Lit in Colour, a campaign launched by Penguin and the Runnymede Trust to diversify English literature, has recently released its five-year progress report. ‘Diversity’ for this campaign doesn’t mean diversity of thought, style, genre, poetic form or historical period, however. It refers to promoting writers on the basis of their BAME (Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic) credentials while insisting that English Literature – cumulatively one of the most staggering achievements in Western civilisation – is too white for the modern classroom.

Is it the job of the curriculum to play catch-up with demographic shifts? Is it the role of literary education to ‘reflect’ the present day, or synthesise history?

As well as prioritising present-day representation over heritage, these initiatives operate on the somewhat patronising premise that ethnic minority pupils living in Britain better relate to literature written by people who share their skin colour – and that BAME authors should be chosen on the basis of identity rather than merit.

Inevitably, intersectionality rears its head: we are assured that ‘while Lit in Colour focuses primarily on connecting students with more Black, Asian and minority ethnic writers, we have been mindful of intersectionality throughout the research process’. Meanwhile, canonical texts must be taught in a way that ‘fully acknowledges and engages with their socio-historical contexts’, specifically the British Empire. One ‘barrier’ to diversity is the fact that UK teachers themselves are ‘overwhelmingly white’, the report writes with an astonishing note of umbrage. As Bernardine Evaristo said in 2015, the campaign aims ‘to redress an education system overwhelmingly delivered through a white filter’.

Despite Lit in Colour working in conjunction with major exam boards across the country, the review indicates a lack of uptake and urges British schools to take action. There appears to be a disconnect between what the exam boards want to be taught in schools and what teachers choose to teach. The proportion of GCSE set texts by BAME authors has increased from 12 per cent to 36 per cent during the five-year campaign, but just under 2 per cent of GCSE students study a full-length book by a BAME writer. Teachers tend to plump for well-established texts – partly because they are important cultural reference points which have stood the test of time, and partly because the teaching sector is overstretched as it is.

Lit in Colour is another iteration of the ideological push we’ve seen to diversify and politicise works of art across the education and culture sector over recent years, especially in the wake of BLM. Typically this means picking texts along the lines of identity, centring race and empire as key themes, and revisiting canonical texts with a double helping of colonial guilt and a readiness to slam ‘Eurocentrism’.

Instead of beauty, technical prowess and heritage, a reductive brand of racial politics has nestled itself at the heart of literature. We’ve seen academics hired by Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust to ‘decolonise’ his legacy and question his status of ‘cultural superiority’ in a relativist attempt to debunk the Bard. Major publishing houses such as Bloomsbury, Penguin and Faber, along with academic publishers, have signed pledges and declarations in favour of ‘diversity’. The most important source of funding for the humanities, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), declares passionately in its mission statement that ‘equality, diversity and inclusion are not optional extras. They are our moral imperatives and must run through everything we do and are’.

And, of course, we’ve seen exam boards axing literary greats in favour of more diverse voices. Take OCR’s decision to cut poems by Hardy, Larkin, Heaney, Owen and Keats in September 2022 – a move that then education secretary Nadhim Zahawi called an ‘act of cultural vandalism’. OCR Chief Executive Jill Duffy explained that the new set of poems ‘demonstrates our ongoing commitment to greater diversity’. Why not excellence or beauty? Living poets now represented are of ‘British-Somali, British-Guyanese and Ukrainian heritage… Of the 15 poets whose work has been added to GCSE English Literature, 14 are poets of colour. Six are Black women, one is of South Asian heritage. Our new poets also include disabled and LGBTQ+ voices.’

Campaigners complain that the school curriculum doesn’t ‘reflect the diversity of modern-day Britain.’ But it’s worth bearing in mind that for the vast majority of its history, England was homogenous – the main reason that the canon is predominantly white is because England was predominantly white. Is it the job of the curriculum to play catch-up with demographic shifts? Moreover, is it the role of literary education to ‘reflect’ the present day, or synthesise history? Literature is a window into the past, a way into understanding our national story and charting the development of culture. By ‘decolonising’ the curriculum, we risk skewing it towards the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The modern fixation on representation is something of a fallacy in any case, given that many of us are drawn to fiction precisely because it takes us out of ourselves. Mapping one’s ‘lived experience’ onto literature is a solipsistic approach – one that downplays the magic of imagination. We bring human emotions to the table, certainly, but why should the syllabus reflect our identity struggles? Aren’t books a transcendent release from the self? We risk losing the more universal appeal of narratives in favour of a narrower ‘inclusivity’.

When I was at school, there was never any suggestion that the non-white girls couldn’t ‘relate’ to white authors – just as I didn’t feel cut off from works by Kazuo Ishiguro, V. S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Wole Soyinka or Chinua Achebe, but judged them on the quality of their output. The idea that my classmate from Hong Kong couldn’t appreciate Shakespeare – or would even be offended by the lack of diverse authors – wouldn’t have occurred to anyone. The proposition would likely have offended her by implying that her group identity would take precedence over individual taste. In fact, many of the international students were sent to the school in order to experience England’s extraordinary cultural inheritance.

We read passages aloud in turn and found ourselves exposed to a strange and exhilarating world: unparalleled beauty of language, emotional depths, intricate characterisation, and exquisite use of imagery. What did I, a teenager at school in the 2010s, have in common with Shakespeare, the Renaissance genius penning the greatest dramas in the English language? As a girl reading Macbeth, how could I ‘relate’ to the eleventh-century Scotsman who found himself locked in an inexorable cycle of ambition and murder? I couldn’t on any material level. And yet I did.

The great joy of reading is imaginative communion – the hand stretched out over history. Identity politics is a crude tool when it comes to understanding literature, even if it masquerades as inclusivity. Lit in Colour should open a book and judge it on its own terms.