The Multi In Cultural Troubles Anthologies
What inevitably prompts the most discussion about an anthology isn't what's put in but what's left out.
Reviews of The Dictionary of Global Culture (Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), for example, noted the included and the excluded. Schubert in, Schumann out; Homer in, Horace out; Franklin Roosevelt in, Ronald Reagan out; Joe Louis in, Arthur Ashe out.
It's an engaging parlor game, but there are weighty questions embedded in list-making: How thorough is the research? What are the intellectual or artistic criteria and are they sound? Who is even entitled to make such decisions?
''It is no longer the case that you automatically have the authority to pronounce these things because you're two Harvard professors,'' said Kwame Anthony Appiah, who, together with his Harvard colleague Henry Louis Gates Jr., edited the dictionary. ''We've had the general democratization of culture in which there is a wider range of people who rightly feel entitled to declare their views.''
As the editors note in their preface, the twin problems of being exhaustive and representative have existed since Diderot wrote the first modern encyclopedia in the 18th century. The global dictionary doesn't pretend to be either, Mr. Appiah and Mr. Gates say, but instead offers ''an invitation for readers to begin the process of understanding those cultures that most of us educated in the West barely know.''
''We tried in our introduction to be clear that our idea wasn't to identify the basic minimum knowledge needed to be the global citizen of something,'' Mr. Appiah explained, adding that they still got complaints like, ''Why is Jackie Robinson not in here?''
Nevertheless, on the cover, right under the title, the book pronounces itself ''the global citizen's guide to culture, emphasizing the achievement of the non-Western world -- what every American needs to know as we enter the next century.''
Even without that subtitle, however, Mr. Appiah and Mr. Gates are essentially doing what all anthologists do: deciding what does and what does not belong in a given canon. And increasingly, such an undertaking involves contentious debates about race, gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation.
''The true object of this dictionary is to question deep-rooted assumptions of European pre-eminence,'' the critic Frank Kermode said about the global dictionary in The New York Review of Books, ''and let white culture . . . take its proper place, diminished but accorded the measure of respect now thought decent, in a global account that includes all the others.'' The editors' goal, he adds ''is to establish a new and aggressive point of view.''
Eliot Weinberger said his anthology of ''American Poetry Since 1950'' (Marsilio, 1993) became enmeshed in vituperative arguments about who deserved to be included and why. A critique in the American Poetry Review accused him of holding degrading views of African-Americans, he said, because he had selected the work of Amiri Baraka and Langston Hughes, whom the reviewer felt were not representative of African-American writing. To Mr. Weinberger, that such a selection could be labeled racist was like entering a world of ''Alice in Wonderland.'' He added: ''I would certainly never do another anthology. It's a thankless task.''
But David Curzon had a different experience with identity politics. He said he had been irked by political-correctness pressure in assembling his two anthologies of poetry based on such biblical texts as the gospels. ''I found it a little irritating to be asked to think about nonliterary criteria such as the proportion of people of one gender or ethnic origin,'' he said. ''But it turned out not to be a problem. I was pushed by some of these requirements to look further afield than I probably would have, and I think I came up with some interesting poems which I'm glad are in the anthology.''
Of course, identity politics aren't the only politics that can cause problems. In assembling his ''Columbia Anthology of British Poetry'' with Carl Woodring a few years ago, James Shapiro said, ''There were Irish distributors who had the rights who did not want to part with those poems unless we changed the name of the anthology -- they didn't like the idea of British.'' He says that ''every anthology is a political statement or a series of political statements.''
Perhaps because their anthology of world poetry covered so many ethnic groups, Katharine Washburn and John S. Major did not worry so much about multicultural considerations. ''We didn't see this as the United Nations,'' Ms. Washburn said. ''Nevertheless, it turned out to have an extraordinary range of diversity.''
The two editors updated Mark Van Doren's ''Anthology of World Poetry,'' published in 1928. Their volume, ''World Poetry: An Anthology of Verse From Antiquity to Our Time,'' published by W.W. Norton in April, includes more than 1,600 poems spanning a period of 4,000 years from the era of ancient Sumer to the late 20th century.
The book consists of eight chronological parts, from the Bronze Age forward, with each section subdivided by language. (Most of the poems were translated into English for the anthology by other poets.)