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Lindsay Johns looks back to the furious debate over the literary canon in America in the early 1990s, and asks what it can teach us about our own, contemporary, culture wars.

This is a subject about which Lindsay feels profound ambivalence. Devoted to expanding the canon, a couple of years back he presented a documentary on Radio 3 calling for Alex La Guma, his literary hero, to be ‘canonised’. But Lindsay also unashamedly loves many classical writers – the so-called ‘Dead White Men’ who he sees as the cultural patrimony of all mankind – and is worried that in our age of identity politics they are at risk of falling out of fashion, and out of the canon.

Lindsay begins this story in 1992, the year Harvard Professor and public intellectual Henry Louis Gates published a plea for a more diverse, what we’d now call ‘decolonised’, canon. Lindsay will show how this plea, and Gates’s literary activism, helped induct many African American authors into the canon.

Lindsay will speak to publishers, editors, literary activists and teachers. He’ll examine questions of power – why the canon matters and who gets to shape it; as well as universality – about whose stories speak to everyone. He’ll examine the shift in the politics and the philosophy of canon-building, and how the debate has moved from what should be added, to what should be removed. What surprises him is how much it is prosaic matters - like the length of a book, who holds the copyright and whether it is anthologised - which determines what is canonised.

But can Lindsay resolve the tensions between his very strongly held opinions on the canon, or at least feel comfortable with his ambivalence? And if so, could that point to a different way of thinking about our broader culture wars?

Producer: Giles Edwards
Research: Stephanie Mitcalf.