Why are the authors overwhelming white, male Europeans or imperialists?
▼European men held greater economic power (colonialism and slavery) and greater freedoms than women, giving them the marge de manœuvre to write literature. As materialists, we must examine the material conditions of literary production. Tolstoy could not have written Anna Karenina if he was one of his peasants he so enjoyed writing about. Plath would never have written The Bell Jar if her parents couldn't afford to send her to Smith College. Perhaps the most poignant quote is from Virginia Woolf herself, as she famously wrote: "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."
While there are outliers, women were systematically excluded from literary circles. It has only been less than a hundred years since Beauvoir and Lorde smashed essentialist ideas about women being biologically inferior to men. Women creating art is not a new phenomenon. But it is an emerging one.
We must note that the subaltern CAN speak. We believe that the Global South and all oppressed peoples are better represented in the film medium (WIP), as literature has turned towards academia in the 20th century.