“For Canons Do”: Black Literary Production and the Canon’s Empire

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dc.contributorAbello Hurtado, Ximena
dc.contributorMahaffy, Caitlin
dc.contributor.advisorKristen, Maye
dc.contributor.authorMorrison, Ainsley
dc.date.accessioned2025-07-15T13:59:24Z
dc.date.available2025-07-15T13:59:24Z
dc.date.gradyear2025
dc.date.issued2025-07-15
dc.description.abstractAs Toni Morrison writes in “Unspeakable Things Unspoken,” “canon building is empire building.” The ever-present debate around the canon, which is to say over which texts are relevant, meaningful, and “great,” always carries high stakes. Understanding the Western literary canon as both a product and producer of empire, I consider the relationship of Black Literary Production to canon. Drawing on the work of Sylvia Wynter and Zakiyyah Jackson in addition to Toni Morrison, I argue that the canon seeks to reproduce beings that serve the interests of empire. By making “great” the texts that produce beings in service of empire, the canon becomes a vital mechanism for not only empire’s self-definition, but for the continual reproduction of the dominant modes of being. By seeking out the texts that the canon and canonical scholarship reject, condemn, or simply cannot accommodate, we are able to identify and name the features of texts that create and support empirical modes. More significantly, in these counter-canonical texts we necessarily find those features that reach towards alternative modes, modes that could fundamentally threaten the dominance of empire. My project examines three works belonging to Black writers—The Salt Eaters by Toni Cade Bambara, The Street by Ann Petry, and Corregidora by Gayl Jones—so as to identify how these works gesture towards the possibility of ways of being that are disappeared by the canon and by empire. To contextualize this practice, I read Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon as a symptom and product of canon and empire.
dc.description.sponsorshipEnglish
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/10166/6772
dc.language.isoen_US
dc.rights.restrictedrestricted
dc.subjectblack literature
dc.subjectpost-humanism
dc.subjectcanon
dc.subjectempire
dc.title“For Canons Do”: Black Literary Production and the Canon’s Empire
dc.typeThesis
mhc.degreeUndergraduate
mhc.institutionMount Holyoke College

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