Session 3 (Friday, Mar. 11th): African Diaspora (Caribbean and North America)
o Greenwood “Translatio studii et imperii: The Manipulation of Latin in Modern Caribbean Literature” in Greenwood (2010) Afro-Greeks: Dialogues between Anglophone Caribbean Literature and Classics in the Twentieth Century
o “Frederick Douglass and The Columbian Orator” in Cook and Tatum (2010) African American Writers and the Classical Tradition
With the reading group “Contested Receptions,” we seek to bring together students and scholars from across the university to discuss some notable social, national, and political receptions of Antiquity in which the place of the Classical has been disputed. The working group is organized mainly around topics that examine classical Africa and its diaspora, the reaction to Martin Bernal’s Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (1987), Classics and abolition in the United States, and the reception of Greek Tragedy in West Africa. One proposed topic, however, slightly extends this scope to exam the use of Aristotelian thought in the 1650 debate at Valladolid over whether not the autochthonous population of the Americas were “natural slaves” or actually lived the good life to a fuller extent than the ancient Greeks and Romans had. Such wide-ranging topics will enable an interdisciplinary conversation and allow us to pose important questions that examine the central questions about the relevance and custodianship of our discipline.
Scholars of antiquity have produced compelling work on all of these topics. Nevertheless, they all remain multifaceted and require a wider perspective in order to be understood in their social, political, historical, and aesthetic complexity. If we wish to discuss meaningfully the role of the Classics in the colonization of the Americas, debates about politics in the contemporary university, discourses of slavery and abolition, postcolonialist literature, or modern stage adaptations we have to start conversations with scholars from Spanish and Portuguese, African American Studies, Philosophy, Sociology, Religious Studies, History, and Comparative Literature to name just a few. This reading group is a modest attempt to begin such conversations.
This working group is open to all members of the Yale community. Please email Ben Jerue to express interest in the group by Monday, January 25. Readings will be circulated before each meeting.