. Dash's film was not widely seen at the time of its release. For years it was difficult to track down, available only on DVD in an out-of-print edition. Almost 30 years later, "Daughters of the Dust" remains Ms. Dash's only narrative feature to date, thanks to an industry that has long overlooked black women.

Which of these works deserves to be considered part of the "canon," that divisive, elusive — and, traditionally, elitist — list of ostensibly foundational, exemplary art works? Well, both of them.

Initially, the structure of the entire introduction was slightly different. The original version of these couple of paragraphs in particular was less succinct, and included this: "If there exists a pop culture canon, or canons, for the 2010s, "Lemonade" is in it. How do you talk about the ongoing evolution of the music video and the autobiographical album without holding up "Lemonade" as an exemplar of both forms?"

My editor rightly slimmed down and refocused the points I was trying to make here.

In the past 10 years, the canon has been democratized. We've been able to observe this happening in real time: More mass art and culture has been created than perhaps in any other period, and by a greater diversity of artists. The rise of YouTube made it relatively easy for anyone with a small budget and a vision to make their own shows. (This helped Issa Rae transform from "Awkward Black Girl" to "Insecure" on HBO.) Netflix caught the ball and ran with it, venturing into original programming, eventually at warp speed; now Amazon, Hulu and other streaming platforms have followed suit. SoundCloud birthed an entire generation of rap stars.

Simultaneously, a wider range of critics and consumers are contributing to the conversation around these works than ever before, particularly through social media and digital publications. No longer do we have to take the word of the gatekeepers as a given.

In my first draft, it took me a bit longer to get to this point, but my editor suggested it would make more sense to briefly lay out the reason for this shift in the canon — the forces at work.

For centuries, the cultivating and maintenance of artistic canons — in literature, fine arts, even pop music — has been the province almost exclusively of white men. There was the 16th-century artist Giorgio Vasari and his collection of Italian biographies, "The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects." The English writer Joseph Addison, who in 1694 published "An Account of the Greatest English Poets." The editors of the respected French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, who began putting out an annual best-of list in 1951. And Harold Bloom, the Yale professor and literary critic who died in October, who became one of the most prominent modern-day defenders of a Western canon that at its most permissive was allowed to include the likes of Emily Dickinson.

The cultural canon has typically included people and works that can be summed up as the usual suspects: Molière, Shakespeare, the "Mona Lisa," the Beatles, "Citizen Kane." It has also been rightly challenged by the likes of Toni Morrison and Barbara Herrnstein Smith for its Western, white and male biases and for dismissing the voices of women and people of color.

The framing of this section came as a suggestion from my editor, who wrote to me via email that I should follow the following arc (note that TK, in journalism-speak, means "to come"): "Here's what the canon has historically been — a pantheon of white men from Beethoven to Roman Polanski. [Then work in some of the more definitional stuff here.] It's been rightly critiqued for being conservative, because who wants to be told by gatekeepers that they have to appreciate TK TK in order to make art."

Calls for a more inclusive canon were not well received by Mr. Bloom and others. In 1994, the literary scholar Peter Shaw tore apart the idea in his article "The Assault on the Canon": When you remove a Shakespeare play from a class syllabus to make room for, say, Alice Walker's "The Color Purple," he wrote, it presents "the specific issue of which of two works is superior."

"Canon assaulters are reluctant to engage in such a confrontation for obvious reasons," he added. Yet in the same essay, Mr. Shaw acknowledged that the canon is "regarded as imperfect at any particular point in time" and "in need of constant reform" and "revision."

It was kind of wild, if unsurprising, to see how perfectly Mr. Shaw's essay maps onto the many critiques that have been made against "woke" politics in the present, including of #OscarsSoWhite. He opens it with the rather dismissive sentence, "The debate over whether the classics of Western literature deserve their canonical status is a political rather than intellectual phenomenon."

"Lemonade" and "Daughters of the Dust" were affirmed and reaffirmed as required viewing. Beyoncé's film made its way onto college syllabuses, and "Daughters of the Dust" was restored, given a theatrical rerelease and finally became widely accessible to audiences once it landed on Netflix in 2017.

It's hard to prove concretely, but I don't think it's a stretch to suggest that the arrival of "Daughters of the Dust" on Netflix is very much linked to the renewed interest brought on by "Lemonade."

IN HIS 2006 ESSAY "Canon Fodder," the filmmaker and critic Paul Schrader riffed on T.S. Eliot's and Mr. Bloom's assertions that no individual work exists in a vacuum — that to appreciate and evaluate art, one must put it in dialogue with the works that came before it. "The greatness of a film or filmmaker must be judged not only on its own terms, but by its place in the evolution of film," Mr. Schrader wrote.

"Daughters of the Dust" didn't need "Lemonade" to assert its place in the canon — the film was added in 2004 to the National Film Registry, a collection of films selected for preservation by the Library of Congress for being "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" — but Beyoncé's homage a quarter of a century later reinforced its staying power and demonstrated just how influential the movie has been.

To transition into the next beat of the piece, it was crucial to bring "Lemonade" and "Daughters of the Dust" back in again, to re-emphasize how they fit into the parameters for canonization.

The same could be said for The Notorious B.I.G., who served as one of many reference points in Lin-Manuel Miranda's Broadway hit "Hamilton." The rapper's premature demise in 1997 — he recorded just two studio albums, both critically acclaimed, before his death at 24 — has long contributed to his looming legend as one of the greatest rappers of all time. But to see his mark on a hit Broadway show emphasized how far-reaching his influence continues to be two decades later.

It could also be said for ball and drag culture, which saw increased visibility with the rise of "Ru Paul's Drag Race" and "Pose." These art forms had thrived in urban L.G.B.T.Q. communities for decades, but queer people were too often relegated to the background, becoming a source of inspiration — and profit — for more "mainstream" artists. In the 2010s, though, millions of others came to appreciate drag culture and understand the foundations that black and brown queer communities in the '80s and '90s laid for everything from Madonna's "Vogue" to Lady Gaga's entire career.

I threw together a list of other things that I felt reflected that same influential dynamic between an old work and a new one as "Lemonade" and "Daughters" — it included "Moonlight," which Barry Jenkins has said was partially inspired by Wong Kar-Wai's "In the Mood for Love," and "Key & Peele" and its lineage with "Chappelle's Show." But I wanted to move beyond film and wasn't fully convinced the "Key & Peele" example held up as well, so I went with Biggie and "Hamilton," and "Pose" and "Drag Race."

Yet the 2010s also delivered a reckoning. The #MeToo movement revealed a long list of careers and dreams deferred, and canonical movies with troubled histories. Mr. Bloom — who himself was accused of sexual assault by a former student, the writer Naomi Wolf — would argue that "politics" has no place in assessing the canon. But most critics ignored this throughout the past decade: The works of Harvey Weinstein, Woody Allen, Michael Jackson, Louis C.K. and other creative minds came under intense scrutiny as past controversies resurfaced.

Debates raged over whether they should continue to be revered. Woody Allen movies that had long been held up as proof of his genius — "Manhattan," "Play It Again, Sam" — suddenly took on a sinister light in the face of renewed allegations that he molested his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow when she was a child. R. Kelly's decades-long oeuvre, made up of songs both incredibly explicit and cheesily wholesome in nature, was scrutinized and cast aside in the wake of a docuseries detailing numerous allegations of sexual and emotional abuse against young girls and women.

You can't talk about who's new to the canon without addressing those who are already there, and it's impossible to wrestle with who's already in there without coming up against a lot of reprehensible figures. It was important to me that this piece include an acknowledgment of the ways in which the last several years have been spent by consumers and critics wrestling with what to do about such canonical works.

But in many cases, the work itself hasn't necessarily plummeted in esteem. Some may still choose not to play "Billie Jean" at their events, but its standing as one of the greatest and most influential pop songs of all time seems unlikely to budge. The film director Jordan Peele has spoken often of how Roman Polanski's "Rosemary's Baby" influenced his feature debut — "Get Out," one of the most highly regarded films of the past decade — despite the fact that Mr. Polanski has been a fugitive from the United States for more than 40 years after pleading guilty to unlawful sex with a minor. Likewise, that legacy did not stop Mr. Polanski's film from receiving positive retrospectives in 2018 on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of its release.

It was really interesting to me that "Louie," at the time of its run widely considered to be one of the best shows of its time, was absent from a lot of best-of lists at the decade's end. This didn't make it into the final version, but in an early draft, I included part of this quote from Rolling Stone's Alan Sepinwall on the show's legacy: "The series' individual merits feel tainted, what it accomplished in paving a path for others to make their own deeply personal series — including Pamela Adlon (Better Things) and Tig Notaro (One Mississippi, whose brave second season had a subplot about a thinly-disguised C.K. type), who created shows with C.K. involved to varying degrees — can't be ignored."

It's not so much that canons have been completely obliterated, as Mr. Bloom and others feared — in any given collection, the old guard and their descendants have remained. But canons have continued to evolve, and new ones have sprung up alongside them.

Martin Scorsese, Bob Dylan, Quentin Tarantino, et cetera aren't going anywhere.

When Mr. Bloom died in October, Joe Karaganis and David McClure of the nonprofit research organization Open Syllabus wondered, in an Op-Ed in The Times, whether he or Toni Morrison, a proponent of more inclusive canonization, won the literary canon wars. Their examination of millions of college syllabuses found that both had won, in a way. Students are still being taught Shakespeare and F. Scott Fitzgerald, but now they are being read along with Joyce Carol Oates and Alice Walker.

A callback to my earlier statement about the canon being democratized.

Mr. Karaganis and Mr. McClure were looking only at literature taught in colleges, but their findings seem consistent across other art forms, from film to music. And I can envision this being the case as we head into the 2020s, too. Years from now, "Daughters of the Dust" and "Lemonade" will together inspire other artists, as will Polanski and Peele, Biggie and "Hamilton." Many of those future works are unlikely to rise to the achievements of their predecessors. But even then, they will prove how singular and exemplary those achievements are — and that the canon is no longer limited by lack of imagination.

As my final point: There will be (and have been) imitators of these canonical works, but that doesn't matter. They've achieved greatness, and many of us have learned to expand upon how we define greatness. A nice win, I say.