What is a “white man idea”?

Considering diversity audits, decanonization, and intellectual freedom for Freedom to Read Week 2023.

Romeo and Juliet 2019 Pop-up Globe by Benny Vandergast via Wikimedia Commons under CC BY_SA 4.0.

Puppets, parasols, stilt walkers and red clown noses are not stage props that are traditionally associated with Romeo and Juliet, but they are sights that greeted fifteen-year-old me standing in the yard of the Globe Theatre, taking in Grupo Galpão’s Romeu e Julieta. The Brazilian street theater acting troupe, founded by actress Teuda Bara, just happened to be performing their rendition of Onestaldo de Pennafort’s Portuguese translation on the same day that my grandmother and I decided on a whim to visit the replica open-air theater. Their production, which can be watched in full at MIT’s Global Shakespeares performance archive, reimagines the 400-year-old tragic play as a comedic parody of youthful capriciousness, family melodrama, and blood feuds, complete with a lascivious nurse and an irreverent priest. My grandmother and I laughed until tears streamed from our eyes; our serendipitous day at the theater became the highlight of our trip. It is evident from occasional pans of the audience, visible in the archival footage, that the performance united theatergoers in a shared experience across age, race, gender, ability, class, language, nationality, and innumerable other differences, observable and otherwise.

Romeo and Juliet and other Shakespearean texts have long been staples of the literary canon, taught in language arts classrooms across the Anglophone world - and in translation beyond it. But longstanding debates about the validity of the canon, its contemporary relevance, and its implications for diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging are resurging, with the Bard squarely in their sites. Detractors scoff at claims that worldwide translation and adaptation of near semi-millenium-old writings are any evidence of their timelessness or universality. The #DisruptTexts community hosted a chat for disrupting Shakespeare, and published another case study specifically on disrupting Romeo and Juliet featuring Elizabeth Acevedo’s multi-award-winning and frequently challenged book, The Poet X.

Another Bard has come under scrutiny for its own star-cross’d affair with the literary canon. Bard College, home to Stevenson Library, made news for undertaking a “diversity audit of the entire print collection in an effort to begin the process of decanonizing the stacks,” according to a blurb in their fall 2021 newsletter. The diversity audit was performed by three students at the private liberal arts college, who “evaluat[ed] each book for representations of race/ethnicity, gender, religion, and ability.” 

At one level, diversity audits represent nothing more than documenting metadata about the identities represented in a library collection. Diversity audits can identify collection gaps that inform collection development priorities, and suggest resource description and metadata enrichment strategies that make items in the collection more discoverable using identity-based search criteria. Diversity audits may be a tool for meeting ACRL Diversity Standard 4: Development of Collections, Programs, and Services, which calls on library workers to provide access to library resources and services that are “inclusive of the needs of all persons in the community the library serves.” This includes taking steps to assess the degree to which existing collections are “reflective of the diversity of the library’s constituent populations,” and to account for demographic trends in the library’s ongoing collection management decisions.

On another level, diversity audits are perceived as ideological incursions into library collection integrity. Despite Stevenson Library director Betsy Cawley’s assurances that the diversity audit served only to “help us understand and answer questions about representation in our collections and build a more inclusive collection going forward,” critics remain unconvinced that, in Cawley’s words, “nothing is being removed, recategorized, or replaced.” Writing for the Wall Street Journal, Faith Bottum notes, 

“The worry here should be that the past won’t survive the passions of the present, even among librarians and others whose task is to preserve literary achievement and blend it with the present.”

While Bottum considers the impact of diversity audits for deaccessioning and collection maintenance, Bard alumnus Robert Weissberg confronts their implications for collection development. Weissberg asserts that such approaches easily slide from identity-affirming into identitarian:

“Library acquisition now becomes a political act—who wants to be on the wrong side of history?”

Thus, using identity-based criteria to either add or remove items from a library collection both require due consideration of the intellectual freedom implications of such approaches, and what they mean for the integrity of the cultural record for present and future readers. In its Intellectual Freedom Principles for Academic Libraries, ACRL notes that “the development of library collections in support of an institution’s instruction and research programs should transcend the personal values of the selector,” and that “a procedure ensuring due process should be in place to deal with requests by those within and outside the academic community for removal or addition of library resources.”

Sofia Leung is a leading facilitator in the movement to decolonize library collections and integrate other aspects of Critical Race Theory into library practice. In her thought piece, “Whiteness as Collections,” Leung cites a colleague’s observation that

“Our library collections, because they are written mostly by straight white men, are a physical manifestation of white men ideas taking up all the space in our library stacks.”

Leung instructs the reader to “Pause here and think about this.”

I did. And the resounding thought in my mind was:

What is a “white man idea”?

Is death a “white man idea” - or the belief that some fates are worse than death, and some things worth dying for? Is love a “white man idea”? What about betrayal and vengeance? Aging and obsolescence? Infirmity and madness? Corruption and deception, good and evil? These and other aspects of the human condition are universal and timeless, and it is because Shakespeare wrote of them so vividly that we still read his works in more than 100 languages, more than 400 years after he shuffled off his mortal coil.

Paulo Freire’s contributions to critical pedagogy are frequently cited in efforts to decolonize teaching, learning, and literature. I shudder to think that an overly literal reading of this Brazilian’s work could convince a fellow Brazilian theater troupe that Shakespearean plays offered them nothing but exclusion and oppression, rather than opportunities for play, parody, and joy that spans centuries, languages, and cultures. Will people still read The Poet X 400 years from now? I hope so. If they do, let it be because librarians see to it that the chain links in the literary canon are forged with integrity between now and then, connecting us to them.

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