I am going to avoid the whole issue of "importance" of figures we see represented in Quizbowl; I've seen the cultural debates before, even entered ito them once, and have no desire to repeat the experience again. Thus, in what I'm about to write I offer NO commentary on how more or less worthy the various people, works, or things who come up are, and whether they DESERVE to be known more than others. The way I see it is this: as Matt Schneller asserted, for a variety of reasons of varying worth, more people know more about traditional subjects. These include, for the most part, emanations from Europe or the Unites States: artists, musicians, literature, kings, battles, treaties, etc. It is just a fact of life that more people are familiar with the works of, say, Dickens, than they are about the works of Senghor; more people know of the deeds of Richard the Lion-Hearted than they do about Sunni Ali. What that means in game terms is that a question on the former examples will be more answerable to more people than questions on the latter. Does this mean that QB should be locked into Europe? By no means. But what it does mean is this: those who shout for canon expansion and multiculturalism should be willing to forfeit their complaints about the difficulty of questions should their wish be granted. Since many of these are people who simultaneously decry both, I ask that you make a choice: do you want easier questions, or canon-expanding ones? It doesn't seem to me that you can have both; and do keep in mind that the canon will expand in all areas, not just your pet field: for every tossup on African dynasties, there will be one on that work of Caribbean literature you've never heard of, or a South American painter you don't know. Which is it? Are questions to be easy, or expansive?
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