Classicisms in the Black Atlantic (Classical Presences) [Illustrated] 9780198814122, 0198814127

Table of contents :
Cover
Classicisms in the Black Atlantic
Copyright
Preface
Contents
List of Figures
List of Contributors
Introduction
Race, Reception, and Classicisms
A Map of This Work
Charting New Courses
PART I: Wakes
1: Middle Passages: Mediating Classics and Radical Philology in Marlene NourbeSe Philip and Derek Walcott
Introduction
Disiecta membra and Radical Philology in Walcott and Philip
Speaking Bones in Walcott’s Omeros
Marlene NourbeSe Philip: Dismembering the Classics
Rereading the Aeneid: The Canon as Precedent
Conclusion
2: “Nero, the mustard!”: The Ironies of Classical Slave Names in the British Caribbean
3: Athens and Sparta of the New World: The Classical Passions of Santo Domingo
Voices in the Wilderness
The Fleeting Splendor of the Colony
The Dictator’s Classics
“Black to the future”
PART II: Journeys
4: In Search of Henry Alexander Saturnin Hartley, Black Classicist, Clergyman, and Physician
Conclusion
5: Roman Studios: The Black Woman Artist in the Eternal City, from Edmonia Lewis to Carrie Mae Weems
“When and Where I Enter”
Piazza del Popolo—4 Via Fontanella (1866–7)
Death of Cleopatra—8 Vicolo di San Nicolo da Tolentino (1867–c.1882)
Pyramids of Rome—4 Via Venti Settembre (1887)
6: Africana Andromeda: Contemporary Painting and the Classical Black Figure
Reimagining Andromeda
Appendix: Referenced Artworks (Not Illustrated)
PART III: Tales
7: The Tragedy of Aimé Césaire
Césaire’s Mythic Origins
The birth of tragedy in 1956
8: Bernardine Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe: An Account of Roman London from the Black British Perspective
An Unlearning and Re-education of British History
Europe’s African Roots
The Myth of Persephone and the Politics of Gender
The Black Atlantic
Gender in the Ancient World
9: Myth and the Fantastic in the Work of Junot Díaz
The fukú
10: Classics for All?: Liberal Education and the Matter of Black Lives
Classics and an Ancient Blackness
The African, Classics for All, and the Current State of Play
W. E. B. Du Bois: The Veil and the Talented Tenth
#BlackLivesMatter: The Persistence of the Veil, the Problem of the Talented Tenth
Classics for All?
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

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CLASSICAL PRESENCES General Editors  

 . 

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CLASSICAL PRESENCES Attempts to receive the texts, images, and material culture of ancient Greece and Rome inevitably run the risk of appropriating the past in order to authenticate the present. Exploring the ways in which the classical past has been mapped over the centuries allows us to trace the avowal and disavowal of values and identities, old and new. Classical Presences brings the latest scholarship to bear on the contexts, theory, and practice of such use, and abuse, of the classical past.

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Classicisms in the Black Atlantic  

Ian Moyer, Adam Lecznar, and Heidi Morse

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Oxford University Press 2020 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2020 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2019945422 ISBN 978–0–19–881412–2 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198814122.003.0001 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4 YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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Preface This volume of essays has its origins in the “Classicisms in the Black Atlantic” conference, organized by Ian Moyer and Paul Hébert, and held at the University of Michigan on March 14 and 15, 2014. Although the cast of contributors to the volume has changed over time, the stellar presentations and productive discussions at that conference have provided an enduring intellectual stimulus to this project. The contributors to that event were (in order of their appearance in the program) Paolo Asso, Mira Seo, Dan-el Padilla Peralta, Justine McConnell, Emily Greenwood, Margaret Williamson, Michele Valerie Ronnick, Butch Ware, Tracey Walters, Adam Lecznar, and Patrice Rankine. Also participating as session chairs were Amy Pistone and Nick Geller. Hannah Yung provided extraordinary assistance in planning and promotion, and numerous units at the University of Michigan contributed to funding the conference. These include the Contexts for Classics initiative; The College of Literature, Science and the Arts; The Office of the Vice President for Research; The International Institute; The Institute for the Humanities; The Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies; The Department of History; The Department of Comparative Literature; The Modern Greek Program; The Department of Classical Studies; and The Department of Afroamerican and African Studies. In preparing this volume for publication, the editors were grateful to have generous and productive comments from the anonymous readers of the book proposal. Throughout the process, the patience, support, and professionalism of our editor, Georgie Leighton, have been extremely valuable. We would also like to thank Hilary O’Shea and Charlotte Loveridge who steered our proposal through the early stages, the Classical Presences series editors for their support of this project, as well as the excellent production team, led by Bharath Krishnamoorthy. In the final stages, timely, accurate, and efficient copy-editing was provided by Nick Geller and Drew Stanley. Support for the production of the manuscript was provided by the University of Michigan College of Literature, Science and the Arts. Finally, the editors would like to thank all the contributors for their generosity in sharing their insights, and their goodwill and dedication in revising and refining their work at each stage. This volume is a testament to their collaborative efforts.

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Contents List of Figures List of Contributors

ix xi

Introduction Ian Moyer, Adam Lecznar, and Heidi Morse

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Part I. Wakes 1. Middle Passages: Mediating Classics and Radical Philology in Marlene NourbeSe Philip and Derek Walcott

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Emily Greenwood 2. “Nero, the mustard!” The Ironies of Classical Slave Names in the British Caribbean

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Margaret Williamson 3. Athens and Sparta of the New World: The Classical Passions of Santo Domingo

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Dan-el Padilla Peralta

Part II. Journeys 4. In Search of Henry Alexander Saturnin Hartley, Black Classicist, Clergyman, and Physician

119

Michele Valerie Ronnick 5. Roman Studios: The Black Woman Artist in the Eternal City, from Edmonia Lewis to Carrie Mae Weems

133

Heidi Morse 6. Africana Andromeda: Contemporary Painting and the Classical Black Figure

Kimathi Donkor

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Part III. Tales 7. The Tragedy of Aimé Césaire

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Adam Lecznar 8. Bernardine Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe: An Account of Roman London from the Black British Perspective

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Tracey L. Walters 9. Myth and the Fantastic in the Work of Junot Díaz

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Justine McConnell 10. Classics for All? Liberal Education and the Matter of Black Lives

265

Patrice D. Rankine Works Cited Index

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List of Figures 2.1. Johnny Newcome in Love in the West Indies (London, 1808)

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Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

3.1. Statue of Fray Antón de Montesinos, Zona Colonial, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic

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Photo by D. Padilla Peralta.

3.2. April 2016 cover of artundreise magazine. Design: Isabel Yepez.

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Courtesy of Markus Weber on behalf of artundreise.

3.3. Statue group of Las Casas, Lemba, and Enriquillo, Museo del Hombre Dominicano, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic

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Photo by D. Padilla Peralta.

4.1. Photograph reproduced from “Hartley, Henry Alexander Saturnin” in Watson 1986, 301

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5.1. Carrie Mae Weems, When and Where I Enter—Mussolini’s Rome, 2006

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© Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

5.2. Carrie Mae Weems, Piazza del Popolo I—Ancient Rome, 2006

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© Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

5.3. Edmonia Lewis, The Death of Cleopatra, carved 1876, marble

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Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Historical Society of Forest Park, Illinois.

5.4. Carrie Mae Weems, Pyramids of Rome—Ancient Rome, 2006 © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

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6.1. Henry Fehr, The Rescue of Andromeda, 1893. Bronze

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Photographs © Kimathi Donkor, 2011.

6.2. Kimathi Donkor, Study of Fehr’s Rescue of Andromeda (Nos I, II, III & IV)

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© 2011. Graphite on paper.

6.3. (Left) Kimathi Donkor, Andromeda. (Right) Detail of Fehr, Rescue of Andromeda, 1893

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(Left) © 2011. Digital 3D design. (Right) Photograph © Kimathi Donkor, 2011.

6.4. Kimathi Donkor, Andromeda, Nanny, Cetus and Medusa

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© 2011. Digital painting; color image can be viewed at www.kimathidonkor.net.

6.5. Kimathi Donkor, The Rescue of Andromeda

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© 2011. Oil paints on canvas, 120 cm  90 cm; color image can be viewed at www.kimathidonkor.net.

The publisher and the authors apologize for any errors or omissions in the above list. If contacted they will be pleased to rectify these at the earliest opportunity.

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List of Contributors Kimathi Donkor is an artist, curator, and educator based in London, where he was awarded his PhD by Chelsea College of Arts in 2016. His solo and group exhibitions have included The Diaspora Pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale; Some Clarity of Vision (Johannesburg, 2015); Queens of the Undead (London, 2012); the 2010 São Paulo Bienal; Hawkins & Co (Liverpool & Armagh, 2008); and Fall/Uprising (London, 2005). Examples of his work are held in private and public collections around the world, including at the British Museum, the Wolverhampton Art Gallery, the Fondation Sindika Dokolo, and the International Slavery Museum. Emily Greenwood is Professor of Classics at Yale University. She is the author of Thucydides and the Shaping of History (2006) and AfroGreeks: Dialogues between Anglophone Caribbean Literature and Classics in the Twentieth Century (2010). She has published widely on ancient Greek historiography, the adaptation and translation of various Greek authors, black classical traditions, and the broader reception of classical antiquity. Adam Lecznar is currently an Honorary Research Fellow in UCL’s Department of Greek and Latin. Adam has interests across classical reception studies, and he has published on Friedrich Nietzsche’s reception of Plato and Prometheus, the classicism of James Joyce, and the reception of Hesiod. He has taught at UCL, Bristol, Royal Holloway, and Oxford since the submission of his doctorate on Wole Soyinka’s reception of Euripides’ Bacchae in 2013, and is currently completing a monograph called Dionysus after Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy in Twentieth-Century Literature and Thought (under contract with Cambridge University Press). Justine McConnell is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature at King’s College London. She is the author of Black Odysseys: The Homeric Odyssey in the African Diaspora since 1939 (2013) and, with Fiona Macintosh, Performing Epic or Telling Tales (2020). She has also co-edited four volumes: Ancient Slavery and Abolition: From Hobbes to Hollywood (2011), The

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Oxford Handbook of Greek Drama in the Americas (2015), Ancient Greek Myth in World Fiction since 1989 (2016), and Epic Performances from the Middle Ages into the Twenty-First Century (2018). Heidi Morse is a Lecturer at the University of Michigan, where she was a 2014–16 Du Bois-Mandela-Rodney Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies. Her book-in-progress, titled Teaching and Testifying: Black Women’s American Classicism, theorizes a new cultural history of the relationship between classical rhetoric and race in nineteenth-century America. Her articles on American women’s poetry, slave narratives, and African American print and visual culture have appeared or are forthcoming in venues including Comparative Literature, Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, and The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to World Literature. Ian Moyer is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Egypt and the Limits of Hellenism (2011), as well as articles on cultural and intellectual interactions between ancient Greece and Egypt. His other interests include ancient religion and magic, as well as modern receptions of ancient civilizations and cultures. In his current research, he is examining the gates and forecourt areas of Egyptian temples in the Ptolemaic period as sites of cultural and political translation. Dan-el Padilla Peralta is Associate Professor of Classics at Princeton University, where he is affiliated with the programs in Latino Studies and Latin American Studies and the University Center for Human Values. He has co-edited a volume on appropriation in Roman culture for Cambridge University Press (Rome, Empire of Plunder: The Dynamics of Cultural Appropriation [2017]) and publishes regularly on Roman literary and cultural history. His book on state formation and religious practice in fourth- and third-century  Roman Italy is forthcoming in 2020 from Princeton University Press, and a co-authored book on 338  and the beginnings of Roman empire is under contract with Harvard University Press. His 2015 memoir Undocumented: A Dominican Boy’s Odyssey from a Homeless Shelter to Ivy League (Penguin Press) received an Alex Award from the American Library Association. Patrice D. Rankine is Professor of Classics and Dean of the School of Arts & Sciences at the University of Richmond. His groundbreaking

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Ulysses in Black: Ralph Ellison, Classicism, and African American Literature (2006) remains a standard for studying the reception of classics among black authors in the United States. His book, Aristotle and Black Drama: A Theater of Civil Disobedience (2013), and various articles, have also extended this work on race and the classics to performance and theatre. Michele Valerie Ronnick is Professor in the Department of Classical and Modern Languages at Wayne State University. She has been a pioneer in the study of black classics. Her photo installation, “12 Black Classicists,” supported by the Loeb Classical Library Foundation has been displayed over fifty times. Her books include The Autobiography of William Sanders Scarborough: An American Journey from Slavery to Scholarship (2005) and The Works of William Sanders Scarborough: Black Classicist and Race Leader (2006). Her hometown of Sarasota, Florida named March 12, 2005 “Michele Valerie Ronnick Day.” In 2006 she was given a key to the city of Macon, Georgia (Scarborough’s birthplace) and in 2007 she won the Outreach Award from the American Philological Association. Tracey L. Walters is Associate Professor of Literature and Chair of the Department of Africana Studies at Stony Brook University where she also holds an affiliate appointment with the Department of English and Comparative Literature. Dr. Walters publishes and lectures on Black writers and their appropriation of Greco-Roman literature, Black British literature, and African Diasporic Women’s Literature. Her publications include Not Your Mother’s Mammy: The Domestic Worker in Transatlantic Black Media (forthcoming), Zadie Smith Decoded (forthcoming), African American Women and the Classicist Tradition: Black Women Writers from Wheatley to Morrison (2007), Zadie Smith: Critical Essays (2008), and Today’s Writers and Their Works: Zadie Smith (2013). Margaret Williamson is Associate Professor Emerita of Classics and Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College. She is the author of Sappho’s Immortal Daughters (1995), and co-editor, with Sue Blundell, of The Sacred and the Feminine in Ancient Greece (1998). Dr. Williamson has also published numerous articles on subjects related to ancient drama, gender, and classical reception. She is currently writing Creole Classicisms, a book on the cultural politics of classical learning in

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eighteenth- to nineteenth-century Jamaica, with particular reference to the naming of enslaved people. She continues to develop an online database, The Jamaican Slave Names Project (jamaicanslavenames. com), in partnership with the Dartmouth College Digital Humanities Summer Residency program.

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Introduction Ian Moyer, Adam Lecznar, and Heidi Morse

The front cover of Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993a) features Aaron Douglas’s 1944 painting Building More Stately Mansions.¹ This image complements the title by marking Gilroy’s intent to explore not only a historical space of black intellectual and cultural production but also its temporalities and historicities. In a dynamic, layered composition of synthetic cubist forms, Orphist coloring, and Egyptianizing silhouettes, Douglas’s work relates images of African American modernity with a composite past.² In the foreground are figures representing black labor and learning, and facing them is a figure with composite Egyptian and West African features³ directing the gaze of two children toward the ensemble of images. In the near background are architectural emblems of modernity: a steel girder; an apartment block; skyscrapers. Further back there are also premodern forms: a pyramid and sphinx loom largest, but there are also Greek columns, a stupa, a church spire, and a Roman arch. Linking and transecting the moments figured by these forms are transparent concentric circles of layered ¹ Gilroy does not treat Aaron Douglas in the text itself, but he could easily have been an exemplary figure in the visual arts to complement Gilroy’s literary and musical subjects. Douglas is perhaps best known for his work in the United States, but he was closely connected with some of Gilroy’s subjects, such as James Weldon Johnson, and undertook his own transatlantic travels in pursuit of his art (see Knappe 2007). ² On Douglas’s choices in combining modernism with African styles and motifs, see Kirschke 1995; Earle 2007. ³ The silhouette suggests a figure wearing an Egyptian headdress or wig, while the eye is rendered as a narrow slit, evoking the conventions of masks created by the Dan people of Liberia. See Ater 2007, 106, discussing Douglas’s Texas Centennial murals. Ian Moyer, Adam Lecznar, and Heidi Morse, Introduction In: Classicisms in the Black Atlantic. Edited by: Ian Moyer, Adam Lecznar, and Heidi Morse, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/ 9780198814122.003.0001

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color that emanate from a globe standing before the children. The circles suggest a complex, layered past, but they may also portray a layered version of Du Bois’s double consciousness, evoked in Douglas’s creation of a visual relationship between a black present (and future) and pasts that are African, European, American, and even Asian.⁴ As an opening image, the painting foregrounds a continuous argument in the work: Gilroy’s appeal to a more recent, modern history in the Black Atlantic,⁵ a transnational world of circulation and diaspora, violent and voluntary, past and present, in which identities are continually made and remade, and in which black critiques of modernity have emerged that operate both from within and without. This modern, hybrid past that was created in the wake of the Middle Passage is also offered as a counter to the purified, premodern or antimodern pasts on which ethnic and racial absolutes are founded.⁶ Gilroy’s immediate target was the purified pasts of recent and contemporary Afrocentrists, and the traditional classical cultures of Greece and Rome surface only sporadically in The Black Atlantic—usually as allusions in the works of Gilroy’s subjects.⁷ Nevertheless, his central argument can and should be extended to those purified, racialized versions of a hegemonic classical past and its cultural products that have been constructed in and for Western modernity. In that spirit, the ⁴ On double consciousness, a central concept for Gilroy, see Du Bois 1903, 3. For the interpretation of the concentric circles in terms of double consciousness, see Earle 2007, 37. The presence of the stupa is not surprising in the context of engagements by Du Bois and others with the politics and philosophy of Gandhi and other anti-colonial figures (see, e.g. Gilroy 1993a, 144). Of his intentions in Building More Stately Mansions, Douglas himself wrote: “Each generation can and must look back on, face up to, and learn from the greatness, the weaknesses and failures of our past with the firm assurance that the strength and courage certain to arise from such an honest and dutiful approach to our problems will continue to carry us on to new and higher levels of achievement” (Douglas Papers, Fisk University, box 3 folder 17, quoted in Knappe 2007, 218). The title of the painting (originally Build Thee More Stately Mansions) quotes the poem “The Chambered Nautilus” (1858) by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.: “Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, | As the swift seasons roll! | Leave thy low-vaulted past! | Let each new temple, nobler than the last, | Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, | Till thou at length art free.” ⁵ We capitalize “Black” in “Black Atlantic” as part of a proper term and do not intend with this usage to imply an essentialist identity that runs counter to Gilroy’s arguments. We are merely denoting that the term as a whole has developed into a distinct analytic and historical concept. Elsewhere in this volume, some contributors have preferred to follow Gilroy’s original usage of “black Atlantic.” ⁶ Gilroy states this explicitly (1993a, xi, 5), and the argument recurs throughout the whole book. The temporal dimension is addressed most directly in the final chapter (Gilroy 1993a, 187–223). ⁷ Gilroy 1993a, 128, 130, 150, 209–10.

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present volume aims to explore a heterogeneous, plural array of classicisms in the Black Atlantic and set them in motion among the circulating people and artifacts that Gilroy used to construct his celebrated chronotope. The endeavor began with the “Classicisms in the Black Atlantic” conference held at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor on March 14 and 15, 2014, and early versions of most of the contributions were first presented in that context.⁸ The original goals of the conference were relatively modest: to explore the historical circuits and trajectories of African diaspora classicisms and the thinkers and artists who (re)created them. These expectations were far exceeded. The diverse responses of the participants, including the dialogues and debates at the conference, as well as the subsequent process of gathering contributions and bringing new voices into the project, attest to the continuing vitality of the Black Atlantic as a frame in which to engage in a critique and reconstruction of various aspects of modernity—in this case, a singular, monologic vision of classicism as a Western, European tradition, and the complicity at times of such classicism with racism and racialized violence. The choice of the Black Atlantic as a frame for exploring African diaspora engagements with classical cultures has also opened another path to destabilizing the idea of classics-as-tradition from both within and outside. Conferences and volumes such as this typically fall under the burgeoning rubric of classical reception studies. Indeed, the original conference was sponsored by Contexts for Classics at the University of Michigan, a consortium devoted to diverse receptions of classics, and this volume appears in Classical Presences, the pre-eminent series for classical reception studies. The Black Atlantic, however, has a much larger life and legacy outside of classical studies and classical reception studies, and so forms a discursive middle ground accessible to a diversity of voices and formations. Participants in the conference and in this volume have affiliations with the fields of history, classical studies, English, comparative literature, Afroamerican and African studies, and visual arts, and our hope is, of course, that its efforts at engendering dialogues and crossings will reach many more people and fields. This book can be seen as a classical reception of a work that has become a classic itself in only a quarter-century. The Black Atlantic has certainly not been immune to ⁸ Please see the acknowledgments for a list of sponsors, supporters, and participants in the original conference.

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critiques, modifications, and extensions.⁹ Gilroy’s work has been faulted for overemphasizing dislocation at the expense of located experiences and struggles, as well as for taking the primarily British, European, and U.S. contexts that he emphasizes in his particular studies as universal, while excluding or minimally treating Africa (especially southern Africa), Latin America, the Caribbean, and Canada.¹⁰ The treatment of gender, it has been argued, is not substantial enough given the significant issues he raises. And some have argued that he has privileged culture over politics and especially fetishized and aestheticized hybridity, without attending to the national contexts of much political action or to the negative dimensions of the transnational in the context of contemporary global regimes of economic and political power. While this volume cannot hope to address all of these critiques, the various contributions do extend the Black Atlantic in various spatial and thematic directions, while striving to avoid dilution of the concept by retaining a focus on the historical chronotope defined by Gilroy, on black and African diaspora engagements with various classicisms, on the doubleness that these engagements entail, and on issues of race, racism, and racial violence. In this sense, the exploration of classicisms in the Black Atlantic as a transnational chronotope founded on the violence of the Middle Passage and sustained by the crossings and circulations of people, artifacts, texts, and ideas affords several possibilities for classical (re)mediations, as Emily Greenwood points out.¹¹ On a basic level, the classical past and its discourses have served as one element, one medium in a varied discursive and artistic repertoire through which Black Atlantic intellectuals and artists have been able to represent to a wide world their particular modern experiences and conditions. And yet there are obvious tensions in this proposition. On the one hand, there is the often-held assumption that the availability of classicism for reconstructing black pasts, presents, and futures is grounded in its universal humanism. On

⁹ See Evans 2009 for an overview of critiques and developments of Gilroy’s Black Atlantic. For recent works that continue to mobilize the term, especially in explorations of transatlantic religious cultures and communities, see Piot 2001; M’Baye 2003; Gruesser 2005; Lorand Matory 2005; Walters 2013; Joseph and Cleophat 2016; Pérez 2016; Barnes 2017; Branche 2017; Joseph 2017. ¹⁰ See Greenwood in this volume (pp. 30–31), who relates this tendency to Trouillot’s “North Atlantic Universals” (Trouillot 2002). ¹¹ See Greenwood’s contribution in this volume, pp. 29–70.

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the other hand, there is the historical fact that the classical legacies of ancient Greece and Rome have been appropriated by modern European cultures as dominant as they are hegemonic and have been used to buttress civilizational and racial hierarchies, thus making those classical legacies complicit in justifying racial violence. This tension—at the heart of W. E. B. Du Bois’s double consciousness and Gilroy’s Black Atlantic— supplies the basic conditions for several different critiques and remediations of classics and classicism. In the first case, the representation of black experience, especially in the reconstruction and recuperation of histories that have been disrupted through diaspora and dislocation, serves to recover effaced lives, voices, and presences not only in the past of the Black Atlantic but also in the classical texts, images, narratives, and practices through which artists and intellectuals have contended with these disruptions. The poetics of engaging with classical legacies in representing black experiences brings to the surface the black and African presences in the classical past and its cultural legacies. And in ways even more direct and directly related to Gilroy’s example, the practice of tracing the lives and work of individual scholars, writers, and artists who effect these critical recuperations or simply embody the struggles of double consciousness renders visible the black contribution to constructing and reconstructing modern classicism. In this process there is the potential for the remediation of classics and classicism. Indeed this is the basis for our decision to emphasize a plurality of classicisms in this book’s title: it represents an acknowledgment that the reconstruction of classicism(s) entailed in recuperating and representing experiences in the Black Atlantic will be capacious and involve the pasts of Egypt, Ethiopia, West Africa, the Middle East, and other parts of the ancient world. As contradictory as it may sound, classicism is here, in the Black Atlantic, understood as multiple, open, non-canonical, and processual. This reorientation toward the generative power of classicisms is a central aspiration of our work.

Race, Reception, and Classicisms In addition to its deep commitment to the immense fruitfulness of revisiting the conceptual and political agendas of Gilroy’s original work, this volume also exists in a network of texts within classics that have examined the interconnections between the cultural products of the

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ancient Mediterranean and the cultures and literatures of the African diaspora. The Black Atlantic was published in the same year as the nominal ur-text of classical reception, Charles Martindale’s Redeeming the Text (both 1993), making Gilroy’s challenge to Eurocentric narratives of modernity of a similar vintage to Martindale’s challenge to the historicist hegemony over classical studies. Just as Gilroy presents the Black Atlantic as a “counterculture of modernity,” so we might consider the revisioning of ancient worlds under discussion in the present volume, and under the rubric of classical reception studies more generally, to represent a counterculture of antiquity.¹² Read together, these texts represent an injunction to classical reception studies to consider the implication of racial categories in the development of classics as a coherent object of study in Europe and America and across the world: this volume thus builds on the excellent work that has been done in this regard by Emily Greenwood and Barbara Goff on the development of classical education in the Caribbean and West Africa, as well as the work of Tracey Walters, Patrice Rankine, Justine McConnell, and many others.¹³ Most existing discussions of the relationship between classics, classical reception, and issues of race start with the controversy surrounding Martin Bernal’s three-volume Black Athena (1987–2006), with its claims that the racial diversity of ancient Greece and Rome has been ignored by centuries of scholarship: at the 2016 Archaeological Institute of America–Society for Classical Studies (AIA–SCS) conference, this took the form of a panel discussion about the 2011 volume African Athena: New Agendas, edited by Daniel Orrells, Gurminder Bhambra, and Tessa Roynon. There are many retellings of the Black Athena debate in the introductions to recent books on the subject of African, Caribbean, and African American appropriations of ancient Greece and Rome, but it is worth briefly recapping its central points.¹⁴ In the three volumes of his Black Athena project, Bernal provides historiographical, archaeological, and philological arguments that aim at reversing what he considers to be

¹² See Gilroy, who entitled the first chapter of the work as “The Black Atlantic as a Counterculture of Modernity” (1993a, 1–41, esp. 36). ¹³ See n. 25. ¹⁴ See, e.g. Rankine 2006, 67–77; Goff and Simpson 2007, 40–2; Orrells, Bhambra, and Roynon 2011; McConnell 2013, 18–23.

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a concerted effort by classicists to cover up the intellectual and cultural influences from Africa and the Near East on ancient Greek culture.¹⁵ The subtitle to his first volume, “The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785–1985,” makes the polemical aspect of his argument clear.¹⁶ Bernal offers two competing narratives of ancient history: the first he calls the “Ancient Model,” which he argues was prevalent during antiquity itself and which, he argues, suggests that the Greeks considered themselves to be deeply connected to the various cultures that surrounded them.¹⁷ The second narrative he entitles the “Aryan Model,” which he suggests was imposed on ancient Greek history from the eighteenth century onward by German scholars who wanted to view Greece as a racially pure state, untainted by contact with African and Semitic cultures.¹⁸ Gilroy’s Black Atlantic was published just after the first two volumes of the Black Athena trilogy came out (in 1987 and 1991), and whereas its focus was on rereading the past of the Middle Passage as a catalyst for the contemporary experience of a hybrid modernity, Bernal’s work plunged classicists back into a much more distant past as they argued over its controversial retelling of ancient history. The discussions that have emerged more recently around these themes in classical reception studies have been able to marry these perspectives by considering the modern presences—violent, educational, liberatory, and otherwise—of the classics and classicisms in the shaping and reshaping of nations, cultures, and identities.

¹⁵ Van Binsbergen 2011 and Orrells, Bhambra, and Roynon 2011 offer two recent surveys of Bernal’s work and its influence within the discipline of classics, with bibliography. Much of this subsequent discussion of Black Athena is drawn from Lecznar 2014. ¹⁶ For the flashpoints in the debate, see Lefkowitz 1996; Lefkowitz and Maclean Rogers 1996; Bernal 2001. ¹⁷ See Bernal 1987, 1, 84–6. For a critique of Bernal’s reliance on ancient myth as historical source, see Hall 1992. ¹⁸ Bernal 1987, 2: “If I am right in urging the overthrow of the Aryan Model and its replacement by the Revised Ancient one, it will be necessary not only to rethink the fundamental bases of ‘Western Civilization’ but also to recognize the penetration of racism and ‘continental chauvinism’ into all our historiography, or philosophy of writing history. The Ancient Model had no major ‘internal’ deficiencies, or weaknesses in explanatory power. For 18th- and 19th-century Romantics and racists it was simply intolerable for Greece, which was seen not merely as the epitome of Europe but also its pure childhood, to have been the result of the mixture of native Europeans and colonizing Africans and Semites. Therefore, the Ancient Model had to be overthrown and replaced with something more acceptable.” This whole paragraph is italicized in the original.

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One of the major intellectual traditions in which Bernal participates is that of Afrocentrist thought, which includes works like George G. M. James’s Stolen Legacy (1954) and Cheikh Anta Diop’s The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality (1974).¹⁹ Each provides narratives of the ancient past that attribute the prestige usually bestowed on GrecoRoman antiquity to the ancient past of Egypt, and of Africa more generally.²⁰ Within this coterie, there exists an exclusionary dynamic of classicism: the value of the antique past resides either on the coast of Southern Europe or in Northern Africa, and there is no possibility of interaction. This is one iteration of “the overintegrated conceptions of pure and homogenous culture” against which Gilroy wishes to argue: these writers mobilize the discourses of ethnic particularism to rechannel the valorizing forces of the ancient past to the benefit of different racial traditions. But despite Bernal’s connections to this particular way of treating the ancient past, Gilroy invokes Black Athena positively in his work for its historiographical insights: he praises Bernal for uncovering the presence of anti-Semitism and racism in history writing, as well as its ideological inflections.²¹ Nevertheless, the comparison with Black Athena suggests that The Black Atlantic is not just about the recuperation of diasporic narratives and experiences as a means of reconstructing histories of global diaspora. It is also, in Gilroy’s original formation, about carrying out the conceptual dissolution of ethnic and national absolutisms, and replotting the nexus of cause and effect in our understanding of Atlantic history so as to not be cast adrift on the windless waters of an overdetermined historical dialectic between irreconcilable ethnic and national categories. There have been various scholarly works that have explored the intersection of race and antiquity from a similar perspective to that of Bernal, and which have focused on more positivist questions about how much racial diversity there was in ancient Greek and Roman society, and whether or not the ancient Mediterranean past was white or black.²² One of the key responses to Black Athena that has emerged from classical reception studies is the 2011 edited volume African Athena: New

¹⁹ See James 1954; Diop 1974. ²⁰ See further Howe 1998. ²¹ See Gilroy 1993a, 190, 215. ²² See, inter alia, Sherwin-White 1967; Snowden 1970, 1983; Isaac 2004; Bindman and Gates 2010a, 2010b; and McCoskey 2012.

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Agendas. Alongside the decision to change its titular adjective “Black” to “African,” thus shifting its emphasis from racial to geographical difference, it is also striking from the perspective of the present volume for its central deployment of Gilroy’s Black Atlantic as a guiding hermeneutic trope (Gilroy spoke at the conference from which that volume is derived, though he did not contribute an essay). In their introduction, the editors use the example of Gilroy’s work—which foregrounds diaspora—to structure one of their central insights about Bernal: To our knowledge, it is rarely, if ever, noticed that Black Athena also depicts an ancient world in which both a diaspora from the Near East and a diaspora from Africa had already happened. One of the boldest provocations of Bernal’s work has been to collapse the polarity of ancient and modern diasporas into antiquity itself and situate both diasporic movements as having already happened well before the Jewish diaspora of the third century BCE and the African diaspora from the sixteenth century onwards. (Orrells, Roynon, and Bhambra 2011, 8; italics in original)²³

Aside from this constitutive concern with the explanatory power of diaspora, there are other reasons that African Athena forms a significant precursor to the present volume. First, there is some overlap between contributors (including Greenwood, McConnell, and Rankine); second, there are chapters in African Athena that would naturally fit within the present volume and which are of a piece with our concern with how figures from the nineteenth century onward have understood their own modern political and aesthetic projects through classicizing itineraries (examples include J. Mira Seo, who spoke at the original “Classicisms in the Black Atlantic” conference on Juan Latino, the same topic as her contribution to African Athena, and Emily Greenwood’s and John Thieme’s essays on Caribbean poetry).²⁴ Those works that respond to the intersection of race and the ancient world primarily through the prism of Black Athena and its controversies have been complemented in recent studies within classics by others that assume a decidedly more modern perspective. On the one hand, this takes the form of works that are focused on particular authors, texts, or geographical areas and their appropriation of classical models, such as, among others, Patrice Rankine’s work on Ralph Ellison, Tracey Walters’ ²³ See further Orrells, Roynon, and Bhambra 2011, 6–8. ²⁴ See Greenwood 2011; Seo 2011; Thieme 2011.

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work on the presence of classics in the writings of anglophone black women writers from the eighteenth century onward, and Margaret Malamud’s recent study of the African American discourses of slavery and abolition.²⁵ On the other hand, a further set of volumes have focused on understanding the broad-scale historical and cultural trends that have attended responses to the texts and objects of European antiquity in the postcolonial period. These works have drawn on the canonical works of Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Homi Bhabha, among others, to examine the interplay between cultural traditions and voices in the construction of visions of antiquity for the postcolonial world.²⁶ Examples include Classics and Colonialism (2005), edited by Barbara Goff, Classics in Post-Colonial Worlds (2007), edited by Lorna Hardwick and Carol Gillespie, Barbara Goff and Michael Simpson’s Crossroads in the Black Aegean: Oedipus, Antigone, and Dramas of the African Diaspora (2007), and Justine McConnell’s Black Odysseys: The Homeric Odyssey in the African Diaspora since 1939 (2013).²⁷ Although many of these works make use of Gilroy’s central concept of diasporic circulation, they often read the modern history of the classical tradition as one overdetermined by the clash of the colonizer and the colonized. In such a project, the motifs of movement and transmission emphasized by Gilroy allow the works of classical antiquity to escape from the grip of the colonial powers and to take refuge in the hands of the postcolonial activist. These discussions are often attended by the shadow of what has been termed “canonical counter-discourse,” the idea that the appropriation of the texts, objects, and myths of classical Greece and Rome within the dichotomies of colonialism is always necessarily a “writing back” to the hegemonic discourse of the European imperial powers who take these same texts, objects, and myths as some of their most precious cultural assets.²⁸

²⁵ See Rankine 2006; Walters 2007; Cook and Tatum 2010; Greenwood 2010; Goff 2013; Rankine 2013; Roynon 2013; Malamud 2016. ²⁶ See McLeod (2000) 2010 for an introduction to postcolonial thought. ²⁷ See also Hall and Vasunia 2010; Stephens and Vasunia 2010; Riddiford 2013; Vasunia 2013. ²⁸ The term “canonical counter-discourse” was popularized by Tiffin 1987, and the idea of “writing back” by Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin (1989) 2002; for further stages in the development of these theoretical approaches, see Terdiman 1985; Gilbert and Tompkins 1996; Thieme 2001.

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Perhaps the most direct rethinking of the conceptual ambit of the Black Atlantic within classical reception has been Goff and Simpson’s Crossroads in the Black Aegean (2007). In this work, the authors build on Gilroy to devise the concept of the “Black Aegean,” which they describe as: a triangle, projected from within the Black Atlantic and symmetrical with it, but with its third point radiating eastwards so that it links Africa to ancient Greece and Asia Minor as well as to the imperial West. An important advantage of this added construct is that it geometrically incorporates a good deal of the African continent, so that it faces into an eastern as well as a western hemisphere. Unlike the Black Atlantic, as its critics have portrayed it, the Black Aegean recognizes the continuing agency of African cultural production, as it bears on the diaspora, but also acknowledges the diaspora as reciprocally defining the continent. (Goff and Simpson 2007, 38–9)

This description dramatizes the triangular connections that bind together Africa and ancient Greece by focusing on contemporary adaptations of Sophoclean tragedy, particularly the plays involving Oedipus and Antigone, by authors of African origin or descent. The choice of this particular subject matter (including plays like the Nigerian Ola Rotimi’s The Gods Are Not To Blame and Athol Fugard’s The Island) leads to a second theme in the volume, the focus on the dynamics of “oedipal love and hate for the colonizer’s culture” (Goff and Simpson 2007, 59). The Black Aegean thus dismantles the duality of Greece and Africa as different origins of cultural value that is encountered in Bernal and reinstates the very concept of “classical” antiquity as something that is the subject of competition between the colonizer and the colonized. We wish to build on the ground-clearing work of volumes like African Athena and Crossroads in the Black Aegean by showing how the space and temporality of the Black Atlantic wrench the idea of the classical free from its assumed status of belonging to European subjects. As Bernal has shown, the racial and national identity of classicism has always been under debate: but perhaps it is time to consider classicism not simply as an object through which the Manichaean polarities of European or African, white or black, colonizer or colonized are negotiated and understood, but instead to think about its deployment by individual figures with a view to expressing constructively their own futures and hopes rather than always as a source of agonism with immovable and divided inheritances. Finally, to dwell on the title of this volume, Classicisms in the Black Atlantic. This title marks one of its crucial departures from traditional

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approaches to the issue of black classicism, and it deserves some discussion. On the one hand, the decision to incorporate the term “Classicisms” into the title of the work resonates with the disciplinary term “Black Classicism,” as coined by one of the contributors to this volume, Michele Valerie Ronnick, to discover and disseminate examples of how African American writers and scholars used responses to the ancient world in their own writings.²⁹ This attribution is common in works on this subject, as we see in titles like “Black Athena,” “Black Aegean,” “Black Odysseys,” to name but a few.³⁰ Representing an alternative conceptual approach, the present volume explores the possibility of classicism, along with its associated practices and ideologies, existing separately from racial signifiers, as something that can be mobilized by any figure in an attempt to think about any ancient past (in line, perhaps, with the ambivalent dream of “Classics for All” that is to be found in Rankine’s essay at the close of this volume). This responds to the presence of race in Gilroy’s concept: what is “black” about the “Black Atlantic” is the historical event of black bodies being transported across the ocean in the transatlantic slave trade, and it is the generative element of cultural production that Gilroy diagnoses as one of its effects. It is encoded in the racial hierarchies that made possible the brutal violence in the Middle Passage, and which also bequeathed the knotted and inextricable legacy of racial politics and inequality that continues to dominate the twenty-first century.

A Map of This Work The interplay in the metaphorical ambit of the Black Atlantic between intellectual concept and historical space is liquid and free-flowing and so influential, perhaps because of the way in which metaphors of the sea and of sea travel are a deep, unswerving current in the discourse of humanistic research.³¹ In this spirit, we have borrowed from the ²⁹ See Rankine 2006, 13–17, 22–34; see further Ronnick 2005, 2006 for foundational works in this field and Greenwood 2009. ³⁰ See also Madera 2015 and Hickman 2017 for recent works from outside classics on “Black Atlas” and “Black Prometheus.” ³¹ See Bauman 2000 and Marta and Holmes 2017 for the concepts of “liquid modernity” and “liquid antiquity,” as well as Foucault 1986, 27: “the boat has not only been for our civilization . . . the great instrument of economic development . . . but has been

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modalities of Gilroy’s maritime chronotope to structure the volume. The essays are grouped into three parts, corresponding to different aspects of the making and remaking of classicisms in the Black Atlantic: “Wakes,” “Journeys,” and “Tales.” These groupings are in no way intended to exhaust the richness of each contribution, but they provide an initial chart for navigating the diversity of approaches to our common goals. The first part of this work, “Wakes,” takes its name from the wake of a ship, both in its literal sense and as a metaphor for aftermaths and trails of consequences. The title also evokes consciousness and keeping a wakeful watch with the dead.³² This part confronts most directly the implication of classicisms in the racialized violence of the Middle Passage and its continuing aftermath. Any attempt to explore the roles of classical learning and culture in the Black Atlantic must reckon with this legacy. The first three essays thus bring to light three moments in that history of violence. In the first instance, the complicity of modern rationality with the violence of the slave trade often operated under the authoritative banner of classical civilization.³³ The day-to-day violence of slavery itself was often undergirded by a classicizing habitus of racial and civilizational superiority. And among the continuing legacies of these discourses in the Black Atlantic are appeals to racialized visions of the classical in modern politics of nationalism and white identities. In their critical acts of recovery, these essays open up potentials for remediating these histories.

simultaneously the greatest reserve of the imagination. The ship is the heterotopia par excellence.” See also Gilroy (1993a, xiii) for his own turn to maritime epigraphs from the works of Frederick Douglass, Walter Benjamin, and Friedrich Nietzsche. The power of oceanic and maritime frames for restructuring historical studies can be seen in the resurgence of Mediterranean studies. See, e.g. Horden and Purcell 2000, 2006; Harris 2005; Chambers 2008; Broodbank 2013. ³² This title is indebted to Sharpe 2016, who gives a brilliant account of all the dimensions of “wake” in contending with the legacies of the Middle Passage and slavery. It is a harrowing account of being in the wake, but also of wake work as a praxis of struggle with the remnants and ongoing presence of atrocity, in part out of the hope of “re/seeing, re/ inhabiting, and re/imagining the world” (Sharpe 2016, 22). ³³ On the entanglement of racial violence and terror with the failed promises of the Enlightenment and modernity, see Gilroy 1993a, 41–71, 117–24. He argues against modernist universalisms from the perspective of the slave’s experience and the extreme disjuncture of that experience from hegemonic metanarratives about progress toward the fulfilment of modernity. Gilroy does not directly address the role of the classical tradition in supporting slavery, but there is a significant literature on the subject. See, e.g. DuBois 2003, 2010. On the unease and blind spots of early classicists toward slavery, Finley (1980) 1998 is still quite relevant.

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Emily Greenwood’s essay begins the collection with poetic efforts to recover the lost bones and voices of Africans murdered in the forced crossing to the Americas. She examines the pursuit of this historical remediation in the radical philology of Derek Walcott and Marlene NourbeSe Philip. Though differing in many respects, both authors are linked through an intertextual node of Caribbean literature: a deep play with the Latin words os/ossis (bone) and ōs/oris (mouth). These authors have used layered, multilingual etymologies of Latin words and subversive resignifications of ancient epics in order to write their own epics of the mute, the ineffable, and the unspeakable. In the case of Philip’s Zong!, this radical poetic practice extends to anagrammatic deconstructions of authoritative legal decisions and classicizing self-justifications of violence. Through this harrowing intersection of history and poetics in the Black Atlantic, Greenwood sees a path to a revised humanism. Margaret Williamson then examines the practice of giving classical names to slaves in the anglophone world of the Black Atlantic. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the period for which extensive records begin to be available, the division between slave and free names seems to have hardened, and it became routine for slaves, especially males, to be given such high classical names as Caesar, Pompey, Hector, Mars, and Mercury. The memoirs of Thomas Staunton St. Clair provide insight into this violent use of an unstable irony. In the narrative of the masters, the contradiction of a slave named after an emperor could be stabilized only by brute power and a pact of shared social and cultural values between St. Clair and his readers. Williamson finds a subversive counterpoint to this pact in the double-edged sword of cultural and linguistic creolization, and more specifically in “A Deep Sleeper,” a story written at the end of the nineteenth century by the African American writer Charles W. Chesnutt. This story, in which assumptions of white superiority are undercut by the classical knowledge and subterfuges of a subaltern narrator, offers a way to bridge gaps in the archive of slave responses to the violence of naming. Dan-el Padilla Peralta’s chapter follows with an analysis of classicizing discourses fraught with the racial politics of national identities on Hispaniola. He examines two interlocking appropriations of ancient Greece in hispanophone Santo Domingo: first, the praise of Santo Domingo as the “Athens of the New World”; second, the independent Dominican Republic’s reinvention as “Sparta of the New World.” These two

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discourses, he argues, have exerted a powerful subterranean influence on Dominican debates about statehood and race. Padilla Peralta documents how and why nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Dominican intellectuals were motivated to appeal to the figure of Athens in claiming a classically European—and nonblack—legacy. The complementary image of the Dominican Republic as a New World “Sparta” that emerged under the dictatorship of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo was used to reassert a racialized nationalism and to justify policies of genocidal violence against Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent. The chapter traces the continuing force of these discourses in contemporary Dominican politics, calling for greater scholarly engagement with the living presence of ancient Greece and Rome in the construction of Latin American nationalisms. The lives and journeys of individual scholars and artists navigating cultural, political, and aesthetic currents in the wake of Black Atlantic slavery comprise the subject matter of the next section, “Journeys.” In contrast to the forced dislocations of the Middle Passage, many of the journeys narrated in this section are voluntary and multidirectional, constitutive of the trans- and circum-Atlantic network of cultural crossings described by Gilroy. The biographical (and in one case autobiographical) approach to these journeys is also in conversation with Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness as a “twoness”—a sense of “being both inside and outside of the West,” as Gilroy (1993a, 30) puts it—that can only be fully understood by the person living that felt sense of contradiction. From a classical scholar’s itinerant career up and down the Atlantic seaboard to the Roman residencies of two black American artists, to the meditations of a contemporary British artist on the place of blackness in classical mythology and Western art history, these contributions highlight the felt impact of Black Atlantic journeys, as well as their historical and cultural underpinnings. By emphasizing migrations and circulations of people in the fullness of their lived experiences and intellectual and artistic journeys, instead of only via their texts, artworks, or other cultural productions, these essays remind readers of the visceral, embodied effects and outcomes of geographical (dis)location and cultural affiliation—in other words, the human impact of slavery’s aftermaths. Michele Valerie Ronnick’s essay examines the varied career and geographical peregrinations of Henry Alexander Saturnin Hartley, a nineteenth-century Trinidadian-American-Canadian classical scholar who was a champion for civil rights, temperance, and education. In all

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of the communities he lived in, from his hometown Port of Spain to his chosen circle of black church members and social reformers in St. John, New Brunswick, Hartley cultivated a life and a calling inflected by African, Greco-Roman, Anglican, and Catholic influences. Notable among his achievements were his frequent defenses against racist invectives and character malignment in local newspapers, as well as his classical scholarship. Written just eight years after William Sanders Scarborough’s textbook First Lessons in Greek (1881), Hartley’s Classical Translations (1889) was the first book of classical translations to be published by a person of African descent in the western hemisphere. From a range of sources including newspapers, letters, and Hartley’s 1890 memoir, Ronnick restores to contemporary readers a life lived with conviction amid the turbulent culture and politics of the fin de siècle Atlantic seaboard. Moving from Caribbean-Canadian migrations to the geographical and conceptual spaces of Black Europe, Heidi Morse traces resonances between two parallel transatlantic journeys of African American women artists to Rome and their on-the-ground confrontations of white, male-dominated narratives of Western art history. Juxtaposing nineteenth-century neoclassical sculptor Edmonia Lewis’s white marble masterpiece Death of Cleopatra (1876) with black-and-white photographs of Roman architecture in Carrie Mae Weems’s Roaming (2006), Morse examines both women’s reclamations of ancient African material and cultural presences in the built environment of Rome—including Egyptian obelisks and Nubian-style pyramids—as well as the black feminist genealogies that inspire their work. Woven into these Plutarchian parallel “lives” is compelling evidence of black women making space for themselves and their chosen communities not only in the present but also in modern perceptions of the classical past. From the Augustan imperial era to twenty-first-century migrations, Lewis’s and Weems’s visual classicisms feature a “Black Rome” that is and always has been part of the multiracial history of the Mediterranean world and more recently the Black Atlantic. Visual art takes center stage again in the next essay as contemporary British artist Kimathi Donkor narrates his own intellectual and aesthetic journey to becoming the first known artist of African descent to depict a “defiantly black Andromeda” (p. 190). Parallel to Donkor’s journey is the journey of Andromeda through Western art history. Donkor’s digital painting Andromeda, Nanny, Cetus and Medusa (2011) revises key

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components of Henry Fehr’s bronze sculpture The Rescue of Andromeda (1893), while his oil painting The Rescue of Andromeda (2011) features a British woman of Nigerian descent as a modern figure for the Ethiopian princess. The paintings, together with the stories behind them, offer a studio artist’s response to debates over race in the ancient Mediterranean world by authors ranging from Ovid and pseudo-Apollodorus to Frantz Fanon, Martin Bernal, Cheikh Anta Diop, and Frank M. Snowden, Jr. Through experimental “Unmasked Africana”—Donkor’s term for visual art that reinterprets previously “masked” African narratives or influences in Western art history—a black British artist highlights diasporic narratives of migration and postcolonial resistance through the lens of classical mythology. The third and final section of essays is entitled “Tales” and is devoted to stories that have circulated in the Black Atlantic and to understanding how literature, art, and narrative have influenced modern understandings of the aftermath of the transatlantic slave trade and its repercussions. In this section the authors explore the ongoing resonances of the kinds of historical and artistic reconstruction that we have seen explored in other sections of the volume, and the way that these have been transformed in their retelling into a form of collective consciousness. It is a building block of communal identity and forms a resource of shared experience constructed around certain historical and mythological events; but it is also a way of drawing out specific individuals and specific events from the past as symbolic representations of what is at stake in the telling of history. The tale is the afterlife of past journeys, and the specter of future odysseys: it teaches as it inspires and warns, and in their totality these three examples offer a way of understanding how the history of the Black Atlantic is subject both to sudden squalls and deep currents, to traumatic dislocation and enduring solidarity. It is also striking that in each chapter the mode of classicism under discussion is not one that relies on clear equivalence to an ancient text or object: it is rather forms, allusions, and reconstructions that represent the appeals to European antiquity. These more fluid recuperations from the past allow for a greater deal of freedom on the part of the writers, and for this volume to consider the reception of the Greco-Roman classics as just one element of a more capacious concept of classicism. In his chapter Adam Lecznar examines how the Martinican writer and politician Aimé Césaire deployed the dramatic genre of tragedy to tell a particular story

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of black history to his audience. The chapter charts the development of Césaire’s artistic work as he shifts from the monologic narrative of his epic poem Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1939), in which black identity is figured as a concept that needs to be forged heroically by a Promethean individual, to his 1963 play Le tragédie du roi Christophe (The Tragedy of King Christopher), in which the tragic limitations of this model are dramatized. At stake here are the multiple possibilities for telling the history of the Haitian revolution, a central event in the history of the Black Atlantic, both as a myth of emancipation from slavery and as a lesson in the tragic difficulties of establishing a stable political system in the aftermath of revolution. The next essay by Tracey L. Walters examines a different type of historical reconstruction, this time focusing on the presence of racial difference in Roman Britain. Here Walters examines the speculative reconstructive classicism to be found in the work of the British-Nigerian novelist Bernardine Evaristo, and in particular her 2006 verse novel The Emperor’s Babe. This novel explores the presence of black people in Roman Britain (including fictional reconstructions, like the protagonist Zuleika, of Sudanese origins, and historical figures such as the Emperor Septimius Severus, who was born in Leptis Magna in present-day Libya and died in York). Walters’ essay explores how the literary doubling of ancient and modern London in voices and narratives reshapes both primordialist and imperialist visions of British identity, and how Evaristo’s poetic classicism translates the British intersections of gender and race into a historical past shaped by a cosmopolitan mythography. The last essay of the section, by Justine McConnell, examines the diasporic historical networks that thread through the creative fiction of Dominican-American writer Junot Díaz. This essay explores the way that classicism offers one mode of engagement with its fractured historical legacy in Díaz’s oeuvre, especially Drown and The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, alongside the competing discourses of science fiction and magical realism. McConnell charts the dialogue between the various creative and temporal registers of these creative modes, setting out their rich intermingling in the story world of Díaz’s fiction. While demonstrating that Díaz’s works are illuminating sites of classical reception that have not yet been explored by classicists, McConnell considers these classicisms as part of an interconnected, transnational network of the Black Atlantic.

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Finally, the volume concludes with a series of urgent reflections by Patrice D. Rankine, “Classics for All? Liberal Education and the Matter of Black Lives.” Here Rankine delivers a trenchant wake-up call to those who would unquestioningly champion the democratic and beneficial elements of classical learning at the expense of reflecting on how its values can and must adapt when seen in the light of the Black Atlantic. Writing from an avowedly American and often autobiographical perspective, this essay shifts fluidly and powerfully between treating the symbolic resonance of the American presidency (and its contemporary invocation by classicists of color in discussions of ancient and modern tyrannies) and examining the examples of Black Lives Matter, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Jay-Z. This final essay culminates the volume by considering classicism at the intersection of the ancient and the modern, the historical and the contemporary, the individual and the collective, providing an intervention that combines political and social intensity in its meditation on the present situation with a constant excavation of the desire for a cohesive past.

Charting New Courses As the 2014 conference, and then the present volume, began to come together, themes emerged out of the contributions that concretized, as well as transformed, the original call for papers. Far from being only a conceptual anchor, the Black Atlantic became a dynamic catalyst for naming and historicizing transtemporal, multilingual, and migrating embodiments and expressions of a plurality of classicisms. While the tripartite structure of “Wakes,” “Journeys,” and “Tales” scaffolds a constructive initial set of associations between the enclosed essays, we encourage readers to pursue alternative threads and relationships between them, especially those that link out beyond singular fields and subspecialties to embrace the historical, lived hybridity of “Classicisms in the Black Atlantic.” Some of these emerging threads offer expansions or responses to critiques that have been levelled against Gilroy, whereas others signal important new directions in classical reception studies; some, of course, do both. First of all, in a significant expansion on Gilroy’s predominantly anglophone conceptualization of the Black Atlantic, the essays in this volume document a robustly multilingual Black Atlantic world that

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crisscrosses geographic, linguistic, and temporal borders. The emphasis on hispanophone and francophone classical receptions in the essays by Padilla Peralta, McConnell, and Lecznar situates emerging scholarship in these subfields as central to the study of classical receptions in modernity.³⁴ At the same time, Greenwood’s and Walters’ focus on radical, experimental poetics by a Caribbean-Canadian and BritishNigerian woman poet, respectively, signals an attentiveness to how traditional classical philology intersects with—and is transformed by— postcolonial theories of creolization and linguistic hybridity, particularly when one of the creolized languages is Latin or ancient Greek. Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe, which Walters describes as written in a “hybridized fusion of creolized Latin, Jamaican patois, contemporary urban slang, and standard English” (p. 234), exemplifies the transtemporal linguistic adaptations (from contemporary London to Roman Londinium and back again) that animate Black Atlantic imaginaries. Meanwhile, Greenwood’s study of “radical philology” in Walcott’s Omeros and Philip’s Zong! documents their “remastering” (p. 56) of the classics via hybridized etymologies, neologisms, anagrams, and fragmentations. These two essays, like others in the volume, also feature a significant emphasis on themes of gender, sexuality, and black embodiment, an intervention which complicates Gilroy’s centering of male figures, such as Martin Delany, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Richard Wright. As Walters points out, the fictional character Zuleika in The Emperor’s Babe, a daughter of Sudanese immigrants coming of age in third-century Londinium, exemplifies the intersectional lived experiences that comprise the historical, contemporary, and speculative resonances of the Black Atlantic. Like the British-Nigerian model in Donkor’s The Rescue of Andromeda, Zuleika migrates through time, space, and cultural imaginaries, blending the politics and idioms of contemporary black Britain with classical history and mythology. Carrie Mae Weems, one of the artists featured in Morse’s essay, takes on a similar project by presenting her photographs in Roaming as portals between black Roman antiquity and modernity. From Donkor’s and Morse’s focus on black women artists and black women in art to Greenwood’s and Walters’ centering ³⁴ A notable example of the expanding field of hispanophone, francophone, and lusophone classical reception studies is Rizo and Henry 2016a. For a comprehensive summary of hispanophone classical receptions, see Padilla Peralta in this volume, p. 80.

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of contemporary black feminist writers and black radical aesthetics, the volume offers a vibrant account of gender and sexuality in the Black Atlantic. Building on these themes of embodiment and intersectionality, and as a complement to Gilroy’s suggestion of the transnational cultural value of music, visual arts emerge in this volume as another medium besides literature which grapples with the role of classicisms in negotiating, commemorating, and remediating slavery’s aftermaths in the Black Atlantic. The very tangibility of visual and material classical presences underscores the importance of investigating their influence. Visual classicisms have the capacity to confront (or reinforce) hegemonic cultural and geographic spaces head-on in a manner that is perceptible and accessible to a wide audience. From Aaron Douglas’s Building More Stately Mansions, discussed above, to Romare Bearden’s Black Odyssey (1977), to French-Togolese artist William Adjété Wilson’s L’Océan Noir, The Black Ocean, O Oceano Negro (2009), the visual arts are rich in black (re)interpretations and hybridizations of the Middle Passage, epic journeys, and diasporic identities. Morse’s and Donkor’s essays in this volume delve into classical and modern art history to examine depictions of race and antiquity in visual art, to counter hegemonic, whitedominated narratives surrounding contested historical and mythological figures like Cleopatra and Andromeda, and to identify submerged African and multicultural presences in cultural and geographic spaces from the streets of Rome to the British collection in London’s Tate Gallery. The relentless and ongoing effacement of black historical (as well as contemporary) presences and experiences in Europe—which, not coincidentally, runs parallel to fabricated claims of the supposed white, European classical inheritance—finds an answer in black visual art through the adamant affirmation of the antiquity of Africa’s pull on the continent. Essays in this volume that analyze literary texts consistently set aside reception studies’ traditional emphasis on adaptation—often taking the form of a one-to-one comparison of ancient and modern texts—in favor of examining the role of classicisms in the dynamic interplay of genre, history, and identity in Black Atlantic narratives. Analysis of the tensions and intersections among historical, biographical, genealogical, and speculative affiliations with the classical tradition exposes the constructed nature of identity-based ideologies of classical inheritance

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(that is, the classics as belonging to white Europeans), and widens the conversation to include cultural narratives of chosen affiliation. One such chosen genealogy is that framed by Ronnick in her recovery of the nineteenth-century classicist Henry Alexander Saturnin Hartley as an intellectual predecessor to fellow Trinidadians C. L. R. James, George Padmore, and Eric Williams. In another vein, Padilla Peralta’s essay on the racialized classicizing project of Dominican nation-building illustrates the potential violence of ideologies of classical inheritance, no matter who wields them. Among the essays focusing on literary works—and here the island of Hispaniola is a shared focal point with Padilla Peralta and McConnell—Lecznar’s study of Haitian history as depicted in Césaire’s Le tragédie du roi Christophe presents the genre of tragedy as a form for the historical, or in other words as a way of understanding constructions of temporality (and race) in the Black Atlantic. McConnell’s essay, too, shows how in the epic theme of a quest for home—which she argues in Díaz’s fiction is emphatically “not a nostos” (p. 257)—classicisms are enlisted in building alternative genealogies, pasts, and futures in Dominican and indeed Caribbean diasporic imaginaries. A final theme that emerges in several essays, and which we add to this snapshot of cutting-edge topics in classical reception scholarship, is the idea of names and naming as sites of contestation that race and the classics swirl around, from historical and contemporary individuals (named and unnamed) to nations to cultural and political affiliations. At the core of this theme is the reality of the violent loss of names, identities, and lives during transatlantic slavery, as well as the power of naming in commemorating those lives—a fact attested in the footnotes of Philip’s Zong!, which list names from Modupe Oduyoye’s Yoruba Names (1972) as a hauntological/epitaphical counterpoint to their violent absence in the “archive of slavery” (Hartman 2008, 6). While Greenwood explores naming in the Black Atlantic vis-à-vis Philip’s “radical philology,” Williamson addresses head-on the violent mobilization of classical names and references in her historical analysis of slave naming practices in the British Caribbean. For Williamson, classical naming is about power dynamics, as well as the inherent possibility of reversing those dynamics when knowing the classical reference no longer guarantees cultural dominance. Classical names—particularly as nicknames, symbols, and analogies—occur again and again in the history of

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the Black Atlantic, as well as in the pages of this volume, as vehicles for social control (Williamson), as a mode of carving out national identities (Padilla Peralta), and as a form of shorthand in sociopolitical commentary, as in recent comparisons between historical and contemporary figures, such as Donald Trump as Julius Caesar (Rankine). Finally, over and over again this volume’s contributing authors contextualize their scholarly investigations in the present politics of racism and antiracism in the age of Black Lives Matter, Brexit, Trump, the DACA repeal, and the rise of the so-called alt-right. Rankine’s concluding essay is a call to classical reception scholars to recognize a more urgent agenda in scholarship and public discourse on these topics. Whereas his 2014 conference paper offered readings of “subterranean” classical influences in works by African American playwrights Suzan-Lori Parks and August Wilson, his revision for the published volume has followed these traces into contemporary politics, probing the limits and possibilities of “Classics for All” in a world reeling from the ongoing (and intensifying) racialized violence of police brutality, anti-immigration policies, and mass incarceration—all part of the long shadow of transatlantic slavery. Another contribution of this volume, therefore, is its preliminary indexing of a diverse range of approaches scholars of classical reception have taken to combat racist discourse, both via traditional scholarship as well as in more public forums, from Twitter and the blogosphere to university campuses. For scholars located in the U.S. and the U.K., in particular, the difference between 2014 and 2019 in terms of national climate is striking. In March of 2014, when the original “Classicisms in the Black Atlantic” conference was held at the University of Michigan, Barack Obama was still president, DACA was in effect, and the Black Lives Matter movement begun in 2013 by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi had not yet reached international attention, as it would in August 2014 during protests following the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. In the UK, the 2016 referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union was still only a re-election promise by David Cameron, and the combined impact of the backlash-fueled rise of the alt-right on politics and daily life on both sides of the Atlantic had not yet been fully felt. The cultural role of the classics in negotiations of contemporary politics has emerged starkly in recent examples of conflict over the racial and ethnic makeup of the ancient Mediterranean world. While classicists

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and historians have increasingly investigated diversity in the ancient world and duly documented the limits of transposing questions of race—as it is understood in modernity—backward onto antiquity, proponents of far-right ideology have interpreted these efforts as ignoring history in order to push a politically correct agenda. In the summer of 2017, when the BBC ran a cartoon featuring a black soldier and his family in Roman Britain, an alt-right commentator complained that “the left is literally trying to rewrite history to pretend Britain always had mass immigration” (Watson 2017). In the ensuing Twitterstorm, British classicist Mary Beard stepped in to explain that “the BBC character was loosely based (with a bit of a chronological shift) on Quintus Lollius Urbicus, a man from what is now Algeria, who became governor of Britain” (Beard 2017). Like her U.S. colleague Sarah Bond, who received death threats for her article about polychromy in ancient sculpture,³⁵ Beard was targeted on social media by detractors who insulted her age, gender, and weight, as well as her scholarly credentials. The vitriol of such attacks—in this case against two white women—underscores the urgency of supporting the voices of historically marginalized classicists who are willing to pursue scholarship in multicultural classical receptions despite public outcry and threats of violence, not to mention the potential detriment to the advancement of their professional careers. Institutions, departments, and professional organizations can and should support individual scholarship as well as public forums on these topics. A few examples illustrate the possibilities for such support, but also the continual and pressing need to pursue such efforts in the face of hostility and complacency. In January 2017, three years after the “Classicisms in the Black Atlantic” conference, the Department of Classical Studies at the University of Michigan hosted a Teach-In to respond to a series of racist posters that had rocked the campus community the previous fall, as well as to make space for public dialogue about Classics, race, and racism. Presenters at the Teach-In took the opportunity to contextualize and denounce white supremacists’ fascination with a monolithic version of classical antiquity, including the whiteness of recovered sculptures.³⁶

³⁵ See Bond 2017; “Classicist Receives Death Threats from Alt-Right over Art Historical Essay” 2017. ³⁶ Four speakers discussed the topic from subdisciplinary perspectives of linguistics, history, archaeology, and critical race studies. See also Morse 2018.

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A self-proclaimed local member of a white supremacist group attended the event and challenged the scholarship, but he was met with clear explanations and firm resistance from a room full of classicists, scholars, and community members. Two years later, similar issues surfaced at the 2019 meeting of the Society for Classical Studies. In the discussion period of a session on the “Future of the Classics” that highlighted equity and diversity issues, controversy erupted when an attendee invoked a conservative, Eurocentric vision of Classics in order to dispute the necessity of redressing historical and ongoing inequalities in the field, and made her argument in the form of a direct personal attack on a black panelist (and contributor to this volume). This event exposed—at least for those not already aware of it—the alarming presence of racism at the meeting and in the field at large, and it can only be hoped that these moments will result in intensified scrutiny and action on the part of organizations like the Society for Classical Studies.³⁷ It is important that professional organizations, publishers, universities, and departments mobilize disciplinary expertise to dispute racist versions of the classics that circulate in the public sphere, and create spaces for the continued attention and self-reflection that are necessary for broader change in the discipline. Examples of the positive results of such leadership have already become apparent. A conference titled “Racing the Classics,” organized by Dan-el Padilla Peralta and SashaMae Eccleston and held at Princeton University in March 2018, was a generative initiative in ongoing efforts to support emerging scholars and scholarship in multicultural classical reception studies.³⁸ Organized as a workshop in order to maximize opportunity for multidisciplinary conversation, field reassessment, and mutual support, the two-day conference will surely join the “African Athena” and “Classicisms in the Black

³⁷ The incident and the aftermath have been documented and discussed extensively. The most cogent articulation of what an event like this means for a black scholar in classics comes from Dan-el Padilla Peralta himself. See Padilla Peralta 2019. Video of the entire panel discussion, which included important insights into problems of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the profession and discipline of classical studies, was made available by the Society for Classical Studies (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcJZCVemn-4). ³⁸ In the UK, a similar event was organized by a group of early career scholars at the University of Reading in June 2018, titled “Decolonising Classics and Medieval Studies: Opportunities, Priorities, and Challenges.” The conference prospectus invited collaborative examination of “the question of what ‘decolonisation’ might mean for the study of the premodern world.”

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Atlantic” conferences as intellectual touchstones for the future of classical receptions and of classical studies itself. International as well as local initiatives such as these remind both participants and the general public of the urgency of deconstructing the tacit exclusions of universalizing formulations of the classics and of foregrounding the study of race and ethnicity—in all their complexities—in the ancient world, in classical receptions, and in the various communities engaged in these intellectual and academic pursuits. Given the fractured history of repeated misappropriations of classical imagery in the service of racism and white supremacy, we believe that it is vital and urgent for scholars of classical reception studies (and their allies) to draw on our collective interdisciplinary resources to historicize, contextualize, and counter white supremacist propaganda, as well as to document a multilayered history of non-universalizing classicisms in transatlantic modernity. Gilroy’s arguments against essentialism, and his insistence on the cultural hybridity of the Black Atlantic, continue to resonate as a deep historical framework from which to theorize new classicisms in the Black Atlantic.

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PART I

Wakes

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1 Middle Passages Mediating Classics and Radical Philology in Marlene NourbeSe Philip and Derek Walcott Emily Greenwood

Introduction In the literature of the Black Atlantic, the Middle Passage is blank space, archival lacuna, silent noise, the story written on water, the underwater epic, the tale that cannot and yet must be told: both disnarrated and dysnarrated.¹ To use a metaphor suggested by Tobias Döring, it is also an intertextual passage, which attempts to conjoin literatures and oral traditions that sometimes pull apart (Döring 1998). This chapter explores the use of Greek and Latin classical texts and figures within the historical and representational space of the Middle Passage.² These texts become middle passages, passages used to mediate between different poles of history. Rather than the center, or originary source, these ¹ See Smith 2008; Shockley 2011; Sharpe 2016, 33, on “the dysgraphia of the wake.” ² My conception of the Middle Passage here is indebted to the concept of an “extended Middle Passage” put forward by Diedrich, Gates, and Pederson in their volume on Middle Passage sensibility and the black imagination (1999, 10): “The extended Middle Passage, with localized cultural webs of signification that form the generic metaphor of this volume, mediates within the discipline of history and literature by arguing beyond essentialism to cross-cultural hybridization, attempting to blur the boundaries between history and fiction by using symbolic practices to undermine historical linearity.”

Emily Greenwood, Middle Passages: Mediating Classics and Radical Philology in Marlene NourbeSe Philip and Derek Walcott. In: Classicisms in the Black Atlantic. Edited by: Ian Moyer, Adam Lecznar, and Heidi Morse, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198814122.003.0002

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adapted classical texts are always at sea, constantly trafficked on the currents of history. As such, these middle passages reflect the extended Middle Passage as a site of memory rooted in translation and crisscrossing vectors. As Christina Sharpe has suggested, recent scholarship on the Black Atlantic as queer Atlantic calls attention to the underlying phenomenon of the Black Atlantic as Trans Atlantic: in excess of and at variance with received histories.³ In approaching responses to Greek and Roman classics in Caribbean literature through the prism of middle passages, I take the realization that there are no unmediated classics as a given. The phrase “mediating classics” in my title is intended in two senses, which represent two important strands of Black Atlantic classical receptions. In the first sense, “mediating classics” are vectors—classical myths and/or texts that serve to mediate and disseminate Black Atlantic experience. In the second sense, “mediating classics” is the action of tempering or reconciling received ideas of classical texts—of remediating them, as it were. Black Atlantic works that consciously remediate classical myths/texts are selfconscious revisions that are inescapably divided works: they preserve the antithetical idea of the classic as a Western form or possession while at the same time exposing the contingency of hegemonic classical traditions. My framework is indebted to Paul Gilroy’s analysis of black countercultures of modernity in the circum-Atlantic in The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Gilroy 1993a), but the privileging of anachronistic Greek and Roman cultures has the potential to sidestep some of the pitfalls of the Black Atlantic as a heuristic, particularly its ineluctable dependence on “North Atlantic Universals,” to use a phrase associated with the historical anthropology of Michel-Rolph Trouillot.⁴ In Trouillot’s definition, “North Atlantic universals” are “words that project the North Atlantic experience on a universal scale that they themselves helped to create” (2002, 847). Alternatively phrased, they are “particulars that have gained a degree of universality” (Trouillot 2002, 847), or “prescriptive universals” (848). As Trouillot elaborated subsequently, these universals perpetuate a Western geography of the imagination in which the West is the universal unmarked (Trouillot 2003). Within ³ Sharpe 2016, 30, responding to Tinsley 2008. ⁴ In 2002 Trouillot published an article entitled “North Atlantic Universals: Analytic Fictions, 1492–1945,” which was included in revised form in Trouillot 2003.

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classics, Goff and Simpson have proposed “the black Aegean” as a necessary supplement to Gilroy’s Black Atlantic, both as a way of getting at the chronological and historical depth of the history that underlies the history of the Black Atlantic and as a way of talking about the ancient Mediterranean in a context in which it is not absorbed into a European or North American tradition (2007, 38–9). The black Aegean opens up a zone of translatability within which the particularity of Greek and Roman texts emerges through adaptation and reception, as something more than the Western appropriations through and by which they have been mediated. As Martindale has suggested in the context of a discussion about the role of Classics in helping to define “A New Humanism” (2013, 18): We cannot know the past as it really was, but illumination can come from the friction between different historical moments in our aesthetic perception of, our receptivity to, different objects from the past. That is why the humanist credo “nothing human is alien from me” precisely need not entail belief in a universal human nature.

The friction that Martindale refers to is evident in the dismembering of classical texts as objects from the past to bear witness to the bones of the anonymized men, women, and children, being transported as property, as objects, who were killed during the Middle Passage. The decision to relate the two—the classical tradition and the Middle Passage—entails a revisionist humanism, giving the lie to a version of humanism that has excluded the black experience of the Middle Passage.

Disiecta membra and Radical Philology in Walcott and Philip Within the broader context of the Middle Passage as a zone of translation based on the physical transportation and translation of bodies—from subjects to enslaved, from African to black—this chapter examines the creative and inventive use of classical texts as mediating middle passages in the work of Derek Walcott (1930–2017) and Marlene NourbeSe Philip (b. 1947). While fully aware of the appropriation of classical texts as “master” texts to birth injurious histories in the New World, Walcott and Philip use Greek and Latin classical philology as a tool for resistance and radical rewriting to lend authority to new tales that bear ironic archaeocolonial witness to the wounds of modern history. In distinct but

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comparable ways, Walcott and Philip have realized the expressive potential in reassembling the figurative, scattered limbs (membra) of the corpus of classical literature for salvaging the figurative bones of the Middle Passage.⁵ Always present as a symbol of history that continues to haunt the present, bones have become an increasingly prominent trope in fiction of the Black Atlantic (chiefly in the Caribbean and North America).⁶ Bones are the organizing schema—the skeleton—of Marlene NourbeSe Philip’s 2008 collection Zong!, which features two bones and a joint on the cover and the first movement (of seven) of which is titled “Os” (bone in Latin).⁷ The hauntological interest of contemporary black literature is epitomized by Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), and has been theorized afresh in Christina Sharpe’s study In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016).⁸ Bones are also present in the study of radical black aesthetics with which Sharpe’s study rhymes, Fred Moten’s In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (2003), in which bones are part of the underground, broken spiritual inheritance to be accessed by “bone-deep” listening to artists such as Duke Ellington. Bones are also implied in Moten’s governing metaphor of the break, the deeper subcutaneous rift in the history of blackness. In both Philip’s conception of Zong! as “a wake of sorts” (2008, 201) and Sharpe’s subsequent formulation of “wake work” (2016, 13) as a form of radical black consciousness—in which

⁵ The adjective “figurative” is purposeful here; there is no suggestion in Walcott or Philip that the lacuna of the Middle Passage can be filled, or that the ruptures of history can be smoothed over. Instead, both poets emphasize the importance of narration and witness. In Philip’s poetry this has increasingly taken the form of disnarration (also dysnarration)— what Reed (2014, 28) describes as a “broken witness”; see also Shockley 2011, 806. ⁶ As Smith notes (2008, 426), Robert Hayden’s poem “Middle Passage” (1962)—the first version of which was published in the journal Phylon in 1944—is an important precursor to the hauntological representation of the Middle Passage in the Black Atlantic. In Hayden’s poem bones occur twice: in the image of the slave trader’s bones, afflicted by fever (“fevers melting down my bones”), and in a rewriting of Ariel’s song in The Tempest (I.2.395–7): “Deep in the festering hold thy father lies, | of his bones New England pews are made, | those are altar lights that were his eye” (italics in Hayden). On the chronology and publication of Hayden’s poem, see Charras 1999, 57. ⁷ Bones are also prominent in the title, conception, and memory work of Dionne Brand’s collection Ossuaries (2010). ⁸ The hauntological imagination of Morrison’s Beloved is analyzed in chapter 4 of Gordon 2008 (first published in 1997), which points out the importance of the evidentiary work of cultural memory for sociological research. Derrida 1994 informs both Gordon and Philip (see Philip 2008, 202); see also n. 44.

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being in the wake is premised on mourning and the wake of slave ships— bones testify to beings reduced to objects, and must be gathered and recovered in the rediscovery of subjects. As an echo to Fred Moten’s clarion opening sentence, “The history of blackness is testament to the fact that objects can and do resist” (2003, 1), we might hear the phrase “the fact that bones persist.” Within this broader arc of critical memory studies, I am interested in the ways in which bones have been given a specific Latin etymology and classical genealogy in Black Atlantic poetry, that is, in the poetry of Derek Walcott and Marlene NourbeSe Philip. The Latin noun os (bone/mouth) suggests an intriguing intertextual node that cuts across divergent categories in Caribbean literature.

Speaking Bones in Walcott’s Omeros The bones of the enslaved disrupt the ruined landscape in Walcott’s poem “Ruins of a Great House,” published in the collection In a Green Night (1962).⁹ The poem explores the ambivalence of English literature in the form of a colonial encounter between the poet as colonial subject and the full colonial history of his British cultural inheritance. English literature is lined up on both sides of history—as simultaneously murderous (Hawkins, Raleigh, and Drake are “ancestral murderers and poets”) and expressive of a deep vein of human compassion as expressed in Meditation XVII of John Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624). The source of the narrator’s quarrel with English literature is what it buries: the bones of the enslaved. While the song of the bones remains unvoiced in Walcott’s poem, its potential disrupts the canon, leading to a critical rereading and dismemberment of English literature, as scattered lines and phrases (disiecta membra of the greats of English literature) are grafted into Walcott’s poem.¹⁰ Initially, in the first line of the poem, the disiecta membra are the ruined stone walls of the great house—“Stones only, the disjecta membra of this Great House”—but as the narrator scans the landscape, other limbs grow out of history, and the wild pastoral scene becomes a ⁹ Walcott 1962, 19–20. ¹⁰ Terada 1992, 60–6, has a good discussion of the creative intertextual mimicry and adaptation at work in this poem.

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heterotopia in which the violent history of slavery lurks amidst the vegetation (Walcott 1962, 19): But where the lawn breaks in a rash of trees A spade below dead leaves will ring the bone Of some dead animal or human thing Fallen from evil days, from evil times.

The scene has a horrific underground, “some dead animal or human thing,” which is made more explicit in the line, “Some slave is rotting in this manorial lake” (Walcott 1962, 19). Walcott’s use of the anonymous, impersonal, dehumanizing adjective “some” conveys the complete lack of any representation or commemoration. The bones of the slave are potential, unvoiced song, which will only ring if struck. While the lyric potential of the bones of the enslaved is only implicit here, “Ruins of a Great House” anticipates the use of bones as a symbol for the unwritten, unsung poetry of the Caribbean that dissects the corpus of canonical literature, introducing breaks and new joints. The use of bones as poetic touchstone finds its fulfillment in the poetic program of Omeros, where the roots of epic are signified as St Lucian, beginning with an invocation of sea and bones. Walcott’s 1990 verse novel, Omeros, invokes Homer and Homeric epic both ostentatiously and obliquely, starting with the nominal allusion to Homer in the title. As Joseph Farrell has explained, this evocation is at once direct and oblique (Farrell 1997, 264–5). The poet narrator gives us an etymology for the title in the second chapter of the poem (1.2.3, p. 14), voiced by a Greek woman named Antigone: “O-meros,” she laughed. “That’s what we call him in Greek.”

Walcott takes the first etymological layer for the title from modern Greek, interposing a mediating layer between the current text and ancient Greek epic. But this latter-day Greek Homer—the “plaster Omeros,” as he is dubbed on p. 323 of the poem—is immediately transplanted from Greece through a fresh, polysemous Caribbean etymology. In the following lines, the narrator dissects the word, translating the different lexemes into St Lucian Patois (Walcott 1990, 14): And O was the conch-shell’s invocation, mer was Both mother and sea in our Antillean patois, Os, a grey bone, and the white surf as it crashes And spreads its sibilant collar on a lace shore.

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Here, the different lexemes are all stressed: Ō-mēr-ōs, breaking up the noun Homer/Omeros and reconfiguring it, while the metrical pattern lends weight to this fresh signifying of Homer.¹¹ The very device of an argument from etymology gestures toward a philological tradition in which language expresses filiation, but Walcott’s twist is to root his etymology in a post-classical tradition of Greek (so-called modern Greek) and to use this as a pivot to an innovative Caribbean etymology, where etymology authorizes neologism. O-mer-os is a patois/Creole etymology, which resonates in three different languages: patois, French (drawing on the francophone roots of St Lucian patois), and, through French, to Latin. The third syllable, os (“a grey bone”), is simultaneously patois (l’os), French (l’os), and Latin (os, ossis). In the previous line, the poet has alerted readers to the double etymology of the second syllable mer through homophony (“mer was | both mother and sea in our Antillean patois”). The final syllable, os, also contains homophonic wordplay in Latin: Latin os, ossis (bone) is homophonous with the noun ōs, oris (mouth), the difference being in the length of the initial vowels: the vowel quantity in os-bone is short, and the vowel quantity in ōs-mouth is long. The phonetic slippage between the two nouns is attested in Latin: in three different passages, St Augustine records that in his day (mid fourth–fifth century CE), the common people (vulgus) could not distinguish phonetically between os, bone, and ōs, mouth, and therefore used the variant ossum for bone, while the educated elite continued to use os for bone.¹² As a poet whose Liberal Arts degree at the University of the West Indies was in French and Latin, and whose poetry contains many instances of Latin wordplay, Walcott surely exploits the semantic ambivalence in os/ōs to suggest the speech of the bones as part of his figuring of Omeros as the voice of the sea and all that is in it. The bones of those who were killed during the Middle Passage are part of the poem’s submerged language and culture, as well as part of the representational challenge that Walcott takes on in this modern Caribbean epic. When Achille dives the reefs off St Lucia in Book 2, fishing illegally for conch shells, a reverie on the deaths of local fishermen calls to

¹¹ For a full study of prosody in Omeros, see Callahan 2003, who stresses Walcott’s protean use of different meters to confound readers’ expectations. ¹² Adams 2013, 14–15.

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mind the anonymous African ancestors drowned in the Middle Passage (2.24.2, p. 128): And, of course, the nameless bones of all his brothers drowned in the crossing . . .

The bones of the dead are to the spiritual landscape as the coral is to its marine ecology, and the two become fused in Walcott’s poetic imagery. In an earlier passage, where Achille dives for sunken treasure, he swims past “corpses | that had perished in the crossing, their hair like weeds, | their bones like long coral fingers” (1.8.2, p. 45). This imagery is sustained throughout the poem, as illustrated by a passage toward the end, where “a quiet culture | is branching from the white ribs of each ancestor,” on an analogy with the coral (7.59.2, p. 296):¹³ Why waste lines on Achille, a shade on the sea-floor? Because strong as self-healing coral, a quiet culture is branching from the white ribs of each ancestor;

Walcott resists the temptation to fill in the lacuna of the biographies of the victims of the Middle Passage, instead choosing to signal their ghostly presences. The closest narrative of the Middle Passage is a prophecy uttered by an African Griot in Book 3 (3.28.1, pp. 148–50), which Achille hears when sunstroke enables him to experience the impossible journey—the Middle Passage in reverse. Walcott’s treatment of this theme reflects the preoccupation in anglophone Caribbean poetry with the question of how to sing the bones of the nameless, anonymous, unsung, unremembered, and unburied dead. Frequently in Caribbean poetics this question is related to language politics and the question of how, and in what language, the bones of the dead would sing, with the languages of empire associated with literatures that facilitated and then occluded these deaths. In Marlene NourbeSe Philip’s potent expression from her point of view as a writer in the anglophone Caribbean, the English language had been “etymologically hostile and expressive of the non-being of the African.”¹⁴ ¹³ The submarine archaeology of modern Caribbean history recalls the central trope of Walcott’s poem “The Sea is History” (Walcott 1979, 25–8). ¹⁴ Philip 2015, 81. Compare Philip 2008, 197: “The language in which these events took place promulgated the non-being of African peoples, and I distrust its order, which hides disorder.”

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Behind the phonetic slippage between Latin os (bone) and ōs (mouth) is a point about the politics of what it means to write an epic of the modern Caribbean. That os bone should suggest ōs mouth, and vice versa, resonates with Kamau Brathwaite’s model of Caribbean literature as a “literature of catastrophe” capable of reflecting the region’s catastrophic history: “For me, the history of catastrophe, the coming to grips with a person bitten by those ratchets; that archetypal labourer; ruined by that greed; requires a literature of catastrophe to hold a broken mirror up to broken nature.”¹⁵ In Walcott’s own manifesto for a Caribbean epic “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory,” breakage is integral to his conception of the creation of an epic art in the Caribbean—pieced together from the fragments of history (Walcott 1998, 69): Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole. The glue that fits the pieces is the sealing of its original shape. It is such a love that reassembles our African and Asiatic fragments, the cracked heirlooms whose restoration shows its white scars. This gathering of broken pieces is the care and pain of the Antilles, and if the pieces are disparate, ill-fitting, they contain more pain than their original sculpture, those icons and sacred vessels taken for granted in their ancestral places. Antillean art is this restoration of our shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary, our archipelago becoming a synonym for pieces broken off from the original continent.¹⁶

To write poetry in this context is not to make, but to remake and reassemble, a re-membering, a piecing together of the disiecta membra. Although the stress in Walcott’s Nobel Lecture was on the African and Asiatic traditions in the making of the modern Caribbean, his poetry repeatedly stressed another tradition—that of classical Greece and Rome—often mistaken for, but not reducible to, its appropriation by modern European empires. That this classical tradition is also part of the fragmented history of the Caribbean archipelago is typical of “the ironic republic that is poetry,” as Walcott puts it (1998, 78).

¹⁵ Brathwaite 1995, 235; italics in original. ¹⁶ Walcott 1998, 69. This is an excerpt from a speech delivered as the Nobel Lecture (December 7, 1992) and subsequently published in Walcott 1998, 65–84.

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Marlene NourbeSe Philip: Dismembering the Classics Walcott’s recognition of every ancestor and his purposeful laying claim to a manifold tradition would seem to clash with the politics and poetics of both the radical, contemporary experimental poetry of the anglophone Caribbean and the radical feminist poetry of Marlene NourbeSe Philip. Lee Jenkins has suggested that Philip subverts “the mythmaking of male poets of the region,” and Philip herself has criticized Walcott and Wilson Harris for being too comfortable with the English language and refusing to acknowledge “that there even exists a dilemma” for Caribbean poets writing in English.¹⁷ However, in many respects Philip’s subversive adaptation of the Aeneid and other classical texts is continuous with traditions of reinterpreting these texts in anglophone Caribbean literature by an older generation of male writers, including Walcott and Naipaul.¹⁸ Like these writers, Philip subverts the tendentious use of Classics in the history of the Caribbean.¹⁹ Ultimately Philip’s target in Zong! is less Virgil’s Aeneid than its reception in a European tradition of empire. As modern scholarship on the Aeneid has shown, Virgil himself was skeptical about the ratio of the Roman empire, particularly in terms of its human costs. Thus, although Philip’s dismemberment of the Roman poet’s text may be subversive, it relies upon a sound philological knowledge of where the breaks are in Virgil.²⁰ In the essay “The Absence of Writing or How I Almost Became a Spy” (orig. 1983),²¹ writing as a black Caribbean woman writer, Philip has ¹⁷ Jenkins 2004, 174. Philip 2015, 85; this can only be a willful misreading of Walcott’s nuanced representation of colonial ambivalence and the complicated politics of language in his poetry. Edmondson 1999 is helpful here in subtly analyzing how, in the anglophone Caribbean, women writers have inherited the concerns of an earlier generation of Caribbean male writers. ¹⁸ See Greenwood 2010, especially chap. 3. ¹⁹ One example of the manifold ways in which Graeco-Roman classics were co-opted by British colonial powers in the Caribbean is the use of Virgilian quotation—frequently deliberate misquotation—on flags for Britain’s Caribbean territories. See Greenwood 2010, 139–41, 172–3, as well as Greenwood 2014. ²⁰ See Guttman 1996, 61, on “heteroglossia betraying the unifying discourse of monologic discourse.” ²¹ This essay was first published in the journal Fireweed (1983); a revised version, which reflects on the development of Philip’s thought and practice, was published as the introduction to the 1989 collection She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks, and as an Afterword to the 2015 edition of this collection (Philip 2015, 76–91), with some revisions.

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theorized this linguistic inheritance in gendered terms, distinguishing between a native “mother” tongue and a foreign “father” tongue, and characterizing the English language (l/anguish) as a source of anguish: Some people are born writing, some achieve writing and some have writing thrust upon them. My belonging is to the last group, coming slowly to accept the blessing and yoke that is writing, and with so doing I have come upon an understanding of language—good-english-bad-english english, Queenglish and Kinglish—the anguish that is English in colonial societies.²²

This understanding of language in the context of becoming a writer is invariably linked to the relationship between language, literature, and the canon. In Philip’s poetry this has also meant probing the relationship between different canonical literatures to analyze how power is transmitted through literature. Philip’s entire 1989 collection (revised edn, 2015), She Tries Her Tongue, is a manifesto of the Caribbean woman writer’s relationship with the English language that takes its cue from Ovidian metamorphosis. Philip uses John Dryden’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses as an occasion for rereading the myths of Proserpina and Philomela and turning them to the situation of a Caribbean woman poet. Her subsequent collection Looking for Livingstone: An Odyssey of Silence (1991) exploited the trope of European exploration as an odyssey that silences the very territories that it purports to make known by covering them with its own “Word.” Philip’s next collection, Zong!, takes a notorious legal text and imagines how the Odyssey and the Aeneid may have functioned as subtexts or pretexts for what happened on board the slave ship The Zong in 1781. In Zong! Philip attempts to tell “a tale that cannot be told”: the tale of the experience of the slaves on the slave ship The Zong, which sailed from the west coast of Africa on September 6, 1781, carrying 440 enslaved Africans, and subsequently sailed off course during the Middle Passage en route to Jamaica.²³ As a result, the ship ran short of rations of drinking ²² Philip 2015, 77. The form “l/anguish” appears in the poem “Discourse on the Logic of Language,” published in the same collection (Philip 2015, 30 and 32). ²³ The theme of disnarration is a leitmotif in “Notanda,” Philip’s commentary on the composition of Zong! (2008, 189–207): “there is no telling this story: it must be told” (189); “this story must be told by not telling” (190); “a story about which there is no telling” (190); “a story that cannot be told” (190); “the story that can only be told by not telling” (191); “how am I to not tell the story that has to be told” (191); “there is no telling this story” (196).

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water, and many slaves and a few members of the crew died. In response, the ship’s captain, Luke Collingwood, took the decision to murder 132 slaves by throwing them overboard pre-emptively so that the ship’s owners (Messrs Gregson) would be able to reclaim the “loss” of property from the ship’s underwriters (Messrs Gilbert) rather than risk further unrecompensable deaths from natural causes.²⁴ Back in Britain a jury initially found the underwriters liable for the “loss,” but the underwriters appealed this decision, and it was referred to the Court of the King’s Bench.²⁵ The radical compositional method of Philip’s 2008 poem Zong! involved taking the legal report of the decision to grant a new trial in the case (Gregson v Gilbert), and then dismantling it in order to refute its (il)logic.²⁶ In order to subvert the document, Philip first took apart the text of the legal decision and rearranged the words to create a counternarrative in the first section of Zong!, “Os.” For the subsequent sections, Philip made an anagram of every word in the legal document in order to construct a polyglot lexicon with which to narrate the slaves’ side of the story. In her notes to the poem, she describes the process as follows (Philip 2008, 200): I devise a dictionary with a list of each of the “mother” words followed by the words contained in that particular word—for instance, apprehension yields hen, sion, pare and pear, to list a few possibilities.

We might also add the Yoruba infinitive ní ran (to remember), or the Shona participle pera (“finished”), both of which appear in the glossary of foreign words used in the poem (Philip 2008, 183–4). The promiscuous mixing of languages in this lexicon reflects the implication of different languages in the complex history of the slave trade, as well as the mixing of cultures and miscegenation of peoples that the racial ideologies which enabled this trade insisted on keeping separate.²⁷ In Philip’s hands, it is not merely the case that every word can be made to spell another word, but that every word can be made to spell its exact opposite:

²⁴ Philip 2008, 193. ²⁵ For a full account of The Zong, the trial, and its historical context, see Walvin 2011. ²⁶ The text of this report is reprinted at Philip 2008, 210–11. Philip refers to this legal text as effectively the only “tombstone” for the slaves thrown overboard (2008, 192, 194). ²⁷ Arabic, Dutch, Fon, French, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Latin, Portuguese, Shona, Spanish, Twi, West African Patois, and Yoruba.

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anagram is revealed as a consummate tool of linguistic subversion. Philip had previously employed anagram as a tool of subversion in the collection Looking for Livingstone, in which anagrams of the word “Silence” furnish the name of an African tribe (variously the ECNELIS, CLEENIS, NEECLIS, etc.) whom the narrator encounters in pursuit of Livingstone. These unfamiliar anagrammatic forms of silence preserve the mystery of the tribe’s identity—that is, they preserve the silence about them—but at the same time the act of anthropomorphizing silence gives it voice. This is another approach to how “to tell a tale that cannot be told”: the anagram of silence, like the constantly interrupted typographic arrangement of Zong!, resists narration, even while articulating that there is a story to be told.²⁸ The compositional method of Zong! re-enacts the violence of the treatment of the slaves on board The Zong. Describing this method in the diary that she kept while working on the poem, Philip writes (2008, 193–4): I mutilate the text as the fabric of African life and the lives of these men, women and children were mutilated . . . I murder the text, literally cut it into pieces, castrating verbs, suffocating adjectives, murdering nouns, throwing articles, prepositions, conjunctions overboard, jettisoning adverbs: I separate subject from verb, verb from object—create semantic mayhem, until my hands bloodied, from so much killing and cutting, reach into the stinking, eviscerated innards, and like some seer, sangoma, or prophet who, having sacrificed an animal for signs and portents of a new life, or simply life, reads the untold story that tells itself by not telling.²⁹

²⁸ For the fundamental importance of the themes of silence and voicelessness in literature written by Caribbean women, see Davies and Fido 1990, 1. In relation to the collection She Tries Her Tongue, Guttman 1996 uses the concept of aphasia as a metaphor for the way in which frustrated narration (fragments, syllabic repetition, word breaks, line breaks, and gaps in the text) signals “damage by and resistance to a history of capture, slavery and enforced creolization” (57). Another way of figuring textual silence in Caribbean women’s writing is suggested by Mehta (2009, 161), who draws on Myriam Chancy’s idea of the “culture-lacune” (quoting Chancy 1997, 17): “In French the word lacune usually connotes a negative absence. By joining the word to culture, which connotes the positive presence of social collective existence, I am implying that lacuna can be read into the texts as a space of ‘nothingness’ that is transformed and affirmed through the politics of representation.” ²⁹ Compare Nawal El Saadawi’s comparison between postcolonial women’s writing and killing: “you are killing ideas, you are killing injustices, you are killing systems that oppose you” (quoted in Hoving 2001, 1).

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This murderous writing is the fulfillment of Philip’s method in She Tries Her Tongue; in a section entitled “Universal Grammar,” Philip offers her own version of the kind of pronouncements characteristic of grammar handbooks when she glosses “parsing” as “the exercise of dismembering language into fragmentary cells that forget to re-member” (Philip 2015, 40). The body of language here is envisaged as composed of limbs (membra), which can be atomized and recomposed.³⁰ In the case of Zong!, the poem incorporates literal membra—the underwater bones of the slaves murdered by the crew of The Zong—which are the missing evidence in this case.³¹ In remembering their fate and their story, Philip represents herself as re-membering in the very literal sense of giving voice to these limbs; hence the first section of the work is entitled “Os” (Latin for bone and—as discussed above—phonetically confusable with the Latin noun ōs, mouth).³² In an interview with Patricia Saunders in 2008, Philip describes the motivation behind Zong! as “a desire on my part for the bones; I want the bones,” and the process of composition as “remembering and mourning, of locating the bones and grieving” (Saunders 2008, 68, 77).³³ But more than the mere dismembering and remembering of the corpus of language, Philip’s text enacts the dismembering of the juridico-literary corpus. Her strategy confronts the authoritative challenge of intertextuality head-on. Writing about her decision to base Zong! on the rewriting of a legal document, she writes “[I] am not even using my own words. Are they ever my own words, though?” (Philip 2008, 193). This radical reassembling of words does not do away with the influence of other texts, but it does highlight the provisional authority of the legal discourse of the report and the texts that implicitly constitute its authority. Philip’s reception of this text shows that its message is conditional upon the authority of its designated audience: a hegemonic slave³⁰ For textual dismemberment in Classical literature, see pp. 54–55. ³¹ Jenkins 2004, 173, reminds us that Philip previously practiced as a barrister: “She ‘represents’ the drowned slaves, in several senses.” Philip attributes names to the drowned slaves taken from the publication Yoruba Names by Modupe Oduyoye (1972). These names are printed in the footers of the pages in the first section of Zong!—underwater, as it were. ³² Sharpe 2016, 38, suggests additional meanings: “Os as ordinary seaman, mouth, opening, or bone.” Os comprises twenty-six numbered poems, and it is followed by six further sections. Philip refers to the former as “the bones” and the subsequent sections as “the flesh” (2008, 200). ³³ Compare Philip 2008, 201.

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trading class. In this anachronistic legal interrogation, when confronted with the counter-authority of a reader descended from the enslaved class, the integrity of the legal document and its language crumbles, and discrepant voices speak through it. Comparing and contrasting her method with the disruption of language in the work of the American language poets, Philip argues that her strategy of subverting language goes beyond a critique of language to the literature and entire system of thought with which it is associated: “In my own work, however, the strategies signpost a multifaceted critique of the European project” (Philip 2008, 197). It is this “multifaceted critique of the European project” that I am interested in—particularly the status of Latin and the literature of ancient Rome in this “European project.” In an essay entitled “Managing the Unmanageable” (1990), Philip has written about the challenge of “ ‘bucking up’ against the weight of Eurocentric traditions” and the discovery that the literary tradition within which she had been educated as a schoolgirl in Tobago was complicit in ignoring her experience and even perpetuating her non-being. At the same time, the language—the medium in which this tradition was related—that was a tool of oppression was her sole tool for expression.³⁴ As several critics have observed, the binary division of her native language into a “mother” tongue and a “father” tongue is problematic.³⁵ If the duality of the native language were reducible to a gendered dichotomy, then it would be possible to pit the Creole mother tongue against the standard “English” English father tongue, making Creole the instrument of linguistic subversion and English its object.³⁶ Whereas, in fact, Creole does significant work in “perturbing the lexis of English” in She Tries Her Tongue, the collection’s linguistic subversion also involves playing tricks with “good-english” English. Hence Philip writes: “In the vortex of new World slavery, the African forged new and different words, developed strategies to impress her experience on the language. The formal standard

³⁴ Philip 1990, 296. ³⁵ On the complexity of Philip’s gendered metaphor, see Guttman 1996, 54–5; Hoving 2001, 290; Fumagalli 2009, 80–1. As Reed (2014, 46) notes in an astute discussion of Philip’s radical poetics, the figuration of a Creole mother tongue is also a fiction, centered around the creation of a positive Caribbean “i-mage”: “The ‘i-mage’ does not so much recover as invent the ‘mother tongue,’ locating ancestry in a future that will have been rather than a past to which one must be faithful.” ³⁶ “English” English as distinct from Caribbean English.

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language was subverted, turned upside down, inside out, and even sometimes erased” (Philip 2015, 83). The strategy of transforming the language by subterfuge is indicative of a Creole culture of resistance and subversion, but the instruments through which this is achieved include a cultural insider’s perspective on the so-called father tongue.³⁷ Philip acknowledges that this notional father tongue is itself also a “mother and father” tongue. Since the English in which she writes is Caribbean English, which represents a “continuum of expression” from Caribbean demotic to Standard English, and vice versa, there is a productive relationship between the poles of “father” and “mother” language, and the poet’s language is the offspring of both.³⁸ From the perspective of postcolonial translation within literatures in English, Bill Ashcroft has pointed out that the translation involved is not between languages but within a single language, warning against reifying language by setting up a false opposition between an “authentic” Creole tongue and a “foreign” colonial language.³⁹ As a poet and writer Philip recognizes her potential displacement from all language, hence the motif of silence and textual lacunas in her poetry.⁴⁰ In relation to She Tries Her Tongue, Naomi Guttman has suggested that aphasia is a suitable metaphor for Philip’s narrative technique and her struggle with language; one would be hard pressed to think of a more powerful trope of linguistic displacement.⁴¹ However, this is no mere postmodern trope about the fundamental instability of language and its relation to the world or about the artificiality of all narration, although these ideas do figure in Philip’s work. Instead, her metaphorical discourse on the anguish of the English language testifies to the fact that the slaves in the New World were

³⁷ Philip 2015, 86: “The African in the Caribbean and the New World is as much entitled to call the English language her own, as the Englishman in his castle.” ³⁸ See Philip 2015, 84: “In the absence of any other language by which the past may be repossessed, reclaimed and its most painful aspects transcended, English in its broadest spectrum must be made to do the job. To say that the experience can only be expressed in standard English (if there is any such thing) or only in the Caribbean demotic (there is such a thing) is, in fact, to limit the experience for the African artist working in the Caribbean demotic. It is in the continuum of expression from standard to Caribbean English that the veracity of the experience lies” (italics in original). ³⁹ Ashcroft 2009, 161–2. Compare Hoving (2001, 18), who reminds us that “all languages are hybrid. There is no such thing as a pure, uncontaminated language.” ⁴⁰ See Jenkins 2004, 171, on “gaps and silences” in Zong! ⁴¹ Guttman 1996; see n. 28.

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dispossessed of their native languages and were treated as “verbal or linguistic squatters” in their new language.⁴² The familial metaphor that pits “father” tongue against “mother” tongue preserves the historical context for the creation of this language situation, which involved both the literal and metaphorical rape of the enslaved Africans and their Caribbean descendants by the imperial power, whose patriarchal authority is figured as a malign father figure. In addition, for Philip the enforced suppression of the slaves’ own languages constitutes linguistic rape, like Tereus excising Philomela’s tongue. Given that several of Philip’s subversions of English exploit its Latinate vocabulary, using Latin to read English against the grain, it is germane to ask how Latin relates to the patriarchal conception of English. In her commentary on Zong!, Latin seems to be conceived of as the grandfather tongue, the former father tongue. Explaining her decision to use Latin titles for the first six (of seven) sections of Zong!, Philip comments: “I chose Latin to emphasize the connection with the law, which is steeped in Latin expressions, and, also to reference the fact that Latin was the father tongue in Europe.”⁴³ At first sight this statement might seem to cast Latin in the same oppressive role as English qua father tongue, but, as elsewhere in Caribbean literature, merely to observe that English had its own complex relationship with linguistic descent is to identify it as itself formerly a colonized vernacular language—and to put it in its place as just one phase in the translatio studii et imperii. As a “father tongue” of English, Latin is drafted in to reorder English and to confuse its roots. At several points in the poem, Philip uses Latin and Latin etymologies to cross-examine English. One of the narrators of the poem is the ship’s (inexperienced) captain, Luke Collingwood, who took the murderous “initiative” to throw the slaves overboard in the belief that the underwriters would compensate the ship’s owners for the loss of property. In Philip’s retelling, Collingwood is haunted by his actions on The Zong and

⁴² Philip 2015, 87. ⁴³ Philip 2008, 209 n. 45. The titles in question are: Os (bone, mouth), Dicta (sayings, statements made in the course of a legal judgment), Sal (salt), Ventus (wind), Ratio (reason, reckoning, calculation), and Ferrum (iron, sword). The seventh section is titled Ebora (underwater spirits, in Yoruba).

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his responsibility for the death of the slaves.⁴⁴ His version of what happened takes the form of a letter to his wife Ruth (a name with an ironic echo of “truth”), who awaits his return at home, but this letter is repeatedly interrupted by the voices of the drowned slaves, present as underwater spirits. Even without the voices of the slaves, Collingwood’s fragmentary account of what happened is discordant, with his original rationalization of the action disrupted by Philip’s authorial countersignifying, often by way of Latin, to expose the illogic of the arguments that he puts forward in his defense. Philip’s subversive use of classical philology is two-pronged: first she sets up Collingwood as a user of sophistical etymological arguments and then she uses multilayered allusions to Virgil’s Aeneid to incriminate him. The following example from Zong! is typical of how Collingwood tries, but fails, to give Ruth a coherent account of what happened, using the authority of Latin to gloss over the flaws in his logic (Philip 2008, 64–5): there are [page break] stars in sidera as there is ratio in rations

Here the mention of stars furnishes a transition to the Latin neuter plural noun sidera (stars), which has been foreshadowed by the noun “aster” (64), a flower whose name derives from the Greek noun astēr (ἀστήρ), star. Collingwood frequently has recourse to Latin, with its legal connotations, to justify his actions. Here the tautologous premise that there are “stars in sidera,” which is a faux etymological argument that relies on the ⁴⁴ In this sense, Zong! is also part of a tradition of hauntological literature in the black tradition (see Philip 2008, 201: “I come albeit slowly to the understanding that Zong! is hauntological”), epitomized by Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and theorized in different ways by Gordon (2008 – originally 1996) and Baucom (2005)—the latter in terms of the specters of the circum-Atlantic slave trade (after Derrida 1994). Philip corresponded with Baucom while they were at work on their respective projects on The Zong (see Philip 2008, 194), and Baucom discusses some of Philip’s pre-published Zong! poems in the third section of his book. Fred D’Aguiar’s 1997 novel Feeding The Ghosts had earlier explored the ghosts of The Zong and is therefore an important conceptual, if not formal, precedent for Philip’s study; see n. 8.

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fact that stars and sidera mean the same thing, only in different languages, alerts us to the specious use of Latin. This is followed up by another argument from etymology: Collingwood’s claim that there is “ratio in rations.” This time the etymology is genuine, since the English noun “ration” derives from the Latin noun ratio, but the argument that it is intended to serve is corrupt. In one sense of the Latin noun ratio, meaning calculation, there is “ratio in rations,” insofar as rations have to be measured out and calculated; but in the sense of ratio meaning “reason” or “logical thought,” then there is no ratio in rations from the point of view of Philip and her readers, particularly since Collingwood used the argument about depleted rations to justify the disposal of 132 slaves, exploiting a logic that makes no sense outside of the “capital logic” of the transatlantic slave trade.⁴⁵ In her commentary on the composition of Zong!, Philip draws attention to the use of the Latin noun ratio in legal terminology, glossing it as “the kernel of the legal principle at the heart of the decision—here ratio dicendi or simply the ratio” (2008, 199). The contentious role that rations played in Collingwood’s justification of the decision to throw the slaves overboard is signaled by the admission that “i ration the truth” (73), as well as by the note in a handwritten font that “we act the part but ration the facts” (81).⁴⁶ The importance of ratio is evident in the fact that Ratio is the title of one of the poem’s movements (99–123). In another fictional retelling of the fate of the slaves on board The Zong, Fred D’Aguiar’s 1997 novel Feeding The Ghosts, this principle of ratio is symbolized by the captain’s ledger, which comes to function as a literal book of life and death as he calculates how many slaves to dispose of in order to secure the optimum profits for the ship’s owners, recording their “disposal” in this book (D’Aguiar 1997, 128): The captain was the maddest of all. His ledger was his greatest treasure. He held it as if it was filled with gold or precious stones that might spill with the slightest jolt or tilt. He consulted it as though it dictated to him the precise means by which the ship should be run. All in the name of profit. ⁴⁵ Baucom 2005, 61. As Baucom has explained in his sociology of the Zong case in the context of circum-Atlantic financial markets, according to this logic Collingwood “was not so much murdering them as securing the existence of their monetary value” (Baucom 2005, 8; see also 62). ⁴⁶ Compare the argument from the anagram: “there is ruse | in insure” (80). Elsewhere in the poem (111), the word “insurers” is associated with the words “ruse,” “ruin,” and “sin.”

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The fundamental tension in Philip’s poem, and it is a tension that literally breaks up the narration of the poem, is between Collingwood’s profit-based version of necessity and the counter-necessity of the slaves’ right to justice, in death if not in life. In the case of ratio above, the hegemonic use of Latin by Collingwood tends to be self-refuting as Philip turns Latin into an instrument of subversion.

Rereading the Aeneid: The Canon as Precedent The cross-examination of the primary narrator on the basis of classical intertexts is a prominent feature of Philip’s narrative. In addition to the challenge of telling a tale that will not be told in a language that is at best equivocal (i.e. it is both a “mother” and “father” language), she has to steer between the master texts of the Western tradition in order to find a voice in which to give the testimony of the slaves. Commenting on her earlier volume, She Tries Her Tongue, Philip observed: “I was also to discover that I could not challenge the language without challenging the canon that surrounded the poetic genre” (1990, 296). Her careful steering through the tradition is visible in the arrangement of the text on the page, which sometimes mimics the course of a ship through water through the use of typographical middle passages. And yet these master texts are necessarily present, albeit altered, in the poem’s language and its cultural references. Invoking the revolutionary associations of intertextuality in the works of Julia Kristeva and others, Tobias Döring (1998, 191) has used the figure of the Middle Passage to describe instances of Caribbean-English intertextuality where potentially antithetical cultural memories are brought into contact through subversive reinventions. In this context, intertextual subversion reinforces linguistic subversion as a tool of postcolonial, subaltern translation. Intratextual subversion adds another dimension to postcolonial translation: playing on the Latin verb vertere, both to turn and to translate, we might construe subvertere and hence subversion as “translation from below.” In Zong! the Aeneid has become a trope: the poem alludes to Virgil as “the poet of troy” (Philip 2008, 97, 121, 153), “the poet of troy of trope” (112), and “the poet of trope troy & rome” (151). In Philip’s reading, the Troy of the Aeneid is a trope not just because it has come to symbolize

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the paradigmatic literary destruction of a city, as well as a site of loss that can be mobilized to win arguments, but also because Virgil’s Aeneid itself turns (Greek trope is literally “a turn”) an existing mythological tradition about Troy to suit its presentist ends. In Zong! Virgil’s version of the fall of Troy and foundation of Rome furnishes a ratio, or rationale, for Collingwood’s behavior. As a latter-day Aeneas, who names his favored female slave on board the ship “dido,” his “afra nigra,” and his “regina” (118), Collingwood has recourse to Troy as an exculpatory precedent. He does what he does because Aeneas did what he did. The analogy between Collingwood’s conduct and that of Aeneas is developed through a series of allusions to the Aeneid that are scattered throughout Philip’s text. In this analogy, the purchase of slaves from the Guinea coast is envisaged as a symbolic rape of Africa: Collingwood recounts: “we | sailed | up | the | cunt of | Africa to | found | an | out | caste | race” (Philip 2008, 97; in Philip’s text, each word is printed on a separate line).⁴⁷ This territorial penetration figured as rape is compounded by the fact that Collingwood’s faltering testimony narrated in the poem attests to his rape of Sade, the slave whom he nicknames Dido, on board the ship.⁴⁸ Although the dominant voice in Virgil’s Aeneid opts to tell Dido’s story in a way that shifts the blame (culpa) for the affair between Aeneas and Dido onto Dido’s libido,⁴⁹ prior to Virgil the prevailing mythological tradition about Dido portrayed her as a chaste widower who committed suicide rather than endure an involuntary second marriage to a Libyan king.⁵⁰ In this sense, the Aeneid forces Dido into a countercultural marriage. Collingwood’s use of the “outcaste race” motif, with its pun on cast and caste, recalls the Aeneid, where the Trojans are “cast out” from their native land by fate (fato profugus, Aen.

⁴⁷ With the exception of the text quoted on p. 46, in quoting from Zong! I preserve Philip’s word breaks and line breaks, but I have not attempted to reproduce the layout of the text, which is a crucial part of its visual argument. The reader is referred to Philip 2008. ⁴⁸ The following rape scene is emblematic, with its euphemistic high diction (“we graft scions of Africa”) used to cover over the horrific crime: “they rip her garment her paps | hang dry she falls we graft | scions of Africa in new lands” (Philip 2008, 121). ⁴⁹ Aen. 4.171–2: nec iam furtiuum Dido meditatur amorem: | coniugium uocat, hoc praetexit nomine culpam (“From now on Dido gave no thought to appearance or her good name and no longer kept her love as a secret in her own heart, but called it marriage, using the word to cover her guilt”). ⁵⁰ See Desmond 1994, 28. Desmond examines the different images of Dido in circulation in medieval literature.

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1.2; acti fatis 1.31), and also potentially an outcast people in the sense of not being the right caste for the Romans, their future descendants. Both in Carthage and in Latium, Aeneas’s enemies are keen to other him, depicting him as a decadent easterner. Playing on the Aeneid, “outcaste race” has another sense, as well: when Aeneas is driven ashore in Libya in Book 1 of the Aeneid, the text plays with the possibility of a counterhistorical plot in which Aeneas might decide to abandon his quest for Latium to settle in Carthage with Dido, leading to the mixing of Trojans and Carthaginians.⁵¹ Viewed from the perspective of the transatlantic slave trade, with its racist distinctions between peoples, this mixing is reminiscent of miscegenation with any offspring destined to be an “outcaste race.” Another aspect of Zong!’s sporadic dialogue with Virgil’s Aeneid is an additional echo of Dido: the historical “coincidence” that Lord Chief Justice Mansfield, who presided over the retrial of Gregson v Gilbert, himself had a Dido connection. According to Philip, she discovered this coincidence in Simon Schama’s book Rough Crossings (2005), where Schama refers to the fact that Lord Mansfield had an adopted greatniece named Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay, whom he brought up in his own house, and who was the child of a union between his nephew, Captain John Lindsay, and an African slave named Belle.⁵² As Philip tells it, the emergence of the Dido motif in her poem is spontaneous: twice she refers to the name “surfacing” (2008, 206) in the context of a discussion about how the poem took shape across several drafts. In Philip’s poem, however, this coincidence between a name in the text and the historical world outside the text turns out not to have been a coincidence. Instead, in her poetic account the ratio of the legal decision is blurred with the logic of the familiar epic plot, with the result that Aeneas’s mistreatment of Dido establishes a precedent for the mistreatment of the slaves on The Zong, which included the rape of some of the enslaved women on board the ship—a crime that becomes incidental to the charge of manslaughter, which in turn becomes incidental to the ⁵¹ The theme of misceri populos (the mixing of peoples) is articulated by Venus, one of the deities who have resolved to prevent this very outcome, at Aen. 4.112. ⁵² For the Dido coincidence, see Philip 2008, 206: “The details of the relationship between Captain Lindsay and Dido’s mother are not recounted. Was she raped? Was there ever, in fact, a relationship? Why was the child brought to England and allowed to reside with Lord Mansfield?”

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crime of insurance fraud, which is what the final verdict in the case was concerned with. In case the Aeneid is not a convincing enough precedent, Collingwood doubles up his epic argument, reinforcing the example of Aeneas with the example of Odysseus. While the allusions to Aeneas center around references to the sack of Troy and his (mis)treatment of Dido, the Odysseus motif is present in references to Circe, the witch who waylays Odysseus and his men in Book 10 of the Odyssey, and the Sirens, who try to tempt Odysseus off course in Book 12 of the epic. Collingwood states: “i hear | the sirens re cite my verses they | lure me on with my own | words to wrap me my only | help the moly you gave . . . ” (Philip 2008, 120–121; compare Odyssey 10); and that: “circe and her sire ns sin | g their son gs tempt wit h all t | here is to eat” (133).⁵³ Since Collingwood’s self-defense takes the form of an epistolary narrative told to his wife Ruth, who is waiting for him at home, the wellworn literary tradition of blaming women for disrupting men’s epic trajectories is pertinent to his argument. Here the Odyssey and the Aeneid function as pretexts in both senses: as excuses and precursors. In Zong! Circe appears in the text as a sinister force who threatens to overturn Collingwood’s plot, and who seems to be blamed implicitly for the “misfortune” on board the ship (“circe the crone sits atop a pile of bones,” 135).⁵⁴ And then, rather than taking the blame for his rape of the slave Dido, Collingwood displaces his agency by intimating that she has driven him mad with lust. Collingwood appropriates the pietas, the dutifulness, which is one of the characteristics of Aeneas (repeatedly pius Aeneas), assimilating it to the Latin vocabulary of Roman Catholicism. As he proclaims, “pater i t is do ne lots | of pi etas to o pa | ter | & fi | des & sp es dum d | um de dum dum” (160).⁵⁵ Also like Aeneas, Collingwood has a dream visitation in which the “saint of tro | y and the ⁵³ The motif of the sirens tempting Collingwood with their song occurs again at Philip 2008, 140. Here I have reproduced the word breaks and line breaks in Philip’s text, but not the setting of the lines. ⁵⁴ e.g. “circe the seer” (Philip 2008, 68), “circe the crone” (80, 135), “circe the crone the hag the seer” (131). Circe’s role within the narrative evokes the witch Sycorax, who has played a much more prominent role in Caribbean revisions of the canon. On the Homeric Circe as a model for Shakespeare’s Sycorax, see Warner 2000. ⁵⁵ Word breaks and line breaks as in Philip’s text; see Philip 2008 for the layout of the text.

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de ad city ro | me app ears to me | at night” (150), which is reminiscent of the apparition of Hector’s ghost in Aeneas’s sleep at Aeneid 2.270–97. But Collingwood’s arguments will not bear the burden of proof that is placed upon them. First the typographical arrangement constantly disrupts his clauses and lends an inchoate quality to everything he alleges. For example, in the passage quoted above, his claims about his pietas trail off into “dum d | um de dum dum” (141). Dum happens to be a Latin conjunction, whose occurrence here is presumably triggered by verbal association with the preceding noun spes (hope), which arguably evokes the Latin proverb dum spiro spero (as long as I breathe I have hope). However, once again the effect of Latin quotation is bathetic, subsiding into mere filler (dum de dum) and undercutting the seriousness of the preceding Latin phrases. In addition, Collingwood’s account is further undermined by the instability of his literary examples. The Aeneid proves a self-negating exemplum, since, by repeatedly replaying the Dido motif, Zong! emphasizes the fact that Rome’s foundation was based on misfortune and ruin. One of the poem’s refrains is: “rome founds her self on murder & | on death” (117; referring to the “suicide” of Dido, here construed as murder, rather than the murder of Remus). Moreover, the reminder that Rome’s power was finite in the phrase “the dead city Rome” (141) undermines the civilizational authority of Collingwood’s case. To refer to the “dead city rome” is to evoke the trope of the translatio studii et imperii (the translation/transfer of knowledge and power), which is inherently selfnegating because any imperial power that appeals to this trope implicitly anticipates its own demise. The irony is even more pronounced in the following formula: “rome . . . turns from ruins of forts and fortunes to found a city on murder and death” (83–4). Here the homophony between “fortune” and “ruins of forts” subverts the fortuna that is meant to guide Aeneas to found Rome in the Aeneid. The collapse of civilizational authority refutes Collingwood’s defense, because from a postcolonial perspective the ruling in Gregson v Gilbert, with the legal (il)logic that the slaves could be treated under the law of property, rests solely on extraneous discourses about humanity as the exclusive property of a particular race. One thinks of Aimé Césaire’s claim in the opening sentences of the treatise Discours sur le colonialisme (1955, 7): “Une civilisation qui ruse avec ses principes est une civilisation moribonde” (“A civilization that uses its principles for trickery is a

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dying civilization”).⁵⁶ Césaire’s caustic observation echoes behind Philip’s anagrammatic counter-reading of the logic of maritime insurance in the Zong case: “there is ruse in insure” (see n. 46). I have referred to Tobias Döring’s idea that in several Caribbean works, Caribbean-English intertextuality functions like a textual Middle Passage, crossing heterogeneous literary relationships with complex histories of causation. Zong! reflects this phenomenon, worrying over the mutual implication of law and literature, the twin organs of Spivak’s model of “epistemic violence.”⁵⁷ Epic plots and literary narratives can be “pre-texts” of/for empire, to use Simon Gikandi’s term, or even legal precedents.⁵⁸ In turn, the pernicious law codes that enabled and perpetuated the transatlantic slave trade and the institution of chattel slavery were the plots that dictated the life stories of millions of Africans in the New World. As the narrator comments, the present tale “is but | an oration | a tale | old | as | sin is | new” (Philip 2008, 80). And this final quotation goes to the heart of the narrative challenge that Philip took on with this poem: how do you expose the horror of what happened on board The Zong and at the same time resist your retelling of this notorious episode becoming another “tale”? And how do you preserve the novelty of the sin, thus preventing it from becoming a precedent or a pretext for some future outrage? One strategy, and it is only one element of a very complex narrative, was to subvert the classical pretexts that Collingwood uses in his defense, breaking up the language and breaking up the tradition to tell a new tale about a very old sin. Hence Collingwood’s use of the disjointed phrase “& for t ruth ask rome” (76) is itself framed by a fragmented description of how the ship’s crew abused the slaves in the process of sorting them for sale. In Zong! the Aeneid has become a trope, which in its familiar version is not adequate to represent the suffering of the slaves on board The Zong: “there | exists | a span | of pain | such | that | the | poet of | the trope | that is | troy can | not own” (87). This claim, which uses one of Virgil’s own tropes

⁵⁶ The example of Odyssean trickery and cunning may or may not be alluded to in Césaire’s statement, but it is certainly present in Zong!: at Philips 2008, 65, the narrator recounts how the Africans were lured to their capture with toys, a description that is reminiscent of Odysseus’s ruse of the wooden horse, narrated in Book 2 of the Aeneid. ⁵⁷ Spivak 1988. ⁵⁸ Gikandi 1996, 97, 102.

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(sunt lacrimae rerum)⁵⁹ to challenge the authority of his epic, is a perfect example of Philip’s classical subversion.

Conclusion The anagrammatic rewriting of Greek and Latin classics in the works of Derek Walcott and Marlene NourbeSe Philip constitutes a radical philology, in which classical texts and languages are repurposed as middle passages that mediate between different histories of English. In the process, Latin and Greek provide a medium for linguistic invention, in which English words can be stripped back to their roots and resignified, exploiting philology for radical image-making; meanwhile, passages of Greek and Latin literature that have acted as vehicles for mythmaking in the history of the modern Atlantic are adapted to black traditions in a move that exposes the contingency of tradition. While Philip may not find common cause with Derek Walcott, both poets are engaged in a profoundly philological project because they ceaselessly address the question of how to love a conflicted language that bears the traces of a colonial history, as well as the question of how to express Caribbean experience within this language. Philip has remarked that the European languages that the slaves encountered in the New World were “etymologically hostile and expressive of the non-being of the African” (see p. 36). Consequently, etymology is an important aspect of philological subversion in Philip’s work: using the anagrammatic dissection, the rearrangement of language, and the rewriting of classics texts to get at a true account (Greek: etumos logos) and to expose the false assumptions that have been transmitted via language. Where Philip’s revisionist method may seem most radical, she is nevertheless part of a philological tradition that has been instrumental for the transmission of the very texts that she subverts. Take, for instance, the figure of textual dismemberment: I noted above how Philip’s compositional method in Zong! puts into practice the dismembering of language described in the earlier collection She Tries Her Tongue. In her own words, she “murdered” the legal transcript on which the poem is based in a version of revision as retribution. This figure of textual ⁵⁹ Aen. 1.462: sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt (“there are tears for the way things are and human affairs affect the mind”).

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revision as dismemberment has a well-known classical precedent. In a famous passage in the Satires, Horace parodies contemporary literary critics who rejected the importance of word order and arrangement (compositio) in Latin poetry.⁶⁰ Horace mocks the idea that individual words and phrases are sufficiently representative of the work of a given poet, pointing out that if you were to take his Satires to pieces—or those of his fellow satirist Lucilius—you would not be left with “even the limbs of a dismembered poet” (etiam disiecti membra poetae).⁶¹ Kirk Freudenburg (1993, 147–9) has shown that Horace’s image of the dismembered body of the poet is an argument against the grammatical figure of metathesis (transposition), here the rearrangement of word order.⁶² Philip’s compositional method gives credence to Horace’s misgivings about metathesis: in Zong! her commitment to verbal rearrangement embraces every level of her primary source text—the legal transcript of Gregson v Gilbert—involving not just the rearrangement of word order, but the rearrangement of individual words through anagram to arrive at a countertext. This very deliberate philological work of dissecting, rearranging, and reassembling is also present in Walcott’s refiguration of Homer as Omeros in the St Lucian landscape and in his conception of the fashioning of an epic memory in the Caribbean, articulated in “The Antilles: Fragments of an Epic Memory.” In this latter work, the peoples of the Caribbean—deprived of an “original language”—have assembled a culture through a process of “renaming, of finding new metaphors,” on an analogy with poetic creation (1998, 70). At the heart of Walcott’s vision of the integrity of Caribbean poetry and Caribbean poets is the importance of resisting the “folly of trying to smother their source” (78), thus in an essay ostensibly dedicated to traces of African and Asian epic memory in the modern Caribbean, we are reminded of one of Walcott’s boldest acts of epic renaming—Homer into O-mer-os—the epic as local and the local as epic. The classical middle passages in Walcott and Philip constitute a working in between traditions that have been artificially separated, using Latin as a medium which has the attraction of being a lingua

⁶⁰ This reading follows the interpretation put forward by Freudenburg 1993, 147–9. ⁶¹ Hor. Sat. 1.4.62. ⁶² See Freudenburg 1993, 148: “In other words, to dissolve the contexture of verse is to ‘butcher’ the poet.”

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franca that has accretions of empire while not being one of the imperial languages of the Caribbean. In philologically remastering the classics, Walcott and Philip mediate between divergent histories, highlighting the contentious ways in which Greek and Latin classics are already mediated by dominant traditions. This philological method corresponds to the concept of “anagrammatical blackness” in radical black aesthetic theory, where the experience of being “in the wake” involves the constant interruption and rearrangement of transmitted histories and texts.⁶³

⁶³ Sharpe 2016, 75–6, in dialogue with Moten 2003, 1.

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2 “Nero, the mustard!” The Ironies of Classical Slave Names in the British Caribbean Margaret Williamson

In Twelve Years a Slave, Solomon Northup, a free black man from New York who had been kidnapped in Washington in 1841 and sold into slavery in the South, recounts a part of that experience that had been shared by many others. Shipped to New Orleans, he is collected from the boat by a slave trader, the laughably named Mr. Theophilus Freeman, under a name he does not recognize (Northup 2007, 56): “Captain, where’s Platt?” demanded Theophilus Freeman. The captain was unable to inform him, no one being on board answering to that name. “Who shipped that nigger?” ’ he again enquired of the captain, pointing to me. “Burch,” replied the captain. “Your name is Platt—you answer my description. Why don’t you come forward?” he demanded of me, in an angry tone. I informed him that was not my name; that I had never been called by it, but that I had no objection to it as I knew of. “Well, I will learn you your name,” said he; “and so you won’t forget it either, by ____,” he added.

Margaret Williamson, “Nero, the mustard!” The Ironies of Classical Slave Names in the British Caribbean. In: Classicisms in the Black Atlantic. Edited by: Ian Moyer, Adam Lecznar, and Heidi Morse, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198814122.003.0003

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In the 2013 film based on Northup’s account, the threat implicit in Freeman’s statement is graphically realized with a blow across the face when Northup queries his new name. The practice of renaming newly acquired slaves was widespread across the Atlantic world, and as both versions of this scene make clear, it was an element in the assertion of power that enslavement entails.¹ If the practice of branding new slaves burns into their bodies the sign of another’s power over them, renaming them does the same on a discursive level.² This forcible induction into a discursive world previously unknown to the person enslaved but seemingly under the control of the enslaver echoes the enormously influential argument of Orlando Patterson: that being enslaved involves a kind of social death—being stripped of your old identity as you are forcibly inducted into a new one. However, as we shall see, the idea of complete erasure that is implicit in the idea of death is more problematic than Patterson’s essentially allegorical account suggests.³ The pattern of names in use, as it can be traced from plantation inventories, bears out the idea that naming was used to impose a new and distinctively servile identity. Slaves’ names as recorded in inventories by and large mark them as belonging to a different category from free whites. They customarily have only one name, whereas free whites have at least two, one of which indicates genealogy.⁴ And those names are mostly distinct from those free whites gave to themselves.⁵ Instead, slaves ¹ There has been much scholarly disagreement as to whether the names recorded for slaves were always given by masters (see Handler and Jacoby 1996; Burnard 2001). I have argued elsewhere (Williamson 2017) that there is good evidence that masters did often rename slaves, but that this was not always the case. What is clear, however, is the investment in control that narratives like this illustrate. ² For a description, see Price and Price 1992, 95–6. ³ See Brown (2009) for a powerful critique of Patterson’s model, which he characterizes as a “distillation” or a “theoretical abstraction” rather than a “description of the lived experiences of the enslaved” (1233). ⁴ Inventories do occasionally distinguish individuals with the same name, but they do so using appearance, stature, perceived provenance, occupation, and only occasionally parentage. ⁵ A study of the names of over 2,000 testators in Jamaica between 1731 and 1750 reveals very little overlap with the names borne by slaves on Blue Mountain Estate in 1731. Out of a total of 112, only one male and two female slaves have names commonly given to free whites (John, Mary, Sarah). A further five female slaves (Lucy, Judith, Rachel, Hannah, and Deborah) bear names also found in the testator list, although none of these is common. Among males the overlap is even smaller: one slave is named Andrew, a name borne by 19 males in the testator list (1 percent of the total), and two, Guy and Gregory, bear names more commonly used as surnames. See Oliver 1919, vol. 2, 114–23; Fitzherbert MSS, Derbyshire Record Office, Matlock (hereafter Fitzherbert), D239 M/E 16484. In the eastern part of Jamaica, Blue Mountain Estate was still a fairly small plantation in 1731 with 115

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have their own distinct names, the main classifiable types of which are the following: place names, mostly from England or Scotland, which were given only to males; hypocoristic—that is, pet or diminutive— names, again versions of European names; African-derived day-names; and European literary names, which will be my focus here and of which the majority are classical. Place names, the commonest type of all, are fairly clearly an instance of masters imposing their world on slaves. A well-known example is that of Thomas Thistlewood, who moved to Jamaica from a town in Lincolnshire in England in 1750, and called the first slave he ever acquired Lincoln.⁶ Another can be found in the inventory for Hope Plantation in 1785, where ten individuals designated as “new Negro boy[s]” are listed together and all but one have place names: Hampshire, Aylsbury, Warwick, Berkshire, Romney, Cumberland, Guilford, Stafford, and Yorkshire.⁷ Likewise, in the 1765 plantation inventory from Blue Mountain Estate in the east of Jamaica, a group of newly purchased African slaves (noted as “Iboe boys”) are listed with the names Scotland, Edinburg, Sterling, Aberdeen, Keeth, Forrest, Murray, Fife, St Andrew, and Stewart.⁸ On this estate, as elsewhere in Jamaica, some of the white overseers and managers were Scots. Not only, therefore, are they stamping the newly enslaved with the marks of their own culture; they are also accentuating the exercise of power this entails by using a cluster of similar names, which in this case are geographically adjacent as well as generically similar. We can designate this practice of drawing a group of names from the same cultural sphere “cluster naming”; other types of name that are deployed in this way include letters (Alpha/Omega), months and seasons, and Protestant grace names, such as Charity, Faith, and Patience.⁹ slaves. By 1777 the number of slaves had almost tripled to 305, but there do not seem to be any significant changes in naming patterns. The earlier inventory is used here for the sake of comparison with contemporaneous data about free white names. For edited transcriptions of these and several of the other inventories discussed here, see the “Jamaican Slave Names Project” 2018. ⁶ On Thistlewood, see Burnard 2004. Thistlewood’s purchase of Lincoln is recorded in his diary in a passage excerpted by Hall (1999, 78). ⁷ Huntington Library, Stowe Brydges Papers, West Indies Estates (hereafter STB–West Indies), Jamaican Estates Box 3. ⁸ Fitzherbert, D239 M/E 18028 (i). ⁹ Letters: Alpha and Omega, Hope 1785 (STB–West Indies). Months: March and June, Hope 1788, inventory entries 106–7. Grace names: Charity, Faith, Patience, Pleasant Hill 1789, Jamaican Material in the Slebech Papers, National Library of Wales (hereafter Slebech), 11523, inventory entries 234–6.

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Cluster naming is especially striking when the names are borne by a group that is distinct in other ways: for example, a group of male field workers on York Plantation in 1778, all African-born and of similar age and assessed value, were named after points of the compass.¹⁰ In this case the similarities between both them and their assigned names are enough to identify them as a cluster and to imply a single purposive act of naming by a slaveholder, even in an inventory that separates the names by listing them alphabetically and by category. Cluster naming that draws on European culture and knowledge strongly suggests that the names were given by slaveholders—the more so the larger the cluster.¹¹ The hypocoristic—pet or diminutive—names tell a slightly different but related story. Here the distinction is not an absolute one between slave and free names. Among free white inhabitants of Jamaica there were plenty of Sarahs, Katherines, Elizabeths, and so on, and they may have used shortened forms such as Sally, Kate, Bess, or Liz in their private lives; but these were not the names of record in surviving official documents, such as wills. Recording the hypocoristic form registers a difference of power and status. Criminals or servants in eighteenth-century England might and did have hypocoristic names recorded,¹² but not those of a higher class: as William Gouge put it in 1622 in a discussion of how wives should properly represent their inferiority to their husbands, the contractions Iack, Tom, Will, Hall for Iohn, Thomas, William, Henry are unseemly because “servants are usually so called” (Gouge 1622, 282–3). Finally we come to African names and European classical names. Much has been made by historians of the prevalence in the record of names of African origin, especially those originating as day-names in the West African Akan-Twi language group. The existence of such names has been used to argue that it was not always slaveholders who—as represented in Northup’s narrative and many others—were responsible for giving slaves the names that appear in the records. Even if, as I have argued elsewhere, the “African” names cannot be taken as straightforward ¹⁰ See nos. 44, 103, 145, 428 in “A List of Negroes on York Estate the 1st of January 1778” (University of Exeter, Gale-Morant papers 3/c/1). ¹¹ Alphabetized inventories sometimes give the impression of clustering Akan-derived day-names, but that is because so many of them begin with Kw-, spelled in Jamaica as Qu-, thus they appear together in such lists. ¹² For examples of predominantly lower-class names recorded in hypocoristic form, see Smith 2013.

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cultural survivals that indicate self-naming by slaves, it is important to qualify the picture that has been painted—not least by slaveholders themselves—of unilateral control on their part. Indeed, taking into account the hints in such things as runaway advertisements that slaves used alternate names among themselves throws into relief the ideological weight of accounts of naming, almost all of which were written by slaveowners.¹³ The repeated stress on naming in accounts such as Stedman’s, and even more in the instruction given by the Virginia slaveholder Robert “King” Carter to his overseers to take “care that the Negros, both men and women, that I sent . . . always go by the names we gave them,”¹⁴ suggests that such assertions of power required constant reinforcement. Nonetheless, the intent to assert power can be clearly read not only in narrative scenes of naming but also in the names chosen and the way in which they are deployed. The group to which this most clearly applies is that of literary, and especially classical, names. Plantation records show that names derived from classical antiquity were extensively used for slaves across broad swathes of the Atlantic world over a long period. There is as yet no synthetic account of this phenomenon, but its scope can be illustrated from studies varying widely as to time and location: a seventeenth-century plantation on a Francophone island in the Antilles, the island of St Helena in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, advertisements for fugitive slaves in colonial New York and New Jersey, and numerous accounts of the American South and the Caribbean.¹⁵ For the purposes of this discussion, the data used will be drawn from records for the island of Jamaica in the eighteenth century. The commonest classically derived names recorded for enslaved males were those of gods, heroes, and prominent historical figures, the last almost all from the period of Roman republican history, with a couple of emperors (Nero, Titus) thrown in. On Pleasant Hill estate in St Thomas in the East in 1763, for example, there were male slaves called Apollo, ¹³ Northup’s account, quoted at the start of this essay, is an obvious exception, but as a free subject whose enslavement was temporary, and who is concerned to emphasize slavery’s degradations, he has an atypical perspective. His response to being renamed is also that of a free man: he dramatizes his enslavement by assuming a right to linguistic self-determination that was not available to the enslaved (“I had no objection to it as I knew of”). ¹⁴ Quoted in Berlin 1996, 251. ¹⁵ Debien and Houdaille 1964; Cody 1987; Hodges and Brown 1994; Wright 2013, 243–76. See also Williamson 2018.

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Bacchus, Cato, Cupid, Cyrus, Hannibal, Hercules, Jupiter, Syphax, and Titus, representing 13 percent of all enslaved males on that estate.¹⁶ All these names and a few more of the same kind—Caesar, Hector, Mars, Mercury, Neptune, Nero, Pompey, Primus, and Scipio—are among the commonest classical names for male slaves. For women the picture is different: although the names of three goddesses, Diana, Venus, and to a lesser extent Juno, are extremely common for female slaves, others tend to be taken from classical poetry, especially pastoral poetry, and later imitations of it. The enslaved women on Pleasant Hill in 1763 included some named Celia, Chloe, Cretia, Fidelia, Pheba, and Thisbe: again all of these (with the exception of Thisbe) are widespread in the records, together with others such as Cynthia, Daphne, Dido, Flora, and Phillis. The naming patterns thus seem to position the two genders very differently, and there will be space here only to consider male names. What is striking is that the enslaved in Jamaica are very rarely given names that were used for slaves in antiquity.¹⁷ The term classical has been used thus far in a relatively neutral descriptive sense, meaning simply names whose prototypes were in use in ancient Greece and Rome.¹⁸ It is time to consider in more detail what this category—and its deployment by slaveholders—means. The simplest explanation of why they were used is that the Europeans who imposed them on slaves were simply supplementing their stock of possible names by reaching in a random way into the common cultural stock of eighteenth-century Europe, especially its literature, in which such names were common. In addition to the names listed above, we also

¹⁶ Slebech 3328. Most of these names have been standardized to a single spelling in order to facilitate comparison across inventories. For these and other standardizations, see the “Jamaican Slave Names Project” 2018. ¹⁷ See Wilson 1998 for an overview of Roman slave naming. Of the Roman names he lists as commonly used for slaves in the imperial period (twenty-nine names), only Primus and Secundus are found in the Atlantic world. However, as Cheesman 2009 points out, there was no hard and fast dividing line between free and slave names in Rome. The distinction between the classical names used for slaves and those of free whites in Britain and its colonies seems to have hardened over time. One of the earliest published lists of “Christian names,” Penkethman’s 1626 Onomatophylacium, lists Caesar, Hannibal, Hector, and Titus among men’s names, as well as Dido and Venus as possible names for women. All of these were in common use for slaves in the eighteenth century, but none figures in even the top fifty names for each sex from 1538 to 1700 compiled by Smith-Bannister 1997, with the exception of Hercules, which ranked thirty-fifth in popularity between 1538 and 1549. ¹⁸ See the “Jamaican Slave Names Project” 2018 for further discussion of these categorizations.

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find others drawn from the still predominantly classicizing literary tradition: the Pleasant Hill slaves in 1763 also included, for example, three named Castalio, Polydore, and Monimia, who were all characters in Thomas Otway’s 1680 play The Orphan.¹⁹ Some of the more directly classical names may well have entered the slave name pool by the same route. For example, Cato, Hannibal, and Syphax, all found as names on Pleasant Hill and later on Henry Dawkins’s Parnassus Estate in 1779, are characters from Addison’s enormously influential play Cato, first staged in 1713.²⁰ Other European name types that are drawn on in this way are biblical names, such as Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Sampson, or for women Hagar and Eve, and (less often) names from Shakespeare such as Hamlet, Romeo, and Lear. In all these cases the point is twofold: to distinguish slaves as a group from free whites by means of nomenclature and to assert the primacy of European culture. However, even if they are, as suggested, simply a part of the common cultural stock, the gesture of domination that their use represents can be intensified through cluster naming. The type of name that, after place names, is most often found in clusters is literary, and especially classical, names—but, interestingly enough, not biblical names. Examples include both sequential and non-sequential listings. The slaves managed by Thistlewood on Egypt Plantation in the late 1750s and 1760s include four with the unusual names of Pluto, Charon, Minos, and Rhadamanthus, all associated with the underworld in classical mythology. Since the local river was called the Styx, it is clear that the naming event(s) of which these are traces involved an in-group joke for those in the know—which did not, of course, include the bearers of the names.²¹

¹⁹ All three of these names are of ultimately Greek origin, but they almost certainly reached Otway by way of later traditions. Polydore (Polydorus) is a character in Euripides’ Hecuba, which was popular in the Renaissance; Castalio was adopted as a Latinized version of his surname by Sébastien Châteillon, a sixteenth-century French preacher and theologian. The immediate source for Monimia may be the character Monime, wife of Mithridates VI of Pontus, in Racine’s 1673 play Mithridate. ²⁰ Addison’s play also includes a male character called Juba, a name also found on Pleasant Hill in 1763; but as usual in plantation records, it belongs to a female and probably represents the Akan-derived name meaning “born on Monday.” I have found only one instance in the records of Juba used as a male name, namely, in 1736 (Merseyside Maritime Museum, D_DAV_2); in view of the date, it is possible that this derives from Addison. ²¹ Thomas Thistlewood papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University: OSB MSS 176, box 11 folder 83, work records for the years 1758 and 1759 (Minos, Pluto, Rhadamanthus), 1760 (same, plus Charon), and later. Thistlewood’s diary for 1758 also shows this group of slaves working (and sometimes absconding) together

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The same applies more obviously to the tongue-in-cheek note attached to a 1784 inventory: “Recd 4 New Negroes Names as follows Milton Pope Drydon & Swift.”²² On York Estate in 1778, a number of unusual classical names appear listed together: in a sequence of thirteen names for young males, no fewer than nine are classical, and these include the relatively uncommon names Phaeton, Plato, Pryam, and Ptolomy. Since this is an alphabetical list, clustering is more difficult to identify, but it is rendered more likely both by the concentration of unorthodox names and by the fact that Plato and Ptolomy belong to a group of four Eboes who are close in age and valuation.²³ On Spring Plantation in 1784, four out of seven “New Negro” women have classical names, of whom three—Aurora, Minerva, and Helen—are listed sequentially in a non-alphabetized list.²⁴ It is not always easy to distinguish accidental from pointed clustering. Is the sequential listing of the names of Julius and Caesar in the 1763 inventory for Pleasant Hill or the (non-sequential) inclusion of Emilia and Desdemona (both characters in Shakespeare’s Othello) as slaves on the Phillipsfield plantation in 1784 simply the result of mental, even subconscious, association?²⁵ There are several reasons for thinking that there is more to it than that. There is an obvious element of irony in giving to the enslaved the names of the most—rather than the least— powerful figures in Graeco-Roman society. And in the case of another closely related type of name, the import of such ironic inversion was clear to at least one recipient. Aristocratic titles such as Countess, Duchess, Duke, Prince, Princess, My Lord, and Queen are also used as names, sometimes in clusters.²⁶ One slave who was named in this way shows in her memoir that she understood perfectly the gesture of cultural superiority it entailed:

(OSB MSS 176, box 2 folder 9). Apart from rare examples like this, cluster naming is normally visible only in inventories, leaving traces of the act of naming but not of the subsequent working lives of the enslaved. ²² Increase and Decrease records for Henry Dawkins’s Sandy Gully plantation, 1784 (Wilberforce House Museum, Hull, box 13 item 2.1). ²³ See n. 10. Other classical names in this inventory—Hector, Homer, “Horrace [sic],” Pindar, Virgil, and Sappho—also suggest strong literary interests. ²⁴ Bristol Record Office, Spring Plantation Papers, AC/WO 16 (27) 120 (f). ²⁵ Slebech 3328, 11524. ²⁶ On Blue Mountain Estate in 1765, three adjacently listed female slaves are called Queen, Countess, and Lady (Fitzherbert, D239 ME 18028 [i], inventory entries 154–6); on Hope Plantation in 1785, three of the ten “New Negro Girl[s]” are named Duchess, Countess, and Lady (STB–West Indies, inventory entries 337, 339, 343).

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In [a spelling book belonging to Mary Prince, a former slave] her name is written “Mary, Princess of Wales”—an appellation which, she says, was given her by her masters. It is a common practice for the colonists to give ridiculous names of this description to their slaves; being, in fact, one of the numberless modes of expressing the habitual contempt with which they regard the negro race. (Note by the original editor of Prince [1831] 1987, 74)

In the case of literary and especially classical names, there is an additional dimension to the mockery: the slaves’ ignorance of the significance of their names. Only those in possession of the cultural capital that such names represent can fully understand the joke, while the ignorant slave is made unwittingly to bear the mark of his or her own cultural inferiority. It was, of course, precisely Africans’ lack of the supposed civilization that high European culture epitomized which was often offered as a justification for their subjugation. A far from atypical example is found in the memoirs of Thomas Staunton St Clair, who served as a career soldier and officer in Demerara (later British Guyana) from 1806 to 1808 and published his memoirs in 1834: It will appear that the injustice of the slave-trade exists more in name than in reality; that, in fact, when Europeans take inhabitants of Africa from their native soil, they . . . merely transplant them from a land of ignorance and superstition to one of civilization and improvement. (St Clair 1834, 203)

It is perhaps because of the particular charge associated with classical names that they are overrepresented in fictional and other narrative accounts of slavery. In the inventories on which this discussion is based, the proportion of enslaved males with classical names never goes above 15 percent, and in fact is often lower. Yet fictions of slavery abound in classical names, from the renaming of the protagonist as Caesar in Aphra Behn’s 1688 novel Oroonoko to the slave protagonists Caesar and Hector of Maria Edgeworth’s “The Grateful Negro” (1804). When Curtis Brett arrived in Kingston from his native Dublin in 1748, it was the classical names given to male slaves that most struck him: presently I heard called the Names of Pompey, Scipio, Caesar, etc and again those of Yabba, Juba, Quasheba (Negro Boys and Girls, Slaves in the Family) which first raised an Idea of my being in old Rome; & then again of my being transported suddenly to Africa.²⁷

²⁷ Curtis Brett Journal (unpublished), 1748, ff. 11–12. Thanks to Dr. Martin Brett of Cambridge University for permission to quote this excerpt.

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In the nineteenth century the prominence of classically named slaves in Matthew “Monk” Lewis’s Journal of a West India Proprietor is accentuated by his rather labored literary riffs on names he encounters among them, such as Psyche, Venus, Hercules, and Neptune.²⁸ In addition to rehearsing the justification of slavery just quoted, Thomas Staunton St Clair also recounts an episode of naming that illuminates the use of classical names for the enslaved. In volume 1 he describes how he and a fellow officer bought two African boys on a whim straight off the boat. As his first gesture of appropriation, his fellowofficer, Yates, gives them “Roman names”: one, “the ugliest of the two,” he calls Nero and keeps for himself; the other, Scipio, is given to St Clair “to educate” (1834 1999, 227). At first, master and slave are presented as equally pleased with their new relationship: The next morning . . . we dressed them in white canvass trowsers and shirts, and strutted off with our two black boys behind us; they grinning at each other, as pleased as my lord-mayor on a show-day. (227)

But the boys’ “education” begins in earnest on the third day with their induction into their new servile condition, and it includes the reinforcement of their “Roman names”: On the third day we made them begin to wait on us, and such ridiculous scenes took place as nearly killed us all at table with laughter. Yates began with Nero. “Nero, the mustard!” Poor Nero knew nothing more than the sound of his name, and stood, staring at his master, with his mouth open. “The mustard, Nero!” he again vociferated, pointing to the sideboard . . . Poor Nero . . . seized a bottle of vinegar, and carried it to his master, who pretended to be in a great passion, and sent him back with it . . . Yates, with the determination of impressing these ingredients more strongly on his memory, made him open his mouth and put into it a spoonful of [mustard], calling out, “Mustard, mustard,” while the poor boy was spitting and sputtering, and dancing on the floor, from the effects of this hot substance. (227–8)

St Clair “practise[s] the same discipline” with his own slave, Scipio, using cayenne pepper, and he reports with satisfaction that Scipio never forgot its name thereafter. This scene is presented as one of merriment; and as if to reassure the reader that it was all harmless fun, St Clair concludes by emphasizing

²⁸ See Lewis [1834] 1999, 43, 83–4, 143.

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that the boys learned quickly and soon became “strongly and faithfully attached to us” (229). But this process of “education” looks more like a violent indoctrination. First it involves the infliction of pain, albeit relatively mild, and second it is staged as a scene of humiliation. The humiliation derives partly from the irony of the boys’ Roman names and their incomprehension of them set against the masters’ knowing laughter. Yates’s command is accompanied by the emphatic repetition of Nero’s incongruous name (“Nero, the mustard!” “The mustard, Nero!”), and St Clair, while professing sympathy for him, also highlights his incomprehension of the name’s significance: “Poor Nero knew nothing more than the sound of his name” (227). Here we see many of the elements present in the scene with Platt—the imposition of a new name and a degree of violence—as features of the induction into slavery, but with an additional twist: the owners’ enjoyment of the incongruity of their elevated names and an explicit emphasis on their bearers’ ignorance of what these culturally charged names mean. Yet it is worth looking more closely at the superiority being claimed by those who deploy classical naming in this way. Classical allusion in eighteenth-century Jamaica was deployed in a range of different ways, not all of which depended on deep knowledge of Graeco-Roman antiquity. Thistlewood’s use of schoolboy Latin in his diary to record his sexual exploitation of enslaved women is an extreme instance of the use of classical learning as hermetic insider knowledge, restricted to an inner circle. As far as we know, he did not intend anyone else to read his diary, and the use of Latin for his sexual practices (the remainder was in English) ensures an extra level of privacy. However, Thistlewood’s grammar school education in England had included the standard instruction in classical languages and literature, and he continued and developed his knowledge while living in Jamaica.²⁹ The books he shipped out to Jamaica in 1750 include, as well as his old Latin grammar textbooks, some standard literary authors—Virgil, Juvenal, Ovid, Sallust, and Tacitus—plus translations into English of these and other authors, as well as some contemporary works in Latin, which was still the language of scholarship. Although his reading over the next few decades tended to focus on more practical matters, classical texts continued to be represented in his book purchases and reading notes. The newspapers he and ²⁹ On Thistlewood’s reading and apparently prolific book-borrowing, see Burnard 2004.

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his friends imported from England routinely included poems in Latin and advertisements for the growing body of translations from classical languages.³⁰ It is no doubt because of Thistlewood’s hopes for his mulatto son John that in the 1770s he took unusually detailed notes on Thomas Sheridan’s 1769 Plan of Education for a Nobleman, which, of course, specified classical authors. Although Thistlewood’s social aspirations on his son’s behalf ended with John’s death in 1780, the inclusion of these authors in the educational program for a would-be nobleman provides a clear indication of why they continued to figure in his own reading, even though his interests ran more to the practical and scientific.³¹ Somewhere in between the extremes of Thistlewood’s private dog Latin and his public display of cultured classicism is the performance of superiority through classical allusion in which both St Clair and the inventory takers participated. The knowledge required to appreciate St Clair’s use of the “Roman names” Nero and Scipio need not have extended much further than the fact that they had a certain cachet. That which enabled the name-givers to riff on classical names by extending them within a particular category into a conspicuous cluster, like the clusters of geographical names already considered, probably demanded a little more. The already-mentioned cluster found in the York 1788 inventory, including the names Phaeton, Plato, Pryam, and Ptolomy, drew on yet more, but still without presupposing a deep familiarity with antiquity. However, the use of classical names to mock slaves is only part of the story; they had other uses that rendered the irony of their use for the enslaved unstable. As well as denoting the gods, heroes, and leaders already mentioned, classical names were also used as pseudonyms in political journals, besides being given to servants and ships.³² Most significantly, they were also used for animals, both domestic pets and

³⁰ On the growth of translations and literary imitations through the eighteenth century, see Gillespie 2011. ³¹ OSB MSS 176, box 11 folder 87, Reading Notes and Other Notes, 1770s. ³² Pseudonyms used in the St James Chronicle, which was regularly imported by Thistlewood and his friends from London, in 1766 included the following, all of which were also given to slaves: Cornelia, Flora, Sappho, Rhadamanthus, Chloe, Titus, and Cato. Several other classicizing pseudonyms in the Chronicle do not overlap with commonly used slave names.

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working animals. In the first category—namely, pets—a well-known contemporary example is the story of Pompey the Little: The Adventures of a Lapdog by Francis Coventry, which went into many editions. There is also, notoriously, considerable overlap between slave and animal names on plantations: for example, on the Blue Mountain Estate plantation in 1771, one-third of the 152 animals had the same names as slaves on the plantation, including some classical ones. Thus these names had also acquired an association with the animal, childlike, or servile.³³ As Claude Levi-Strauss has pointed out, the very act of giving animals such as dogs individual names helps to make them what he calls “metonymical human beings” (1966, 207). Rather than categorically different beings, they become creatures in an undefinable place of adjacency or alterity in relation to humans. Recent scholarship on the eighteenth century has seen the constitution of animals as pets as a way of thinking about alterity—looking beyond the boundary of the human to try to define it with reference to the nonhuman.³⁴ Yet for classical names in particular, the ancient referents of the names also open up a range of meanings at the other end of the animal–human–divine scale, ranging from prominent historical figures, such as the ones already mentioned, through to superhuman heroes—as in the case of Hercules and Hector— and to the suprahuman, that is, the divine: Mars, Neptune, Mercury, even Jupiter. This whole shifting field of meanings as a whole, then, gestures not just beyond the civilized world, but beyond humanity itself. Thus Nero in the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth might be the name of an emperor, a slave, a lapdog, or a steer, and the range for deities is even wider. And there is a range of affective relationships evoked through that spectrum, from the affection one might show to a pet, to the discipline—sometimes harsh, whipping, for example—that might be applied to a working animal, to the respect, even deference, that a figure such as Nero—or, more typically, Scipio—might evoke. The ways in which St Clair’s narrative maneuvers among the relationships suggested by these names cast further light on his use of irony in the naming scene. The chapter begins with Yates and St Clair going to

³³ In a (non-comprehensive) search of eighteenth-century newspapers, Wright (2013, 260–2) found the following classical names given to dogs: Caesar, Cato, Hector, Neptune, Pluto, Pompey, and Scipio; also Flora and Phillis. ³⁴ See, e.g. Brown 2001; Palmeri 2006.

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observe the sale of slaves off the ship, and St Clair describes both the slave market and the slaves themselves in a range of ways. The slave trade itself he sees as a cause of “disgust and horror” (224), a “traffic in human flesh” (220), and he describes the slaves themselves as “poor creatures” and “poor wretches.” Yet in the next breath he remarks how little they seem to suffer from their enslavement, exclaiming “How different are the feelings of these ignorant beings . . . from ours” (224). In this section of the narrative he uses an animal image to argue the horror of the trade, commenting on how the planters examine these captives, limb after limb, “just as the dealers do with horses in our fairs in England” (221). After the boys have been purchased and given new clothes, the image and attitude change dramatically: now, as they grin at each other, he describes them as being “as pleased as my lord-mayor on a show-day” (227). But the elevation implied in this image is ripe for ironic reversal, and indeed it has already been reversed in the naming system, where Mylord is one of the aristocratic titles already mentioned.³⁵ It is also, as we have seen, reversed in the scene of naming and subjection that follows: Nero and Scipio are, as it were, set up only to be brought down by the ironic imposition of their names. What is interesting is the extent to which the force of this scene depends on exclusions. First, there is no mention of the prior language and culture of the boys: St Clair is able to present them (implausibly) as tabula rasa for the meanings he and Yates impose on them, just as plantation inventories omit mention of previous names. The association with working animals, though evoked earlier in that reference to the horse trade, is also excluded. The only relationship evoked by the names Nero and Scipio that is consonant with the naming scene itself is that of domestic pet, the only kind of animal normally allowed into the house; and I think that complex relationship of mastery and tenderness is in fact suggested by St Clair’s constant repetition of the word “poor,” which he often uses elsewhere, but never for creatures who are his equals or represent a threat.³⁶ But that pitying, almost affectionate relationship is ³⁵ STB–West Indies, Hope 1776, entry 68. ³⁶ Examples include a slave who risks whipping (vol. 1, 123, “poor Mungo”), a free black woman whose costume and pretensions St Clair satirizes (vol. 1, 116, “this poor black creature”), St Clair’s dog Pincher when threatened by other dogs (vol. 1, 143), a rattlesnake killed by a fellow-officer (vol. 1, 165), rank-and-file soldiers on an ill-fated expedition (vol. 1, 180), and the rebellious Bush Negroes, as they are being executed by being burned alive at

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trumped by the controlling irony, just as St Clair’s sympathy for slaves earlier in the chapter is trumped by his argument that abolishing slavery would not benefit them, as well as in the previous chapter by the familiar assertion that civilization, even for the enslaved, is preferable to barbarity. The sentimental language of pity and tenderness is ultimately contained by the mastery both described and enacted by it, although it also serves to mystify that mastery, to soften its outlines. The scene brings together, then, two features of the “Roman names”: first a selective evocation of the animal associations of the names, and second their association with power. In the naming scene itself, the animal associations of their names have narrowed in such a way as to poise them on the cusp between the not-quite-human—like pet animals—and humans who have the capacity for language and understanding. What keeps them just on the human side of that division is their capacity for language, which is presented as being brought forth ex nihilo in this scene. The sadistic infliction of pain at the site of speech—the mouth—initiates linguistic understanding—“he never afterwards forgot its name”—and thus eventually the possibility of speech. Yet the boys’ linguistic understanding is also already present as a repressed potentiality: their lack of understanding is predicated on the supposition that they could understand, even though they do not. You cannot in fact have the repression without the potentiality, and it is the ironic play on their names that dramatizes that repression, as well as the exercise of power it entails. “Poor Nero knew nothing more than the sound of his name,” says St Clair, encapsulating the superiority he claims first in the adjective “poor” and second in the allusion to the gap in knowledge—thus, status, power, civilization—between officers and slaves. This irony, and the superiority it stages, would not be available if either the slaves did not have elevated names—if there were no authoritative and exclusionary knowledge in play—or if, on the other hand, they were animals without the capacity for understanding: the mere sound of his or her own name is precisely what an animal might be expected to understand.³⁷

its conclusion (vol. 1, 184). As a hunter and an officer, St Clair is complicit in all these scenes. ³⁷ For reminders that enslavement exploits the humanity of the enslaved in ways that would be impossible in dealing with animals, see Johnson 2003, 2018; Bloom 2017.

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Yet on what exactly does the implicit claim to exclusive knowledge on the part of the officers rest? As we have seen, ostensible knowledge of classical culture could cover a wide range, and it need not involve any deep knowledge of Graeco-Roman antiquity. In order for this scene to have its effect, the officers needed to know only two things about the signification of Roman names: on one hand, the convention of giving them to slaves and, on the other, the cachet they connote. It is possible, therefore, that they knew both as much and as little about classical names as Mary Prince knew about aristocratic names—namely, that they are associated with power, and are therefore given to slaves in a gesture of cruel irony. The classicizing dramatized here is a posture, and it is bogus in the sense that it is underpinned by brute power rather than real knowledge. The association with power could hardly be clearer, since the speakers here—army officers—are the enforcers of European domination. What matters is not what is said but who says it. The classicism exemplified in this scene, then, goes well beyond the almost incidental fact that the knowledge it evokes derives from the Graeco-Roman world. Far more significant is its implication in a gesture of cultural purism that is analogous to, and deployed in the service of, racial purism. Its key feature is its dependence on a series of exclusions. On one hand, the other associations of Roman names, along with the relationships they connote in other spheres of life, are very selectively evoked, and many are repressed. The other repression is in the staging of the scene as the boys’ entry into language, removing all mention of their prior capacity to signify—the languages which, by the age of ten, they surely knew. Just as their previous language is absent, so the potentialities of the language into which they are being inducted are heavily edited. But the necessity of these exclusions also shows how the gesture is doomed to failure. Neither the pre-existing multivalence of the names nor the possibility of new signification can in fact be entirely suppressed. However symbolically mutilated the boys’ entry into language may be in this scene, their capacity to deploy, evade, subvert, and signify on their new names cannot be contained, especially in light of the new cultural and linguistic meanings which—despite St Clair’s silence—they brought to the encounter. In the face of this multiplicity, both past and future, the gesture of containment and exclusion must be constantly—because ineffectually—repeated. Classicism, with its emphasis on purity, closure, and boundedness, is here confronted by the dynamic fluidity of

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creolization, in the sense of a never-ending creative dialogue between different cultures, languages, and social groups—and this applies even within the grotesquely unequal power relations of slavery.³⁸ What would later be called the “master languages” of Europeans never in fact achieved complete domination: thus Robert “King” Carter’s instruction to his overseer constantly to inculcate the slaves’ new names is an index of the anxiety accompanying renaming rather than of its effectiveness.³⁹ An index of the power and ubiquity of creolization can be found in one of the already-mentioned names for women: Pheba. When spelled thus or as Phebe, Phoeboe, Phaba, or Phoebe, this looks at first sight like a classicizing name. Yet it appears to have merged with another extremely common type of name found on Jamaican plantations: daynames from the West African language Akan-Twi.⁴⁰ Phibbah, which happens to be the name of Thistlewood’s most constant enslaved sexual partner, likely represents a combination of the Akan-Twi female name Phibba/Phibbi/Phibah, “born on Friday,” with the classical one: thus it is a radically creole name with no single cultural origin. It is impossible to determine from the multiple spellings whether a transcriber (or any other observer, including its bearer) regarded it as African or classical; the natural tendency would be for a European to err in the direction of the more familiar, namely, the latter. Creolity in this sense—multiple origins and meanings that constantly evolve in new contexts and for different observers—permeates the whole pool of names, whether, as here, represented graphically or not. If the significance of Roman names is under threat from creolity, so too is the irony underpinning their application to slaves, all the more because its ultimate guarantee is extratextual. As we have already noted,

³⁸ The literature on creolization is extensive: for some overviews, see Balutansky and Sourieau 1998; Shepherd and Richards 2002; Stewart 2007. These and other accounts of creolization, while differently inflected in different national situations, concur in rejecting binary oppositions such as master/slave, white/black, and so on (themselves the product of colonial thinking) in favor of accounts that stress its interactive nature. The much-quoted phrase of Brathwaite (1971, 307) in relation to creolization—that it was “cruel but creative”—is apt for the context of slavery. ³⁹ See n. 14. ⁴⁰ See DeCamp 1967. For an example of a female Akan day-name, Coobah (Cuba, Cubba, and so on, meaning “Wednesday-born”), that despite its origins has been assimilated into the pool of New World names and is no longer treated as wholly African, see Williamson 2017.

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what stabilizes it is the power of the officers over the bodies of the enslaved, which in the physical—though not discursive—sense embraces the possibility of their execution. The fact that physical death is a possibility for a slave while cultural death is not might be regarded as the ultimate triumph of culture—just not of European culture. Still, in the sense that it depends on the relative power of the participants, the irony is what John Seery in Political Returns (1990) calls situational rather than simply textual. His emphasis on irony as an interactive process is echoed by many others; as another theorist of irony Linda Hutcheon (1994, 2) puts it, “the ‘scene’ of irony involves relations of power based in relations of communication.” All the more disturbing, then, is the way in which this text implicates its readers in that irony. It is not only St Clair’s fellow officers who lay claim to the power associated with arcane European knowledge; his readers, too, as they look over his shoulder at the scene, are implicated in the subject position implied by shared knowledge. The knowing mastery which we as readers are invited to share over the meaning of the names works a powerful ideological effect on us, one that involves us, too, in a gesture whereby power over the boys trumps pity for them. In the opening pages of the chapter, St Clair has, as we have seen, expressed sympathy for the enslaved, and even horror at the institution itself. But these sentiments are followed by some familiar arguments in mitigation: abolition will not benefit the enslaved, who appear to be happy. An index of the extent to which this naming scene instantiates power⁴¹ may perhaps be found in the way another later one brilliantly and wittily reverses its irony. It is no accident either that this second narrative postdates slavery or that its author was writing in declared opposition to slavery and its aftermath. Charles W. Chesnutt, born in Ohio in 1858, grandson of a prosperous white farmer and slave-owner and his black slave housekeeper, began in the 1880s writing with the aim of addressing “the unjust spirit of caste which is so insidious as to subject a whole race and all connected with it to scorn and social ostracism” (Chesnutt 1993, 139). His first works of fiction were inspired by stories from the period of slavery told by his father-in-law’s black gardener. In them “Uncle Julius,” a former slave, tells stories about slavery to his current employer and the ⁴¹ For a fuller discussion of the relation between naming and power, see Butler 1997 and the discussion in Benson 2006.

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latter’s wife. It is the white owner who is the overall narrator; Uncle Julius’s stories and the remarks of his wife and other relatives are quoted in direct speech. In “A Deep Sleeper,” written in 1893 and first published in 1899, Uncle Julius tells the narrator, his wife, and his sister-in-law about a group of plantation slaves named Skundus, Tushus, Cottus, and Squinchus. The sister-in-law, Mabel, responds to the names by “shaking with laughter” and asks how the slaves came by them. Uncle Julius responds: “Dem names wuz gun ter ’em by ole Marse Dugal’ McAdoo, wat I use’ter b’long ter. Marse Dugal’ named all de babies w’at wuz bawn on de plantation. Dese young ’un’s mammy wanted ter call ’em sump’n plain en’ simple, like ‘Rastus’ er ‘Caesar’ er ‘George Wash’n’ton’; but ole Marse say no, he want all de niggers on his place ter hab diffe’nt names, so he kin tell’em apart. He’d done use’ up all de common names, so he had ter take sump’n else. Dem names he gun Skundus en’ his brudders is Hebrew names en’ wuz tuk out’n de Bible.” “Can you give me chapter and verse?” asked Mabel. (Chesnutt [1899] 2002, 736–7)

The multiple layers of irony in this scene are prepared first by Mabel’s amusement at the names themselves, and then by her skeptical response to Uncle Julius’s explanation: “Can you give me chapter and verse?” There can be no doubt that Chesnutt knew exactly how he was setting up his classically educated white readers with these names, which are, of course, creolized versions of the Latin for second, third, fourth, and fifth, and thus an extension of the common slave name Primus, meaning “first.”⁴² Just as St Clair’s readers will have done, such readers are likely to take pleasure in decoding the arcane language, as well as the irony of “Caesar” being described as a “plain and simple name.” The smile of satisfied—perhaps self-satisfied?—recognition will probably grow even wider when we read the old man’s explanation of their provenance: “Hebrew names . . . out’n de Bible.” But the assumption of superior knowledge underpinning the amusement of white listeners and readers alike is misplaced. Uncle Julius may ⁴² On Chesnutt’s education in the Greek and Roman classics, see Masiki 2016. Unlike contemporaries such as William Scarborough and W. E. B. Du Bois, Chesnutt was largely self-educated, in part because, as he notes in his journal in 1878, “first class teachers would not teach a ‘nigger’ ” (Chesnutt 1993, 93). Latin ordinals other than Primus are found in inventories, but much more rarely.

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not cite chapter and verse here, but his creator Chesnutt could certainly have done so. The classical prototypes of these names are only the first, visible layer of significance: the names Secundus, Tertius, and Quartus also appear in the Bible, as Julius has claimed—albeit in the New Testament rather than the Hebrew Old Testament. And lest there be any doubt about Chesnutt’s sly vindication of Uncle Julius, one of the Secundus characters figures in the story of Eutychus (“fortunate”), who—like the title character of Uncle Julius’s story—was a deep sleeper (Acts 20:4–10).⁴³ The relevance of this connection becomes clear in the dénouement, where Uncle Julius, as usual, has the last laugh. In the framing narrative, he has been asked to help the owners harvest a ripe watermelon. Uncle Julius first questions whether the watermelon is ripe, then agrees that it should be harvested because otherwise it may be stolen by “po’ w’ite trash” (735). However, he declares himself unable to manage the heavy wheelbarrow, offering the services of his young relative Tom—but only after Tom, who is “a deep sleeper,” can be roused. While they are waiting, Uncle Julius tells the story of a slave who evidently fooled his white master about a lengthy absence by claiming that he had been asleep for a month; but Uncle Julius tells this tall tale straight, leaving his audience to infer that it was a pretense. Then comes the final turning of the tables: when young Tom arrives, and they go for the watermelon, it has gone. The inference must be that Uncle Julius is party to its disappearance, and that his warnings about “po’ w’ite trash” were a cover. The governing irony, therefore, is that those who mocked Uncle Julius’s rendering of the Latinderived names turn out to be those on whom deception is practiced— twice over. The position of knowing and ignorant observers on which classical slave naming depended has been neatly reversed. This staging of knowledge as power reverses the power relations in St Clair both within the narrative and in the relationship between text and audience.

⁴³ I owe the New Testament references to the insightful argument of Barnard 2014. I differ from him only in emphasis: my analysis assumes that the names are recognizable as derived from Latin ordinals even through their dialectal rendering rather than being, as he puts it, “unrecognizable to white listeners as names in any language at all,” though, of course, the satire depends on their being, at a minimum, recognizable to white readers (Barnard 2014, 76). On the implications of Chesnutt’s renderings of dialect, see Redling 2006. See also the comment by Hemenway, contrasting the knowledge of Uncle Julius with that of the narrator persona, John: “John reads, but does not understand, Julius ‘knows’ but does not require abstractions for proof” (Hemenway 1974, quoted in Sollors 1985, 126).

Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

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Fig. 2.1. Johnny Newcome in Love in the West Indies (London, 1808). In the lower right panel are shown Newcome’s children, identified in the caption as (1) Lucretia Diana Newcome, (2) Penelope Mimbo Newcome, (3) Quaco Dash Newcome, (4) Cuffy Cato Newcome, (5) Caesar Cudjoe Newcome, (6) Helena Quashebah Newcome, (7) Aristides Juba Newcome, (8) Hector Sammy Newcome, (9) Hannibal Pompey Wampo Newcome.

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Reading archives alongside documentary accounts, and even fictional accounts, cannot remedy the widely—and justly—lamented gaps in the archives.⁴⁴ But it can bring into sharper focus the ideological investment that structures the archive, and thus help to reveal its partiality and open up some of its silences. In the sources examined here, the most important feature of classical allusion is not the way in which it frames perception, although it undoubtedly does do that in other New World encounters between the known (by Europeans) and unknown. Those who named their slaves Homer, Virgil, Pindar, or Sappho were not offering any commentary on those individuals’ poetic prowess. Rather, they were boasting of their own fluency in the language of power. But that language turns out to be a very thin veneer, whose pretensions are very easily turned against its speakers once the power relations change. The rhetoric of inventories, especially those produced by managers as evidence of their competence, is one of control, but in the light of the St Clair scene, we can also read them as a record of failure. Indeed, even before Chesnutt so neatly turned the pretensions implicit in “knowing your classics back on themselves, classical naming had come to signify the emptiness of such pretensions. A satirical cartoon from 1808 (see Fig. 2.1) charts newly arrived planter Johnny Newcome’s liaison with his black mistress, which resulted in the birth of nine children. In addition to his or her surname, each child has multiple first names mostly consisting of a classical name juxtaposed with an Akan-derived day-name: Caesar Cudjoe Newcome, Helena Quasheba Newcome, and so on. The target of the satire is Johnny Newcome’s social pretensions, which are signaled partly by the multiple names given to his children. The effect is fatally undercut, however, by the dissonance between the two types of first name: the irretrievably servile connotations of the day-names and the pomposity of the classical ones. Yet the effect of comically doomed pretentiousness is possible only because the classical names are also typically servile. To return to the relationship between classicism and creolity, the classical has been trumped by the creole in a way that responds with uncanny precision to the mocking way in which all those slaveholders made use of it. It is no more than poetic justice.

⁴⁴ Among recent attempts to grapple with this issue, see Hartman 2008; Fuentes 2016.

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3 Athens and Sparta of the New World The Classical Passions of Santo Domingo Dan-el Padilla Peralta

I knew intuitively that people can suffer from historical overdose, complaisant hostages of the pasts they create. —Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995)

For all its productivity, the postcolonial turn in classical reception has for the most part been confined to the anglophone world.¹ In a reminder that the dominion of empire continues to leave its mark on the Acknowledgments. This chapter began with an invitation from Ian Moyer and Paul Hébert. Interlocutors at Columbia University (Jesús Rodríguez Velasco, Murad Idris, Christopher Brown, and Eileen Gillooly), the University of Maryland, College Park (Francisco Barrenechea and Judith Hallett), Reed College (Jessica Seidman), the Hunter College Bluhm Scholars Program (Elizabeth Butterworth), Princeton University’s Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication (David Bellos and Liesl Yamaguchi) and Program in Latin American Studies (Maria Gabriela Nouzeilles), the University of Virginia’s Political Thinking at the Margins conference (Lawrie Balfour and Murad Idris), and Stanford University’s Department of Classics (Grant Parker) prodded me into reformulating the essential questions. Distilling some of this material for a chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Comparative Political Theory (Padilla Peralta 2019) tightened up the argument; thanks to Megan Thomas and—that homie strikes again!—Murad Idris. My most heartfelt gratitude is reserved for Adam Lecznar, Heidi Morse, Ian Moyer, and Nick Geller, who all gave of their time and editorial insight to improve this chapter. ¹ A selection: Goff and Simpson 2007; Hardwick and Gillespie 2007; Hardwick and Stray 2008; Greenwood 2010; Orrells, Bhambra, and Roynon 2011; Vasunia 2013 (with Umachandran 2014); Torlone 2014; Parker 2017. Dan-el Padilla Peralta, Athens and Sparta of the New World: The Classical Passions of Santo Domingo. In: Classicisms in the Black Atlantic. Edited by: Ian Moyer, Adam Lecznar, and Heidi Morse, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198814122.003.0004

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production of academic knowledge, classical encounters in hispanophone cultures and literatures remain underappreciated—though there are signs that this state of affairs is on its way out. Elisa Rizo and Madeleine Henry have published a path-clearing collection of essays that document how “Hispanophone and Lusophone receptions of the classics expose the conditions in which societies of the Diaspora, and also of Africa, endure the challenges of modernity”; and research into Greek drama’s reception in the Americas and into the classical debts of Latin American writers, architects, and nation-builders has accelerated dramatically.² Many of these studies strive to underline classical reception’s place within projects of anti-imperial or anti-colonial resistance. Greek and Latin texts have in recent decades proven quite fertile for counter-hegemonic enterprises, as the global footprint of Sophocles’ Antigone exemplifies.³ We may finally be witnessing a “democratic turn” in Greco-Roman antiquity’s reception, though the discipline’s continuing incubation of anti-democratic tendencies should quiet any optimism on this score.⁴ Nonetheless, the hispanophone Caribbean and the island of Hispaniola in particular have so far been bit players in classical reception’s efflorescence. This development is all the more curious given the lengths to which Dominican scholars have gone to write themselves and the Dominican Republic into white European genealogies that deliberately shun “the other peoples of the archipelago” (Torres-Saillant 1997, 214–15). As routed through a specific form of classical reception, the transcription of white European and criollo domination into the DNA of Dominican culture is the subject of this chapter. I will be arguing that two interlocking appropriations of ancient Greece wind their way through Dominican culture and politics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The first is the crowning of pre-independence Spanish-speaking Santo Domingo as the “Athens of the New World”; the second is the reinvention of the ² Rizo and Henry 2016b, 3. Drama: Hardwick 2004; Torrance 2007; Nelli 2010; Barrenechea 2015; several essays in Bosher et al. 2015, esp. Andújar 2015; note also Andújar in progress. Writers: Laird 2015 on Neo-Latin authors of the colonial period; CamposMuñoz 2013 on Garcilaso de la Vega; Jansen 2016, 2018 on Borges. Architects: Niell 2016 on José María de la Torre’s classicizing building El Templete (Havana). Nation-builders: Bartosik-Vélez 2018 on Bolívar, to be read with Mignone 2016, 196–201, on the site of Bolívar’s famous juramento. ³ See the essays in Mee and Foley 2011, esp. Fradinger 2011 on Antigone in Haiti. ⁴ Antigone’s global reach: Hardwick 2004; Goff and Simpson 2007. The “democratic turn” of Classics: Hardwick and Harrison 2013. The continuing complicity of Classics in racialized anti-democratic practices: Padilla Peralta 2017 (immigration restrictionism); Umachandran 2017 (white fragility).

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Dominican Republic as the “Sparta of the New World” under the dictatorship of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo (1930–61). I will show that these paired Hellenophile appropriations, in conjunction with a selective engagement of ancient Rome, are integral to the racialized anti-Haitianism “propagated by the [Dominican Republic’s] dominant classes” as a means of reproducing and sustaining forms of political control.⁵ The specter of these appropriations continues to stalk contemporary Dominican nationalist politics: the conclusion to this chapter will outline their warping effects on the twenty-first-century fabric of Dominican life. Beyond its specific brief of cataloguing the reception of the classical in Santo Domingo, this chapter hopes to mount a critique of nation-building enterprises that is broadly compatible with, and significantly indebted to, Paul Gilroy’s model of the Black Atlantic as a site for the construction of a doubly conscious cultural system triangulated between Europe and Africa. There are at least two interpretive hurdles that will need to be cleared in the course of formulating such a critique. The first hurdle has to do with the risks of reading sophisticated textual productions solely or primarily as ideology, even if one is already committed to the proposition that classical reception is fundamentally a species of political ideology. The second is the methodological challenge of narrating how the European-oriented classicisms privileged by several generations of Dominican intellectuals came to be coupled with a vehement disavowal and effacement of Africa and blackness. Any effort to plot the trajectories of classical reception in the Dominican Republic soon finds itself face to face with a dilemma: the writers and artists most instrumental in this reception are the ones most deeply implicated in the drive to occlude if not erase alternative modes of cultural reception and reproduction; to accept reception on their terms is therefore to risk endorsing a species of epistemic injustice.⁶ In an effort to hedge against this problem, I have assumed in almost all cases a hermeneutics of suspicion in the interrogation of the source material, playing up (where necessary with Gilroyan gusto) the inter- and transcultural traffic that underwrites even seemingly casual receptions of Europeanizing classicism into Dominican nationalism.

⁵ Anti-Haitianism: Matibag 2003, 10–11, building on Sagás 2000; Torres-Saillant 2000, 1092–4. ⁶ Introduction and orientation to this concept: Fricker 2007. Application to classical studies: Chae 2018.

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Voices in the Wilderness Classical reception joins hands with Roman Catholicism to cast a monumental shadow over twenty-first-century Santo Domingo. Towering over Santo Domingo’s Colonial Zone is the Dominican version of the Statue of Liberty: a 15-meter statue—sculpted by the Mexican artist Antonio Castellanos Basich and donated to the Dominican Republic by Mexico in 1982—of Fray Antón de Montesinos, the friar who became famous for lambasting the first generation of Spanish colonizers in a sermon delivered on the fourth Sunday of Advent in December 1511 (Fig. 3.1). Chosen as homilist by his fellow friars, Montesinos availed himself of that Advent Sunday’s assigned reading from the Gospel of John to upbraid the Spanish settlers of Santo Domingo for their rapacious exploitation of Hispaniola’s indigenous population. Ego vox clamantis in deserto—John the Baptist’s famous response to the questioning of the priests and Levites sent from Jerusalem (John 1:23 Vulgate)—became in Montesinos’s hands the perfect weapon for criticizing the first wave of colonizers: I who am the voice of Christ on the desert of this island . . . this voice tells you that you are all in mortal sin and in it you live and die on account of the cruelty and tyranny that you exercise on these innocent people . . . . Are these not men? Do they not have rational souls? Are you not obligated to love them as you love yourselves?⁷

For the text of the homily, we rely on the testimony of a congregant sufficiently moved by the homily to become a resolute proselytizer for the indigenous people’s cause: Bartolomé de Las Casas. It is Las Casas who informs us that—despite the strongly negative response to Montesinos’s sermon—legal measures to scale down and regulate the exploitation were implemented, notably the 1513 Laws of Burgos.⁸ Yet although Montesinos’s sermon inspired Las Casas to take up the cause of indigenous populations with unflagging determination, the latter soon struck a pact with the devil that he would belatedly regret: freedom for the indigenous people but slavery for imported African laborers. For this “poor and ⁷ Las Casas [1561] 1994, vol. 3, 1761–2: “Yo que soy voz de Cristo en el desierto desta isla . . . Esta voz [os dice] que todos estáis en pecado mortal y en él vivís y morís por la crueldad y tiranía que usáis con estas inocentes gentes . . . . ¿Éstos, no son hombres? ¿No tienen ánimas racionales? ¿No sois obligados a amallos como a vosotros mismos?” All translations in this chapter are mine, unless otherwise noted. ⁸ From the initial denunciation of the colonizers to the enactment of the Burgos protocols: Las Casas [1561] 1994, vol. 3, 1757–829.

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Fig. 3.1. Statue of Fray Antón de Montesinos, Zona Colonial, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Photo by D. Padilla Peralta.

ambiguous compromise,” Las Casas would be justifiably criticized, starting with the abolitionists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.⁹ ⁹ Trouillot 1995, 75. Abolitionist-era critics of Las Casas hammered away on this issue: see, e.g. Castro 1851, 150, on his “error lamentable de espíritu”; Almeida 2010 for Las

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The questions delivered with such astringent force by Montesinos set the terms for the dispute that would occupy Spanish Thomist clerics for the next half-century—from Francisco de Vitoria’s 1539 lectures at Salamanca to the debates of 1550–1 at Valladolid that pitted Las Casas against Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda. Montesinos’s question “Do they not have rational souls?” was a harbinger of things to come; much of the dispute was routed through readings of Aristotle.¹⁰ The Advent homily proved to be, in at least one sense, an authorizing script for this face-off, “a pivotal episode in establishing the social ontology of modernity.”¹¹ However, matters are not so simple, since the homily only survives through the mediation of Las Casas, who himself was busy searching for authorities high and low with which to stack the deck in his favor; how much of this homily is Las Casas’s own creation we will never know for sure. Whatever the case may be, Montesinos went down in Latin American history as a trailblazer, and precisely for that reason he was appropriated and co-opted into the reproduction of Dominican national identity several centuries later, first through the statue’s installation and then through the anniversary commemoration of his controversial homily. In 2011 the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Santo Domingo commemorated the 500th anniversary of Montesinos’s sermon with a very wellattended Cathedral Mass. A few months before the anniversary celebration, a pastoral letter published by the Conference of Dominican Bishops sought to rehabilitate and reposition Montesinos’s sermon as a twenty-first-century call to social justice. Citing the Dominican Republic’s ongoing struggles to provide its population with adequate housing, hygienic living conditions, decent-paying jobs, and effective rule of law, the bishops wrote: “A voice cries in the new deserts of our Dominican Republic and asks us: ‘With what right and with what justice do we hold our people in such cruel and horrible slavery?’”¹² At the anniversary Mass itself, the Casas’s reckoning at the hands of British Romanticists; Roorda, Derby, and González 2014, 63–4, for the thoughts of Las Casas’s biographer Augustus Francis MacNutt. Roca Barea 2016’s prosecution of Las Casas (306–21) is seriously compromised by its special pleading on behalf of Spanish imperialism. ¹⁰ For reconstruction of the main lines of debate before and after Valladolid, see Pagden 1986, 1987. ¹¹ For the quotation, as well as for the call to study Valladolid as such, see Mills 2015, 13. ¹² Conferencia del Episcopado Dominicano 2011, §23a: “Una voz clama en los nuevos desiertos de nuestra República Dominicana y nos pregunta ¿con qué derecho y con qué justicia tenemos a nuestro pueblo en tal cruel y horrible servidumbre?”

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homilist insisted on the contemporary relevance of Montesinos “because the poor still live under oppression.”¹³ To the surprise of the homilist and of many of those in attendance that day, it was publicly revealed a year and a half later that one of the Mass co-celebrants had been actively involved in a very specific type of oppression. This co-celebrant was the papal nuncio to the Dominican Republic, Józef Wesołowski, who was recalled to the Vatican in August 2013 amidst allegations of child abuse. According to multiple published reports,¹⁴ Wesołowski had been in the habit of cruising Santo Domingo’s beachfront in search of pre-teen and teenage boys from the most vulnerable and recourseless group in Dominican society: the (not infrequently orphaned) children of impoverished Haitian immigrants and Dominicans of Haitian descent. The envoy from the center of ecclesiastical power was accused of having preyed on the socioeconomically and politically most marginalized at the same time as he was speaking in public of the need to improve the lot of resident Haitians who were being threatened with increasingly stringent immigration measures.¹⁵ Among the many unsettling details of the reports was the allegation that Wesołowski regularly molested at least one young Haitian-Dominican victim “at the heel of” the Montesinos statue, “in the shadow of the friar’s robes.”¹⁶ The presence of the monumentalized Montesinos seems to have given an extra edge to Wesołowski’s erotics of transgressive exploitation. Dominican media coverage of the incident ranged from indignant and furious—not only at the nuncio himself but at the Vatican, which had recalled Wesołowski before he could be charged in a Dominican court—to regretful and even nostalgic. Revealingly, it is in these nostalgic undercurrents that one finds gestures in the direction of ancient Greece. In a January 2015 op-ed for the newspaper Diario Libre entitled “El Malecón de Wesolowski” (Wesołowski’s esplanade), José del Castillo Saviñón, the Dominican Minister of Industry and Commerce, mourned the beachfront’s now irreversible association with the “furtive incursions” of the nuncio “just as Santo Domingo aspires to convert itself into a welcoming destination for the more than five million visitors who come to us annually.”¹⁷ However

¹³ Apolinar and Urbáez 2011. ¹⁴ See, e.g. Goodstein 2014a, 2014b. ¹⁵ Peña 2012. ¹⁶ Olivo Peña 2013. ¹⁷ Castillo Saviñón 2015: “Justo cuando Santo Domingo aspira convertirse en destino acogedor de parte de los más de 5 millones de visitantes que nos llegan anualmente.”

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humiliating for Dominican pride the European and American news coverage of the pedophile’s escapades on the beachfront, Castillo was determined to use the episode as a teachable moment. The op-ed glances back at a pioneering figure in Dominican engineering, Octavio Acevedo, who had been trained in the States and overseen a number of construction projects during and after the U.S. occupation of the Dominican Republic from 1916 to 1924. Acevedo was especially insistent on the modernization of the beachfront, and it is Acevedo’s argument in support of this project that Castillo directly quotes in bemoaning the impression left on prospective tourists by the misdeeds of Wesołowski: “What is, then, the first impression of those who arrive by water to the First City of the Indies, to the Athens of the New World?”¹⁸ The accent placed here is on a transnational classicism whose reverberations are most acutely registered at the moment of the outsider’s encounter with the city, and whose appeal lies as much in its amenability to a metanarrative of teleological material improvement as in its capacity to structure emotions of shame and disappointment. This is a classicism that seeks to fossilize the city as a product of the colonial gaze. The second and third sections of this chapter take up the origins and trajectory of this celebration of Santo Domingo as the Athens (and in time the Sparta) of the New World, subjecting the various valences of this species of classicism to closer scrutiny. For now, my main purpose in documenting Castillo’s use of Acevedo is to underscore how the romanticizing summons of Santo Domingo’s status as classical facilitates the political effacement of marginalized black and brown bodies, simultaneously enacting and blurring distinctions between internal and external Others in the process. Refracted through his quotation of Acevedo, Castillo’s anxiety about the consequences of Wesołowski’s misdeeds for tourism turns a blind eye to the suffering that the nuncio had inflicted on the most vulnerable members of Dominican society. Nor does it stop to acknowledge even for a moment the deeper history of violence that brackets the lives of these children and their families, most recently in the form of ramped-up migratory enforcement targeting Dominicans of Haitian descent and those Dominicans suspected of being Haitian on

¹⁸ As quoted in Castillo Saviñón 2015: “Cuál es, pues, la primera impresión que reciben los que llegan por la vía marítima a la Primada de las Indias, a la Atenas del Nuevo Mundo?” (emphasis mine).

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account of their dark skin.¹⁹ Among the most pernicious of the ideological practices through which structural violence has been credentialed is a racial logic rooted in the revanchist conjuring of Santo Domingo as the Greece of the Caribbean; this mythologizing project owes its conceptual texturing to some of the same geopolitical forces that are responsible for the classical transmutation of its Antillean neighbors, such as St. Lucia’s metamorphosis into the “Helen of the West Indies.”²⁰ Although this project is, as we will have reason to explore shortly, the collaborative work of multiple Dominican writers and politicians over the past 150 years, no person has been more prominent in recent refinements of this notion than the late Dominican President Joaquín Balaguer (1906–2002). As part of the vast and expensive celebrations to commemorate the Fifth Centennial of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas that were held during his third stint as president, Balaguer gave a 1992 lecture in which he rapturously lauded the “Latin and Greek heritage” transmitted through Spanish colonization. Seven years later—and three years after stepping down from public office and declining to appear on the presidential ballot for the first time since 1966—the nonagenarian Balaguer wrote a slender book entitled Grecia eterna (Eternal Greece), dedicated to “Dominican youth passionate about the humanities.”²¹ Explicit in the lecture and in Grecia eterna was not just an exaltation of classicism, but an uncompromisingly Eurocentric and authoritarian vision of the classical that was well over a century in the making by the time Balaguer relinquished his hold on the country’s governance. Further amplifying the message was the monograph’s title, a wink to Dominican dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo’s 1954 lecture “La España eterna” (“Eternal Spain”).²² How this vision seized on the transmission of Spanish culture

¹⁹ On the Dominican Constitutional Tribunal’s 2013 ruling and its consequences, see Fumagalli 2015, 383–9; Nolan 2015, 38–47; Padilla Peralta 2015; Jelly-Shapiro 2016, 205–25. ²⁰ In the hands of Derek Walcott: Greenwood 2010, 232–4. ²¹ Balaguer (1996) 2006; the volume of Balaguer’s works in which this book was published also contains “evocations” of two other national cultures, España infinita (Infinite Spain) and La raza inglesa (The English race). The fulsome editorial introduction to this volume places Grecia eterna on a par with the writings of Lessing, Winckelmann, and Burckhardt (76–7); for Dominican classicism’s investment in post-Enlightenment Hellenophilia, see the next section. ²² Printed in Balaguer 1955, 261–6. Trujillo delivered the lecture while on a state visit to Spain as the guest of his fellow dictator Francisco Franco.

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through imperial conquest as a device for the transplantation of classical antiquity to Hispaniola is the subject to which we turn next.

The Fleeting Splendor of the Colony To set the scene, we will need to say a few words about Hispaniola’s complicated history. After its 1496 foundation, the port and city of Santo Domingo served as a springboard for Spanish colonization first of the Caribbean and then of Central and South America. The establishment of viceregal government on the island and of the Universidad Santo Tomás de Aquino in 1538 added two feathers to the new port’s cap; and soon enough, following the creation of a plantation economy on the backs of indigenous and imported African labor, Santo Domingo became a linchpin in the transactional networks of the Spanish conquest. But as the momentum of colonial management shifted west and south during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Santo Domingo and Hispaniola’s fortunes waned—with the abandoning of the northern portion of the island following a series of pirate attacks marking the low point.²³ Meanwhile, French merchants gained a foothold on the western third of the island, which under the 1697 Treaty of Ryswick was passed off to France. It took only a few decades for French Saint-Domingue—reliant upon the labor of hundreds of thousands of slaves trafficked across the Atlantic to cultivate sugar and coffee—to become the most profitable slave colony in the Caribbean. Under the leadership of Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, these slaves rebelled against the French in 1791. Attempts on the part of the Spanish to take advantage of the ensuing turbulence and regain control over the entire island failed, resulting in the cession of the hispanophone two-thirds of Hispaniola to France in 1795; but France proved unsuccessful in suppressing the rebellion, and Saint-Domingue proclaimed itself the independent Republic of Haiti in 1804. The following year, Haiti’s forces entered Spanish-speaking Hispaniola, still under French occupation. Within four years, Haitian internal divisions and the defeat of the French garrison in Santo Domingo led to the restoration of ²³ Often elided in Dominican historiography of the colonial centuries is the successful creation of maroon communities by escaped former slaves during this period; see Ricourt 2016, 54–5, 71–102.

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Spanish control over the hispanophone side of the island; this state of affairs obtained until 1821, when Santo Domingo declared its independence as “Spanish Haiti.”²⁴ Soon afterwards Haitian forces returned, and this time they occupied the country until an independence movement was launched by the “Liberators” in 1844. The newly christened Dominican Republic spent much of the next seventy-five years on the precipice of incorporation into Spain—with a return to colonial status from 1861 to 1863 proving abortive—or annexation by the United States, which occupied the country from 1916 to 1924. Political and economic instability ultimately opened the door to the dictatorship of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo (1930–61) and then, after his assassination, to the pseudodemocracy that was consolidated under Joaquín Balaguer after a second American military intervention in 1965. As Benedict Anderson memorably argued, national communities coalesce around fictionalizing enterprises, among the most potent of which are myths of foundation. The Dominican Republic is no different: in her remarkable and wide-ranging 2016 stratigraphy of dominicanidad, Lorgia García-Peña has flagged as integral to the coupling of Dominican national identity with anti-Haitianism an 1822 episode whose factual details were first veiled and then supplanted by the operations of myth: the murder of the Galindo virgins.²⁵ In the early days of the Haitian occupation, Santo Domingo was transfixed by reports that three drunk men had killed a man riding into town and then gone on to the murdered man’s house in the community of Galindo; there they had found and killed his three daughters (ages fifteen, ten, and six), sparing only their nanny. The culprits were quickly detained, and in June of that year they were convicted and sentenced on the basis of the nanny’s testimony. Within a few decades, the story of the incident would free itself from the constraints of the facts ascertained at trial and don the trappings of racialized myth: thanks largely to the widely read accounts of Félix María del Monte (1819–99) and César Nicolás Penson (1855–1901), the “virgins of Galindo” were recast in the Dominican imaginary as victims of the Haitian occupation, and their murderers not as

²⁴ For the political tug-of-war during this period, see Eller 2011; Picó 2012; for the turbulence of the subsequent decades, see Eller 2016. ²⁵ Here and in the remainder of this paragraph, I rely on García-Peña’s (2016, 23–57) reconstruction of the episode and its ripple effects.

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Dominicans but as Haitians who had committed the additional transgression of raping the girls before killing them. Blending distortion, racialization, and pornotroping, Del Monte in his 1860 poem Las vírgenes de Galindo and Penson in his 1891 eponymous sensationalization distilled an origin tale for Dominican national identity in which Haitians had perpetrated sexual violence against virginal Dominican innocents. Whereas Del Monte composed and published his work while residing in Puerto Rico as an exile, Penson made full use of the emergent newspaper industry of 1890s Santo Domingo to circulate his; the enduring canonicity of his account would be guaranteed half a century later by the adoption of Las vírgenes de Galindo as a mandatory text in schools.²⁶ Much as Roman legend would frame Lucretia’s rape at the hands of Sextus Tarquinius as the decisive catalyst for the uprising of Romans against Tarquin domination, so too would the murder of the Galindo girls (once transmuted into myth) be upheld as validating Dominican insurrection against the Haitian occupation—in this specific case, by scripting Dominican identity as classically pure and white and its Haitian counterpart as dark and criminal.²⁷ That the story of the Galindo sisters as reworked by Del Monte and Penson seems suspiciously similar to Republican Rome’s founding myth may have something to do with the popularity enjoyed by the Italian Vittorio Alfieri’s Brutus plays during and after the Haitian occupation; the Dominican secret society La Trinitaria coordinated and staged productions of these plays to conceal its covert revolutionary designs in the lead-up to 1844.²⁸ Throughout the long nineteenth century but especially during its second half, the reception of classical myth in Santo Domingo came to be increasingly flexed to a specific nation-building project: affiliation with Euro-American white identity and culture on the one hand and disavowal of Haitian and/or African identity and culture on the other, at a time when the geopolitical

²⁶ See García-Peña 2016, 56, on the educational afterlife of Penson; for his use of print media, see Tejada’s preface to Penson (1891) 2015, 11–44. ²⁷ Cf. Aimé Césaire’s representation of Haiti as the origo et fons of the black race’s classical past; see Lecznar in this volume, pp. 197–222. ²⁸ Henríquez Ureña 1965, 163–4; Balaguer 1966 in Coleccíon pensamiento dominicano 2008–2009 (hereafter CPD), vol. 3, 829, with the detail that Juan Pablo Duarte brought copies of Alfieri’s plays back from Europe in his suitcase. Del Monte had strong interests in dramaturgy and wrote several plays; on their ideological thrust, see n. 38.

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stakes of being slotted as one or the other could not have been greater.²⁹ Del Monte’s wielding of Greek and Roman myth and culture in Las vírgenes de Galindo, an epic poem littered with references to Vestals and Furies, is intended in the first instance to signal both that the Galindo incident rose to antiquity’s standards and that Del Monte had the gifts for representing it as such. Yet the decisive discursive move most responsible for marrying Dominican identity to Greco-Roman classicism while shutting out Haitian culture as irredeemably and degradingly African was the fusion of a miserabilistic account of what the Haitian occupation had wrought with a celebration of what colonial Santo Domingo had once been. Obscuring Santo Domingo’s place within the circuits of the Black Atlantic, this discourse would theorize blackness as a violent and traumatic disruption of the previously smooth transfusion of classical culture qua white European legacy to Hispaniola’s shores. Within the gendered and sexualized scheme of the colony as virgin and the Haitian as rapist, the GrecoRoman inheritance imparted to Santo Domingo by its colonial founders was figured as the victim of black men’s predations. Here, too, Del Monte paved the way, his poem’s opening stanzas galloping from joy at Columbus’s discovery and memories of the early decades of the colony to morose contemplation of Santo Domingo’s stomping by “the unpleasant and brutal Haitian”—a city turned moribund and facing the Caudine Forks in its subjection to the FrenchAfrican monster.³⁰ The temporal mise en scène is, of course, crucial to unfolding the logic of the poem: Del Monte adopts the vantage point of 1822, with the aim of contrasting the (perceived) depredations of the Haitian occupation to the glory and renown of colonial Santo Domingo before the “franco-cafre” arrived on the scene.³¹ But Del Monte is hardly the only figure to join despair about the present to colonial nostalgia; closer attention to the works of his contemporaries and successors discloses a classicizing strain in the representation of colonial Santo

²⁹ How Dominican elites steer a path between this nineteenth-century Scylla and Charybdis: García-Peña 2016, 28–37; see also Eller 2014, 87–91, on their imperial interlocutors. On the “massive intellectual energy” supercharging Dominican elites’ “didactic anti-Haitianism” in the years after 1844, see Eller 2016, 31–40. ³⁰ Del Monte (1860) 1885 in Penson (1891) 2015, 383–4. ³¹ Del Monte’s fearmongering about the “franco-cafre” anticipates the Trujillista denigration of the Haitian as “galo-etiópico,” for which see Mateo 1993, 138–9.

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Domingo that weaponizes Greco-Roman antiquity against the HaitianAfrican believed to menace the new Dominican nation. At around the time Del Monte was composing his poem, a curious moniker for the colony seems to have been making the rounds: Athens of the New World. The nicknaming of Santo Domingo as Atenas del Nuevo Mundo is not detectable in any writings from the first several centuries after the colony’s foundation. Early chronicle descriptions of Santo Domingo liken the colony not to ancient cities but to contemporaneous ones in Europe,³² though it is not inconceivable that colonial Santo Domingo might have at some point inherited the nickname from Salamanca—long fêted as Castille’s Athens.³³ However, we are on much firmer ground when it comes to tracking the nickname’s deployment and circulation in the literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The incorporation of the name into the mythological substructure of the colonial period’s legacy is largely due to the philologist, teacher, and pan-Hispanic man of letters Pedro Henríquez Ureña, the son of one of Del Monte’s most distinguished students. Henríquez Ureña is nowadays credited with having been “the great architect of the modern conception of Hispanic-American culture,”³⁴ in part because of volumes such as his 1936 literary history of colonial Hispaniola, in which he comments that: Local legend reports that the city of Santo Domingo, capital of the island, earned the name of “Athens of the New World.” A phrase of typically Spanish Renaissance flavoring—but what a strange conception of the Athenian ideal, an Athens partly militarized and partly monastized! On what was this pompous title based? On university teaching, of course; later, in the wisdom of the convents, the Archbishop’s Palace, and the Royal Audience.³⁵

³² For example, Florence: A. Geraldini 1520, quoted in Cordero Michel 1998, 65. For a synopsis of chronicle writing on the colony, see Moya Pons 2017, 178–84. ³³ Atenas castellana: De La Flor 1989. I thank Jesús Rodríguez Velasco for bringing this possibility to my attention. ³⁴ Díaz-Quiñones 2008, 64: “El gran artífice del concepto moderno de la cultura hispanoamericana.” ³⁵ P. Henríquez Ureña (1936) 2007, 11 = CPD, vol. 4, 112: “La leyenda local dice que la ciudad de Santo Domingo, capital de la isla, mereció el nombre de Atenas del Nuevo Mundo. Frase muy del gusto español del Renacimiento; pero ¡qué extraña concepción del ideal ateniense: una Atenas militar en parte, en parte conventual! ¿En qué se fundaba el pomposo título? En la enseñanza universitaria, desde luego; en el saber de los conventos, del Palacio Arzobispal, de la Real Audiencia, después.”

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Ascribing the transmission of the nickname to the traffic of “local legend,” Henríquez Ureña briefly savors the oddball status of this colony of soldiers and convents as a new Athens on American soil before making an affirmative case for the appellation’s relevance: it was the foundation of the Universidad Santo Tomás de Aquino, the first institution of university learning in the western hemisphere and for several centuries thereafter one of the intellectual nerve centers of the Caribbean and hispanophone worlds, which together with the organs of church and state certified Santo Domingo as a new Athens. Closed down in 1822 at the beginning of the Haitian occupation—an event as definitive for the memory of Haiti-inflicted evils as the murder of the Galindo sisters, as we will see in a moment—the university was reopened as the Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo (UASD) in 1914. To this day, UASD markets itself as the primada of the Americas, as the author of this chapter learned firsthand from the insistent boasting of his parents.³⁶ Much like other self-promotional investments in the logic of chronological precedence, the claim pitches a tent in the lexical-ideological field whose contours are delineated in the generations immediately prior to Henríquez Ureña’s appearance on the scene: primacy as synonymous with proximity to Europe and European classicism. For all its seeming factual authoritativeness, Henríquez Ureña’s 1936 volume is implicated in the invention of this tradition—a dynamic process with inputs from multiple nineteenth-century Dominican texts that were composed under the same cultural and geopolitical conditions as Del Monte’s epic poem. In keeping with his broader intellectual project of purposing Hellenism as a vehicle for the creation of a pan-Latin American identity,³⁷ Henríquez Ureña’s distinctive contribution was to scale up the Hellenophile dimension of this tradition. The writers who preceded Henríquez Ureña in interpellating the colonial past as classical all exhibit the mythologizing propensities on display in Del Monte’s work: a triumphant and garlanded colony—raced as white, sometimes opened up to

³⁶ The boast also reached a reader of Princeton’s copy of Syme 1958, who scrawled “Sto. Domingo” next to the statement that “in the year 1551 two universities were established in the New World—one at Mexico and the other at Lima” (37). ³⁷ Andújar 2018a and 2018b both document Henríquez Ureña’s promotion of a “Hellenized” Latin American culture on his travels to Mexico and Argentina.

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white-indigenous mestizaje (miscegenation), always wiped clean of blackness³⁸—is pitted against the Santo Domingo of the Haitian occupation and its aftermath. Entwined anxieties about an irrecoverable glorious past and a besieged postlapsarian present are repeatedly negotiated in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Dominican literature. An important interlocutor for this practice is Fernando Arturo de Meriño (1833–1906), whose career took him from the priesthood to the presidency. His 1867 Elements of the Physical, Political, and Historical Geography of the Dominican Republic has this to say about the deficits of his country’s educational system: It cannot be said of Santo Domingo, which in times of splendor had the honor of earning the distinguished appellation of “Athens of the New World” on account of the brilliant talents it produced and on account of its famous University that brought the sciences to its sister Spanish colonies—to the same extent that it brought them its material riches—that today it counts on more in the way of intellectual shine [other] than the natural talent of its children. While it is true that the country does not lack establishments of basic and higher learning, there is no scientific institute in which the youth—thirsty for knowledge—can have nourished the force of genius that beats, vigorous but ignored, in their brain.³⁹

In the background to Meriño’s analysis were contemporaneous debates unfolding elsewhere in the Americas and in Europe about the development of university systems and their articulation to nation-building. However, in the foreground of his text is a fault-finding mission: Meriño is quick to dole out blame for the state of affairs then obtaining in Santo Domingo and alights on a culprit a few pages later. The capital of the Dominican Republic, at the time of Meriño’s writing re-liberated following the failed annexation by Spain, had been “the seat of the famous ³⁸ Commenting on the dramatic works of Del Monte and his peers, Molinaza (1984, 50) hits the nail right on the head: “Evidencian en materia ideológica racismo. Denotan que la dominación del blanco extranjero era necesaria para los fines del desarrollo histórico, en el cual no se contemplaba la participación social de mulatos y negros.” ³⁹ Meriño 1867, 78–9: “Santo Domingo, que en sus tiempos de esplendor tuvo la gloria de merecer el distinguido calificativo de la Atenas del Nuevo Mundo, por los brillantes talentos que produjo y por su célebre Universidad que llevó las ciencias á algunas de las otras colonias españolas, sus hermanas, así como les llevó tambien sus riquezas materiales, no puede decirse que cuenta hoi con mas brillo intelectual, que el del talento espontáneo de sus hijos. Si es cierto que no faltan en el pais algunos establecimientos de enseñanza superior y elemental, tambien lo es que no existe un Instituto científico, en el que la juventud, sedienta de estudios, pueda dar pábulo á la fuerza de genio que late vigorosa y abandonada en su cerebro.”

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University that earned it the honorable description of ‘Athens of the New World,’ destroyed after 1822 by the Haitian government.”⁴⁰ Despite the looming presence of Euro-American imperial adversaries throughout this period, Meriño (and his contemporaries) chose to play up the calamities inflicted by the Haitian occupation—stressing Haiti’s closure of the university in Santo Domingo as among the most grievous of all because it had deprived the hispanophone side of the island of the colonial-era gem through which it had previously staked its claim as worthy heir to a classical European tradition. The writings of Meriño’s contemporary Emiliano Tejera (1841–1923) strike the same chords. A founding figure of Dominican historiography and a lifelong agitator for Dominican independence during and after the abortive re-incorporation into Spain, Tejera published an homage to Juan Pablo Duarte (leader of the 1844 Liberators) on the fiftieth anniversary of Dominican independence. If only because of the protean maneuvering through which its author tries to head off the potential threat of Spanish takeover on one end and the ideologically constructed threat of forcible reintegration into Haiti on the other, the essay is a rhetorical tour de force: For twenty-two years [from the Haitian invasion to 1844] the Dominican groaned in harsh servitude. What occurred during this period of time? . . . Ah! The mind grows sad in remembering such a grievous time. What horror! What ruin! . . . The screech of owls interrupted the silence of the cloisters that had once reverberated with the virile tones of the Córdobas, Las Casas, and Montesinos; the spider covered with dusty curtains the cathedral of the wise professors who with their science had conquered for their fatherland the honorable description of Athens of the New World. The shrines continued their transformation into ruins, or havens for the practitioners of Vodoo, and the convents were dwellings for lizards and owls . . . . And this is the situation that the descendants of the conquerors of America put up with!⁴¹ ⁴⁰ Meriño 1867, 83: “Fué asiento de la célebre Universidad que le valió el honroso calificativo de la ‘Atenas del Nuevo Mundo,’ destruida despues del año 1822 por el Gobierno Haitiano.” ⁴¹ Quoted in M. Henríquez Ureña 1966 = CPD, vol. 4, 463–5: “Veinte y dos años gimió el dominicano en la dura servidumbre. ¿Qué ocurrió en ese lapso de tiempo? . . . ¡Ah! contrista el ánimo el solo recuerdo de época tan luctuosa. ¡Cuánto horror! ¡Cuánta ruina! . . . El grito de los mochuelos interrumpía el silencio de los claustros, que habían resonado un día con los viriles acentos de los Córdobas, Las Casas y Montesinos, y la araña cubría de cortinas polvorientas la cátedra de los sabios profesores que con su ciencia habían conquistado para su patria el honroso calificativo de Atenas del Nuevo Mundo. Los templos iban

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For Tejera, both Las Casas and Montesinos were icons and lodestars of a colonial past in which learning had “conquered”—not merely earned but conquered—the nickname of Athens of the New World. Yet this past, according to Tejera, had been shattered by the Haitians with their perverse idolatry; it had taken Duarte’s leadership and faith, enhanced by his Grand Tour of Europe in 1834 and his return home to a land whose virgin soil “recalled ancient Greece,” to deliver his fellow countrymen from the Haitian yoke. With Tejera we are in prime position to consider how the Romantic and Victorian apotheosis of classical Athens as the pinnacle of the Greek achievement left its mark on hispanophone Caribbean thought. This imprint is discernible in the poetry of one of Tejera’s friends, the writer most responsible for the rearing and education of Pedro Henríquez Ureña: his mother Salomé Ureña de Henríquez (1850–97). Even more plangently than Meriño and Tejera, Ureña tapped the rich vein of nostalgia in her calibration of colonial Santo Domingo’s classical stature. “Yesterday,” she mused in her 1876 poem “Ruins”: when the flourishing arts installed their empire here, and you had prominent creations, you were a shock and surprise to the nations, and they called you the modern Athens.⁴²

What especially distressed her was to see not only the fame but the memory of that fame fade; in “To my fatherland,” an elegy composed two years later, Ureña chastizes her compatriots for this lapse: you forget that you were, with the utmost justice, once the distinguished rival of Greece, when august science elevated you on its shoulders, and (in the midst of praise) your rays of light irradiated the world.⁴³

convirtiéndose en ruinas, o en cuarteles de los sectarios del Vodoux, y los conventos eran morada de lagartos y lechuzas . . . . ¡Y esa situación la soportaban los descendientes de los conquistadores de América!” ⁴² “Ruinas,” lines 16–20 in Ureña 1960 = CPD, vol. 1, 422–4: “Ayer, cuando las artes florecientes | tu imperio aquí fijaron | y tuviste creaciones eminentes | fuiste pasmo y asombro de las gentes | y la Atenas moderna te llamaron.” ⁴³ “A mi patria,” lines 32–6 in Ureña 1960 = CPD, vol. 1, 436–9: “que fuiste, olvidas, en gallarda justa | rival preclara de la Grecia un día | cuando la ciencia augusta | en sus hombros te alzó, y entre loores | irradiaron al mundo tus fulgores.”

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Additional instances of this discourse in her poetry and the poetry of her peers can be easily multiplied. The representation of the young Dominican nation state’s fall from grace was worked out in part by extolling its predecessor, colonial Santo Domingo, as the Athens of the New World; and one important subtext (or foretext, in the case of Tejera) of this colonial romance was anti-Haitianism, which acted in concert with other components of the Dominican racial and patriarchal imaginary to turn Salomé Ureña—a woman of African descent—into a paragon of white Catholic motherhood.⁴⁴ The harnessing of nostalgia as a motor for anti-Haitianism was not without some complications: Tejera’s attempts to deploy anti-Haitianism within a non-annexationist frame and Ureña’s insistence on Dominican independence capitalized on an affect that had originally been formulated in a language familiar to and also capable of enticing those European elites who endorsed the prospect of welcoming Santo Domingo back into the colonial fold. Writing five years after the Dominican government’s submission of a request for reannexation to the Captain-General of still-colonial Cuba, the Spanish diplomat and scholar Gaspar Nuñez de Arce (1834–1903) sympathetically recapped the letter’s peroration by drawing direct attention to the infusion of colonial nostalgia with classicizing rhetoric: “an emotional plea to Spain, recalling her beneficent administration for 320 years—an administration that had spread well-being and happiness throughout the island, at the time known as the Athens of the New World.”⁴⁵ As mentioned earlier, the equation of colonial Santo Domingo with classical Athens does not date to the colonial period itself; the main ancient state on the minds of the first few generations of conquistadores and their critics was not classical Athens but republican and imperial Rome.⁴⁶ Dominican interest in ancient Greece as a backdrop for the construction of a new national identity picked up only with the rediscovery and romanticization of Hellas during and after the Age of Revolutions.⁴⁷

⁴⁴ On this metamorphosis, see Ramírez 2015. ⁴⁵ Nuñez de Arce 1865, 40–1: “concluia con un caloroso llamamiento á España, en el cual se recordaba su benéfica administracion por espacio de 320 años; administracion que habia esparcido el bienestar y la felicidad en la isla conocida en aquellos tiempos por la Atenas del Nuevo Mundo.” On Dominican pleas for Spanish annexation during this period, see Eller 2016, 63–71, esp. 69–70, on “tropes and fantasies of black submission” to Spanish culture. ⁴⁶ See Lupher 2003, 43–149. ⁴⁷ On this rediscovery, see now Harloe 2013.

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For confirmation of the peculiarly nineteenth-century inflection of the “Athens of the New World” designation, we might look beyond Hispaniola to the near-contemporaneous application of the label to other colonial Latin American cities newly minted as post-independence capitals: Ciudad de México, Lima, and Buenos Aires all at various points claim the crown.⁴⁸ Moreover, this Dominican preoccupation with antiquity soon began to emulate a pattern well documented for the Euro-American military and cultural imperialisms of the period: the welding of Hellenism to the raciological sciences within the crucible of Herderian ethnography, Victorian anthropology, and Darwinian biology.⁴⁹ Remarkable for its bundling of these strands is “The Dominican State before Public Law,” the doctoral thesis of the historian and jurist Américo Lugo (1870–1952)—which was submitted in the same year that U.S. Marines occupied the Dominican Republic for the first time. After toying briefly with the Dominican–Greece comparison— The Dominican state occupies an island territory. Nothing more favorable than islands for the formation of states. It is enough to cite Greece. And among the islands of the world the situation of Santo Domingo is enviable.

—the thesis launches into an enumeration of the reasons why the Dominican Republic was a failed and unworkable state: “its possession of an overly fertile land under a torrid climate, the deficiency of food production, the excessive mixing of African blood, anarchic individualism, and the lack of culture.”⁵⁰ In dialogue with peers who in the lead-up to the American occupation and for many years afterward fought over the best ways to jumpstart national modernization, Lugo adopted a position of gloomy pessimism, informed by readings in Herder and possibly even Buffon.⁵¹ Here we see an ecological and biological ⁴⁸ Mexico City: Pérez Verdía 1892, 224; Lima: Hampe Martínez 1999, 88; Buenos Aires: Gay 1849, 67. Cf. the application of this label in the United States and its white-supremacist subtext: Marquardt 2018 on Nashville as the “Athens of the South.” ⁴⁹ For the evolution of these sciences in the United States, see Painter 2010. ⁵⁰ Lugo 1916 = CPD, vol. 5, 41: “El Estado dominicano ocupa un territorio insular. Nada más favorable que las islas para la formación de los Estados. Basta citar a Grecia. Y entre las islas del mundo la situación de Santo Domingo es envidiable . . . . Por la posesión de un territorio demasiado fértil bajo un clima tórrido, la deficiencia de la alimentación, la mezcla excesiva de sangre africana, el individualismo anárquico, y la falta de cultura.” ⁵¹ The main lines of debate are set out in the writings of Pedro Francisco Bonó: see the selection on “barriers to progress” in Roorda, Derby, and González 2014, 209–11; additional discussion of Bonó in San Miguel 2005. The presence of Buffon-inflected ecological

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determinism taking shape around classical Greece as a kind of impossible protreptic: (over-fertile) soil and (African) blood had overwritten the insular Hellenic potential of Santo Domingo. The Greek achievement, then, was not so much an image of what the colony had attained— although Lugo was well acquainted with this tradition—but of what the Dominican Republic of his lifetime could simply not become. The final word goes to Mariano Lebrón Saviñón, one of Joaquín Balaguer’s coevals and the founder of a private university named after Pedro Henríquez Ureña: “Fleeting was the glory of the colony.”⁵² By now it should be clear that formulations of this kind have historically capitalized on nostalgia to invent a past geared toward the anti-black and antiHaitian projects of Dominican modernity. After all, Pedro Henríquez Ureña had lionized Santo Domingo’s white European heritage in part to combat his own fears of ennegrecimiento (“blackening,” “niggering”); he stood at the head of an eminent roster of Dominican elites whose racial phobias led them to categorically deny any legitimacy to the AfroDominican experience in their construction of the state’s colonial past and postcolonial present.⁵³ With the arrival of authoritarian rule to the Dominican Republic in the 1930s, this blanket disavowal of blackness in favor of a classicizing idiolect found its most unrelentingly murderous advocate.

The Dictator’s Classics Three years before formally consolidating power in a 1930 coup, the then Brigadier General Rafael Leónidas Trujillo (plantation overseer turned military careerist) was the subject of an editorial in the Dominican newspaper La Revista that favorably compared him to Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, and Napoleon. Andrés Mateo has zeroed in on this editorial as the first move in the program of hero cult through which determinism in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century disparagements of the Caribbean climate: Torres-Saillant 2006, 110–11. ⁵² Lebrón Saviñón 1994, vol. 1, 12: “Fugaz fue el esplendor de la colonia.” Lebrón Saviñón’s complicity in the production of Trujillista discourse (on which see further below): Mateo 1993, 97–8. ⁵³ On P. Henríquez Ureña’s fears of ennegrecimiento, see Díaz-Quiñones 2006, 237–8; Valerio-Holguín 2011; for his experience of discrimination, see J. L. Borges as quoted in Andújar 2018b. The racial phobias of the Dominican intellectual class: Torres-Saillant 1994.

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Trujillo’s military and police powers were invested with mythological potency and psychological force.⁵⁴ Not long after the coup, Trujillo began to cultivate a cadre of Dominican intellectuals who could lend their literary and rhetorical luster to the new administration and its cultural projects. Among those tapped were Pedro Henríquez Ureña, who in 1931 was appointed superintendent of education; his brother Max, previously in the post, was dispatched to serve as Secretary of Foreign Affairs. While Pedro was not long for direct cooptation by Trujillo—he stepped down from his position in 1933 and left the Dominican Republic, never to return—he may have been the ghostwriter of a speech that Trujillo delivered at the 1932 christening of the Ateneo Dominicano, a new cultural center in the capital. In this speech, the dictator claimed to possess “Greek ardor” and extolled ancient Greece as “mother of rhythm and mistress of beauty, rendered eternal in the impeccable whiteness of its marbles.”⁵⁵ Speech and center alike took their inspiration from the Hellenism endorsed and promoted by the brothers Henríquez Ureña on their travels throughout Latin America. They had previously been involved in the 1909 launch of the Ateneo Mexicano in Mexico City, and Pedro would continue proselytizing for a Hellenophile construct of Latin American identity after going into voluntary exile in 1933.⁵⁶ By no means was the Ateneo Dominicano’s inauguration the only indication of the young dictatorship’s fixation with Hellenizing discourses, which in subsequent decades would be imprinted on Santo Domingo’s urban landscape. One of the nice touches of Pedro Peix’s 1985 short-story reminiscence of the dictatorship—Pormenores de una servidumbre (Details of a Servitude), an account of the inner anguish and external humiliations of a fictional bureaucrat whose loyalty is tested, so to speak, ⁵⁴ La Revista 1927, with Mateo 1993, 40–1. ⁵⁵ Trujillo Molina 1932, 12 = Trujillo in Balaguer 1955, 32: “La misma Grecia . . . madre del ritmo y señora de la belleza, eternizada en la blancura impecable de los mármoles.” On this speech, see Mateo 1993, 85–6, with n. 44 on the disagreements over authorship. For the circumstances of P. Henríquez Ureña’s departure and on Trujillo’s reaction to it, see now the detailed essay by Bernardo Vega (2014); the story that the dictator sought and was denied access to his wife circulated for decades afterwards (Vargas Llosa 2017, 214). ⁵⁶ P. Henríquez Ureña and the Ateneo Mexicano: Andújar 2018a. Recent coverage of the Ateneo’s origins and development glides over the dictatorship; for the backdating of its foundation to 1871, without any mention of the 1932 (re-)inauguration, see Diario Dominicano 2015.

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by the dictator—is the protagonist’s wistful recollection of a time when he could walk out of the National Palace’s Hall of Caryatids without having the stench of intrigue and betrayal cling to his tuxedo.⁵⁷ Built between 1944 and 1947, Trujillo’s Palacio Nacional was the work of the Italian architect Guido d’Alessandro, who was commissioned to design a structure with a pronounced neoclassical aspect.⁵⁸ Its Hall of Caryatids simultaneously channeled ancient Greece and the space in the Louvre bearing the same name: a double reception, with the familiar translation of Greece through Rome wired right into the circuits of signification that were set in motion by the name; the intermediating force of European fascist investments in neoclassical architecture, and Trujillo’s determination to emulate them, is another ideological intertext worth keeping in mind.⁵⁹ Lending a macabre twist to the caryatid program of the Palacio Nacional was Trujillo’s well-known obsession with procuring women for his sexual gratification: emphasis on the virile domination of the dictator, and on the necessary subordination of women to the satisfaction of his (as the archetypal Dominican man’s) desires, was fundamental to the regime’s patriarchal cultural program.⁶⁰ Once again, classicizing art looms large in the sexual ordering of the political imaginary. At Trujillo’s disposal for the dissemination of the regime’s classically inflected self-glorification was mass media. The same United States military occupation that had greased the wheels for Trujillo’s ascension also introduced radio technology to Hispaniola. Following its initial deployment by the Marines to track and kill guerrilla opponents of the

⁵⁷ Peix (1985) 2002, 39: “cuando podía salir del Salón de Las Cariátides sin transmitir en el pañuelo de su smoking el vaho pusilánime de la intriga y la delación.” ⁵⁸ See the official Dominican history of this structure: República Dominicana Ministerio Administrativo de la Presidencia 2018; omitted is the building’s use for the filming of The Godfather, Part II in 1974: Pérez 2014. ⁵⁹ The place of caryatids as architectural forms in the appropriation and reception of vanquished Greece into Rome: Nichols 2017. In still another quirk of reception, the Louvre’s Hall is where Roman copies of Greek statuary are now displayed: Louvre 2018. The different stories told in antiquity about the women of Carya(e) and their translation into sculptural ornament: Vitr. 1.1.5; Pausanias 4.16. For National Socialism and classicizing architecture, see Whyte 2017; generally on Trujillismo and Nazism, see n. 64. ⁶⁰ The best-known example of the Trujillato’s decades-long sexploitation of women— and of the deadly risks faced by those women and families who resisted the dictator’s predations—is the case of the Mirabal sisters, as novelized in Alvarez 1994; the dictator’s nymphomania is a major theme of Vargas Llosa 2000.

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occupation, radio technology elicited the interest of engineer Frank Hatton Guerrero—then an interpreter for the American forces—who founded the station HIH in 1924 before expanding it and renaming it in 1927 as HIX: Radio Atenas del Nuevo Mundo.⁶¹ After Hurricane San Zenón’s leveling of HIX and its companion HIZ in September 1930, new radio stations were launched, except this time with Trujillo’s interest in molding public opinion as their primary catalyst. Within a short time, not only radio but newspapers and other media had become conduits for the declarations and pronouncements of the dictatorship.⁶² Emanating from these media channels was a Newspeak tinged with the Hellenophile pretensions of the Dominican Republic’s governing class. Peix’s short story conveys the flavor of the discourse in its parodies of Foro Público, a gossip column in the newspaper El Caribe whose praises of the dictator and malicious rumors about his opponents were read over the radio; in one mock-up of the column, Peix has Foro Público commend the dictator for “the laws that in his visionary and Hellenic wisdom the Benefactor and Father of the New Country radiates.”⁶³ Yet in some respects the truth was even stranger than fiction, as a closer look at a specific strand of classical reception pursued by Trujillo and his coterie of intellectual apologists reveals. Inspired both by European fascism’s appropriations of classical antiquity and by Latin American traditions of encomiastic rhetoric, the Trujillato proved capable of accommodating not only classical Athens but classical Sparta—in the process plugging into yet another transatlantic circuit for the appropriation of classical antiquity.⁶⁴ As with the Athenian flirtation, so too with the Spartan one: it was overdetermined, with its earliest mentions dating to the decade before ⁶¹ Outline of the history: Pacini Hernandez 1995, 45–6, to be read with the detail-rich account posted on Rincón del vago (“Publicidad en la Republica Dominicana” 2018). ⁶² On these developments, see Roorda 2016, 187–8. ⁶³ Peix (1985) 2002, 40. A haunting refrain is addressed to the story’s protagonist: “Sintonice la radio” (“Tune in to the radio,” 27, 42). For Foro Público’s cultural significance, see Collado 2000. ⁶⁴ Rawson 1991, 335–43, is illuminating on the background to Nazi interest in Sparta but devotes only three paragraphs to Hitler; Losemann 2012 and Roche 2012 analyze Sparta’s importance to Nazi pedagogy and racial ideology; Rebenich 2005 contextualizes Fascist appropriations of ancient history against the lived experiences of practicing ancient historians. For the connection of Trujillismo to Nazism, see Fabio A. Mota as quoted in Avelino 1995, 243; Ricourt 2016, 35. For Sparta’s place in Latin American rhetoric of the 1920s and 1930s, see, e.g. the Nicaraguan revolutionary Augusto Nicolás Sandino’s fêting as a Leonidas (Alvarez García 2007, 182–3).

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Trujillo assumed power and appearing in Dominican histories of the post-1844 state’s border conflicts with Haiti. In 1921 Bernardo Pichardo waxed rhapsodically about a soldier who had distinguished himself against Haitian forces in one of the border battles: “Oh, illustrious man: your virtues were worthy of Spartan times!”⁶⁵ Praise grounded in the Spartan ideal was also extended to political figures who rose to prominence in the generation after the 1844 Liberators, even if these figures did not meet the ethical or racial standards of later Dominican historians; thus Américo Lugo compliments the infamous latenineteenth-century President Ulises “Lilís” Heureaux as “black in his sentiments and skin color, white in his manners and mind,” as well as “of Spartan sobriety and frugality.”⁶⁶ Yet Sparta-inflected encomium tended to fixate on the era of the Liberators, as Dominican historiography came to mirror and replicate the hegemonic structures of imperial domination: at the time that Lugo and Pichardo wrote their histories, the reframing of the Dominican independence movement of 1844 as the stand of the civilized few against the barbaric onslaught had received a new jolt from the “frontification” accelerated by American intervention—and the criminalization of migrant blackness propelled by the new obsession with the frontier.⁶⁷ However, although the physical and conceptual landscapes of the frontier were being seeded with memories of classical Sparta in the years before 1930, it would take the Trujillato’s intellectual agents to realize that engagement fully—and lay bare its genocidal dimensions. But instead of seizing on classical Sparta as orientation and justification for an anti-Semitic program,⁶⁸ the dictatorship’s racial politics would place ancient Laconia at the heart of an anti-black project.

⁶⁵ Pichardo (1921) 1964 = CPD, vol. 5, 246: “¡Oh, varón ilustre; tus virtudes eran dignas de los tiempos de Esparta!” ⁶⁶ Lugo 1919 = CPD, vol. 5, 107: “Negro por los sentimientos y el color, blanco por sus modales y mente . . . de sobriedad y frugalidad espartanas.” Overview and full translation of this paean to Lilís: Roorda, Derby, and González 2014, 183–4. ⁶⁷ Derby 1994 is excellent on frontification; García-Peña 2016, 58–92, esp. 77–82, is a first-rate account of the frontier’s racial re-articulation in the intervention’s wake. On the colonial prehistory of the frontier, see Ricourt 2016, 23–9. Commentary from a highranking Dominican official on the history and present-day status of the frontier: Soto Jiménez 2014, 435–63. ⁶⁸ Trujillo welcomed Jewish refugees from Europe as part of his “whitening” program: Roorda 1998, 127–48.

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The better known of the two individuals to pursue this Spartanizing line aggressively was the young Joaquín Balaguer, who maintained a busy schedule of writing even as he reached the heights of political power under Trujillo as the Sejanus to the dictator’s Tiberius. In The Christ of Liberty (1950) and The Guard of the Frontier (1962), biographies respectively of Juan Pablo Duarte and the Liberation-era general Antonio Duvergé, Balaguer took full advantage of the Sparta trope. Both texts, and in particular the second, reveal the workings of this idiom under the vigilant gaze of the dictator. In Christ, praise is showered on Doña Manuela, Juan Pablo Duarte’s mother, for her “Spartan valor.”⁶⁹ In the second biography, Balaguer claims that Duvergé—a commander under the Liberators who had been born in Puerto Rico of French-Haitian parents but whose grandfather had fought against Toussaint—had been endowed with “Spartan character” from the earliest moments of his life. The Sparta-flavored compliments flow even more copiously from the biographer’s pen when Balaguer turns to narrating the border conflicts of 1845: not only Duvergé but his troops morph into Spartans, most notably the injured colonel who speaks “with Spartan dryness” when presenting himself before Duvergé after two days of almost singlehandedly fending off the Haitians at Cachimán; Duvergé earns the admiration of his troops on account of his “frugality, appropriate to a Spartan”; a few years later, on trial in 1849 for what Balaguer assures us were trumpedup charges, Duvergé’s lawyer defends him as “firm as a sword, modest in the fields and in civic life like a Spartan soldier.”⁷⁰ Why exactly is Balaguer so quick to cast the Liberators and their generals as Spartans? An answer of sorts begins to emerge in a panegyric that Balaguer delivered in May of 1959 on the twenty-ninth anniversary of the dictator’s rule, with both Trujillo and the recently ousted Juan Perón of Argentina in attendance. Rumors were in the air of a Fidel Castro–supported invasion of the Dominican Republic, which did occur ⁶⁹ The “gallardía espartana” consisted in not standing in the way of her son’s assault on Haitian despotism: Balaguer 1950 = CPD, vol. 3, 818. The praise is all the more significant given Trujillo’s preoccupation not only with modeling himself after Duarte but with presenting his mother as a fitting successor to Duarte’s mother. ⁷⁰ Balaguer 1962 = CPD, vol. 3, 902: “temple espartano” of Duvergé; 921: the colonel “se encaró a su jefe para responderle con sequedad espartana”; 940: “tuvo además Duvergé, para hacerse admirar por las tropas, la frugalidad propia de un espartano”; 953: “firme como una espada, modesto en los campamentos y en la vida civil como un soldado de Esparta.”

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a month after the speech and backfired spectacularly. Balaguer seemed to have had this imminent threat very much in mind when after the standard preliminaries in praise of Trujillo’s stewardship of the country he declared: “We are ready, then, to pass with Trujillo into history as the Sparta of America, after having been, during the first two centuries of the Discovery, the Athens of the New World.”⁷¹ This conversion of the Dominican Republic into Sparta was adapted from the same nationalist strand of thinking that had cast Dominicans as Spartans in their fight for independence against Haiti, and Haitians (by implication) as Persianstyle threats not only to the country’s political and cultural well-being but to the noble civilizational project inaugurated by the classical colony. In the face of an anticipated foreign threat, one mode of identification with the classical past was now being exchanged for another; that the dictator’s middle name was Leónidas only furthered Balaguer’s rhetorical conceit. In any event, two years before Balaguer’s panegyric the preexisting nationalist discourse pitting the Dominican Republic as Sparta against Haiti had received a new lease on life in the form of an unabashedly anti-Haitian treatise that pursued the Sparta comparison at great length. The 1957 monograph La exterminación añorada (The Longed-for Extermination) is the work of the mysterious Trujillista apparatchik Ángel del Rosario Pérez (1911–96), whose shadowy presence in Dominican politics and culture has grown even fainter after the complete disappearance of his unpublished papers and writings following his death.⁷² An apologist for the dictatorship and its white-supremacist credo, Rosario Pérez plotted a vehement response to his contemporary Jean Price-Mars’s works Ainsi parla l’oncle and La République d’Haïti et la République Dominicaine, both of which had put forward a negritudeinformed understanding of Hispaniola’s cultures.⁷³ The renowned Haitian writer, politician, and ethnographer was first accused by Rosario ⁷¹ Quoted in Rodríguez de León 1996, 277: “Estamos listos, pues, para pasar con Trujillo a la historia como la Esparta de América, después de haber sido, durante los dos primeros siglos del Descubrimiento, la Atenas del Nuevo Mundo.” ⁷² Pérez 2003, 91–2, covers the little we know. Rosario Pérez’s claim that Trujillo was ordained by God “to save the Dominican people”: Rosario Pérez 1957, 342; discussion and context in Mateo 1993, 136–7. ⁷³ The Trujillista response to Price-Mars: Balcácer in Price-Mars 2000, xxiii–xxix; San Miguel 1997–8; 2005, 93–4. Price-Mars’s long and accomplished career is summarized in Dubois 2012, 289–92.

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Pérez of “disrespecting” the Dominican Republic in his writings by failing to acknowledge the unassailable status of Spanish-speaking colonial Santo Domingo as the “Athens of the New World.” Following a series of encomia to the dictator—interspersed with pleas that Trujillo remain strong in defending the “beacon” of civilization on the Spanishspeaking side of the island against the black Haitian menace—Rosario Pérez then declared that no precaution could or should be spared: the Dominican Republic had to be ready to convert itself into the “Sparta of the New World,” a hyper-militarized state perpetually on guard and capable of undertaking devastating reprisals against the Haitian threat at a moment’s notice. Woven into this argument was the conviction that the genocidal purge with which Trujillo had targeted Haitians, Dominicans of Haitian descent, and for that matter anyone with dark skin two decades prior—the so-called Parsley Massacre initiated on the dictator’s orders in 1937—was not only justified but potentially in need of repeating.⁷⁴ These positions are all systematically elaborated in a chapter of Rosario Pérez’s book entitled (appropriately enough) “Sparta of the New World,” in which the author lays the blame for the Dominican Republic’s need to reinvent itself as a Sparta at the feet of Haiti: “because of the Haitians themselves, not only the First City of America, but also the entire Dominican Republic, is turning into the Sparta of the New World.” But Rosario Pérez goes on to explain that in a sense the Dominican Republic had already outdone classical Sparta in overcoming as much as it had to become an independent nation in spite of Haiti’s presence on the other side of the island: there is still more heroism in the Dominican than in the Spartan. Sparta from beginning to end was but a branch of the Greek tree, one grain in the sheaf that swept down in its entirety against the barbarity of the Persians. Santo Domingo, on the contrary—and excuse the paradox—had no other companion except its own solitude in the unequal fight against Haitian barbarism.⁷⁵ ⁷⁴ Also known as El Corte (The Cutting). Debate about the quantitative extent of the genocidal mayhem continues but is somewhat beside the point; somewhere in the low to mid-five figures is a reasonable guess: Moya Pons 2010, 368–9; Dubois 2012, 303–5; Ricourt 2016, 36–7. Approaches and reactions to the event in fiction and nonfiction: Strongman 2006. The Trujillista ideological apparatus deployed to justify and sanitize the event: Avelino 1995, 241–9; Moya Pons 2010, 369–70. For Trujillo’s resettlement of Jewish refugees in the aftermath of the massacre, see n. 68. ⁷⁵ Rosario Pérez 1957, 115: “por causa de los propios haitianos, no sólo la Ciudad Primada de América, sino la República Dominicana toda, se convierte en la Esparta del

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The Dominican liberation from and ongoing resistance to the Haitian presence are here reconceptualized as an even greater accomplishment than the Greek victory during the Persian Wars: whereas Sparta (with its Leonidas) had Athens and others as allies, the Dominican Republic had only itself to rely on against the merciless onslaught. The assimilation of Haitians to a rampaging horde of barbarians recurs elsewhere in Rosario Pérez and is central to his twofold polemic against Price-Mars. Extending the claim activated in the first appearance of the analogy, Rosario Pérez proceeds to contend that when black Haitians rebelled against the French residents of Saint-Domingue, they had risen up as an overwhelming mass against those isolated representatives of European culture; decades later, the Dominican Liberators managed to form a united front against the undifferentiated barbarie despite being hopelessly outnumbered; for that reason, the mettle of the Dominican nation surpassed not only that of classical Sparta but that of Enlightenment France. With this scaffolding in place, Rosario Pérez finally moves to position the Dominican Republic as “the watchtower of Hispanicity” and to elucidate “the longed-for extermination” promoted by his book’s title—the necessary and unavoidable outcome of the final clash between the superior (Dominican qua white-criollo) and inferior (Haitian qua black) races inhabiting Hispaniola. Trujillo’s mission, as outlined in the book’s later chapters, is to maintain a top-notch regimen of national preparedness for that decisive confrontation in which the civilizing forces of Santo Domingo would emerge triumphant. Thus it came to pass that by the final years of Trujillo’s regime the Dominican Republic was being identified both with classical Athens and with classical Sparta. Through these identifications the legacy of the first American intervention and the mythology of the colony were fused and transmuted into the uncompromisingly racialized nationalism that underpinned the dictatorship’s hegemonic order.⁷⁶ Trujillo’s assassination in 1961 did not put an end to these classicizing identifications, since the generation of intellectuals who came of age and embraced this Nuevo Mundo . . . . [H]ay todavía más heroísmo en el dominicano que en el espartano. Esparta al fin y al cabo no era sino una rama del árbol griego, una fibra del haz que se abatía todo entero contra la barbarie de los persas. Santo Domingo, por el contrario, valga la paradoja, no tenía más compañero que su propia soledad en la lucha desigual contra la barbarie haitiana.” ⁷⁶ On this order’s conceptual and institutional arc, see Horn 2014.

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rhetoric under the dictatorship continued to write in this vein for many decades after. Balaguer, for one, proved adroit at capitalizing on the second American intervention in 1965 to revert the Dominican Republic to a system of one-man rule that was buttressed by an extravagantly textualized white-supremacist ideology.⁷⁷ However, in recent decades counterpoints to this ideology and its reception of the classical past have arisen. I turn finally to these critiques and their future prospects.

“Black to the future” Drawing its titular inspiration from Paul Gilroy, this section will outline the content of these critiques, some of which gesture in the direction of Caribbean Afrofuturisms.⁷⁸ Acerbically flavored commentary on Dominican authoritarianism’s fascination with ancient Greece comes to the fore in the writings of Pedro Mir (1913–2000).⁷⁹ In addition to a career as a poet that culminated with his selection as Poet Laureate of the Dominican Republic in 1984, Mir was an exceptionally accomplished essayist. Originally published in a 1973 issue of the Dominican magazine ¡Ahora!, “Entre dos tiempos gramáticos” (Between Two Grammatical Tenses) teasingly deconstructs the widely held belief that Dominicans need firm government—one more ideological legacy of Trujillo’s dictatorship. “Someone,” Mir begins, was saying yesterday—and it will become apparent that it wasn’t only yesterday, since this has always been said—that in certain national circles it is held that Dominicans need to be governed with a firm hand . . . . This business about having to govern with a firm hand is not a Dominican idea, ladies and gentlemen! It’s a universal idea with a most ancient tradition. The Greeks, who invented democracy some 25 centuries ago, invented it—as the whole world knows—as a firm-hand democracy.⁸⁰

⁷⁷ Balaguer’s writings fill ten volumes; the slick prose of his autobiography (1989) runs to nearly 500 pages. ⁷⁸ See the penultimate section of Gilroy 2000; note also the commingling of sociohistorical critique and Afrofuturism under the same title in Dery 1994. Cf. McConnell in this volume (pp. 240–264) on the blending of “the fantastical and the political” in Junot Díaz’s Afrodiasporic vision. ⁷⁹ Overview of the corpus: Torres-Saillant 1997. ⁸⁰ Mir 2000, 462 = Mir 2010, 133.

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Mir’s sarcastic retrojection of “firm-hand government” to the ancient Greeks is double-edged. Applying pressure to the authoritarian conceits of late-twentieth-century debates about Dominican governance by insinuating that the same reasoning about the need for “strong” (read: exploitative) government prevailed in antiquity, too, Mir slyly undercuts the privileging of ancient Greece as exemplary past. On his reading, the real legacy of Greek democracy for contemporary Dominican society is its success at masking the exercise of authoritarianism; this transit between pseudo-democratic past and pseudo-democratic present is what suspends Dominican society “between tenses” (hence Mir’s title). Through this play with reception, Mir pointedly animates an observation made some years later by the scholar of hispanophone classical reception David García Pérez: how a special kind of naïveté is required to indulge the idea of democracy as a legacy from Greek antiquity. Taking a page from Michel-Rolph Trouillot, we might add that the projection of this naiveté is never far from the practice of racialized violence.⁸¹ Although Mir’s tweaking of the invented tradition behind Dominican democracy as Hellenic legacy does not directly reference race’s imbrication in the (re)production of the classical, recent monumental interventions in the topography of Santo Domingo have stepped into the breach. Earlier we noted that the persistently elegiac evocations of Santo Domingo’s colonial past as classical are implicated in a species of miserabilism that fixates on mourning the brown present as a fall from white grace. But the statue of Montesinos with which this chapter opened creates conditions for another modality of reception: the hunger to identify “with the past in the future perfect,” that register of classicism whose most iconic expression James Porter has located in the Periclean Funeral Oration: “Mighty indeed are the marks and monuments of our empire which we have left. Future ages will wonder at us, as the present age wonders at us now” (Thuc. 2.41.4 [trans. Warner]).⁸² The statue is significant both because of its size and because of its placement in an exceptionally conspicuous stretch of the beachfront, within full view of ⁸¹ García Pérez 2012, 119: “Sólo desde la utopía o por la ingenuidad se puede creer que la idea de democracia es una herencia de la antigüedad griega.” Cf. Luis González’s complaint in the introduction to Soto Jiménez 2011: “Y es que en verdad en la RD no conocemos todavía la democracia en su esencia clásica ateniense” (12; emphasis mine). On naiveté and violence, see Trouillot 1995, xxiii. ⁸² This passage’s figuration of classicism as future perfect: Porter 2006, 62.

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tourists and of the service economy that has stabilized around catering to their needs. As a matter of optics, the statue’s association with the project of beautifying the beachfront for the indulgence of tourists is only a short step removed literally and metaphorically from the refusal to grant recognition to the disserved and disenfranchised black and brown denizens of Santo Domingo, as we saw in connection with Wesołowski and Castillo; or even worse, it traffics in the promotion of Dominican beauty into a touristically exploitable commodity—the postcolonial dynamic disturbingly evoked in a 2016 cover of the Swiss magazine Art und Reise (Fig. 3.2), in which a representation of the Dominican Republic as a woman holding her hand to shield her face is captioned with the words “bekannte Schönheit in neuem Glanz” (familiar beauty in new splendor). However, the statue opens the door to the activation and circulation of new models for the conceptualization of Dominican history. In the next few years, a museum for indigenous cultures will be opened in the statue’s immediate vicinity: granting that the museum has drawn some of its public support from the preference of many Dominicans to identify with their indio roots over and above their African ones, and that the museological is itself a mode of regularizing and normalizing the silencing effects of structural violence, one might still take this move as a step forward.⁸³ Potentially even more rewarding would be a recontextualization of the Iberian Montesinos as no mere white European but as a hybridized figure himself, representative of an intellectual and demographic cultural complex that had enmeshed communities on both sides of the Straits of Gibraltar in the centuries before the colonization of Santo Domingo. It is tempting to wonder why Castellanos Basich endowed his sculptural subject with close-cropped, curly hair: whatever the precise motivations behind it, the statue’s coiffure offers one route through which to begin plotting a reconstruction of the colonizers as bearing Africa with them even before the importation of slaves to Hispaniola. Owing as much to the Arab-African preservation of Aristotle as to the New Testament, Montesinos’s homiletics perform an intercultural brokerage and mediation not radically dissimilar from the work of such figures as Juan Latino, the African ex-slave turned professor of

⁸³ News of the museum’s plans: Pérez Reyes 2016.

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Fig. 3.2. April 2016 cover of artundreise magazine. Design: Isabel Yepez. Courtesy of Markus Weber on behalf of artundreise.

Latin in Grenada.⁸⁴ The Advent Sermon would initiate the project of transposing the frontier collisions of the Islamic and Christian worlds of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Mediterranean onto the Black ⁸⁴ For the life and writings of Juan Latino, see Seo 2011.

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Fig. 3.3. Statue group of Las Casas, Lemba, and Enriquillo, Museo del Hombre Dominicano, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Photo by D. Padilla Peralta.

Atlantic’s vortex of humans and cultures—a transposition then written over by those nineteenth- and twentieth-century Dominican intellectuals who labored to keep Santo Domingo locked in unidirectional contemplation of a classicized and static European whiteness. Montesinos is hardly the only historical figure to be retrieved through the monumentalizing aspirations of the present for the contemplation of an imagined posterity. At the entrance to the Museo del Hombre Dominicano in Santo Domingo, a row of three statues was installed during the 1980s (Fig. 3.3): in the center, in friar’s robes and holding a cross, is Bartolomé de Las Casas; flanking him are Sebastián Lemba, the African-born slave and rebel leader executed by Spanish colonists in 1548, and Enriquillo (Guarocuya), the Taino mastermind of multiple indigenous revolts from 1519 to 1533. The commemoration of these three figures is intended to underscore the hybridity of Dominican culture, a notion not greeted enthusiastically in all corners of Dominican society; Lemba’s addition in particular set off a storm.⁸⁵ The statue group is not without its warts even from the vantage point of those calling for ⁸⁵ See Howard 2001, 8; Fumagalli 2015, 122–3 (with fig. 8).

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greater inclusion. As with the Montesinos statue, the colonial period alone is deemed worthy of monumental display, with subsequent centuries allowed to recede into oblivion; one might grumble about the centering of Las Casas with cross in hand and the primitivizing of Lemba and Enriquillo, who are made to sport only loincloths; and it is striking if not entirely surprising that among members of the Dominican elite the intensity of poetic and artistic engagements with the indigenous past has not been paralleled by an equal investment in the legacies of the Black Atlantic.⁸⁶ Yet the willingness to embody both the glories and the traumas of a multiethnic heritage—and to resist the siren call of marketing the colony as a classical apogee—represents a tectonic shift in the cultural and political landscape. Making these kinds of revisionist critique all the more urgent is the high profile still enjoyed by the Dominican Republic’s classicizing nationalists, whose authoritarian predilections are never far from the surface of their writings. Among the most regularly consulted of these writers is the prolific Manuel Núñez. Born in 1957 and trained at University of Paris VIII and at the University of the Antilles, Núñez is perhaps best known for his forays into politics and for his 1990 (second edition 2001) book El ocaso de la nación dominicana (The Twilight of the Dominican Nation). In its opening chapters, the book mines nineteenth- and twentieth-century European thought to lay the groundwork for the Dominican nationalist project that will occupy much of the remaining pages. Two of the first figures to make an appearance are the ancient historians Numa Fustel de Coulanges and Theodor Mommsen, whose 1870 face-off over the question of whether Alsace-Lorraine was properly French or German is taken by Núñez to exemplify a contrast between two intellectual traditions: a French one that prioritizes the importance of libre consentimiento (free consent) in the decisions of communities to come together as a nation and a German one that underscores the importance of language, origins, and geography, with the latter’s roots traced to Herder.⁸⁷ Instead of reading

⁸⁶ Ricourt 2016, 45: “Yes, with Lemba Africa is present in the museum, but the center is Spain, and the historical substrate is Taino.” For an example of elite-level immersion in the recreation of the indigenous “substrate,” see Soto Jiménez 2010; for a school text that harps on “el tema de los pobladores indígenas” with no recognition of the African presence, see Blanco Díaz 2003. Skepticism that most Dominicans can speak knowledgably about Enriquillo: Moya Pons 2017, 142. ⁸⁷ Núñez (1990) 2001, 27–8. For full historical contextualization of Fustel de Coulanges’s reaction to Mommsen’s “Annexionsforderungen,” see Ungern-Sternberg 2017, 20–4.

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-  

these traditions as irreconcilable, Núñez holds them to be complementary, the desire to live together as a community defined by shared institutions quite easily joining hands in his view with a strong sense of shared cultural and ethnic legacy. From this innocent-seeming harmonization, Núñez pivots to the proposition that the Dominican nation is defined both by an act of consensual coming together (the independence movement of 1844) and by a cultural legacy held en común that “transcends” race and color.⁸⁸ This transcendence had formerly, in Núñez’s view, elevated the Dominican nation above its Haitian counterpart, which by contrast was forever locked in the prison-house of blackness; the fear that Haitian migrants are now encroaching upon the integrity of Dominican culture fuels Núñez’s doom-and-gloom forecast for the Dominican present. It may come as no surprise, then, that with the book and his subsequent writings Núñez positioned himself as one of the intellectual eminences behind the immigrant-restrictionist movement that currently has Dominican politics in its vise-like grip. In El ocaso, Núñez excoriates Dominican “elites” for being more concerned with securing low-salaried migrant labor than with protecting the average Dominican worker or with—and here for Núñez lies the cardinal sin—protecting the integrity of an uniquely Dominican culture.⁸⁹ According to Núñez, this culture was the beneficiary of a successful prior assimilation into Hispanicity so spectacularly successful as to displace from the Dominican mind any “cultural Negro” proclivities: in contrast to the “Haitian Negro,” who might choose to take refuge in Creole and vodou or to recreate African culture and stage the illusion of a mythic return to Africa, the Dominican does not and cannot entertain these fantasies because such “essentializing emotions” have disappeared from his mind.⁹⁰ Here and ⁸⁸ So, e.g. Núñez (1990) 2001, 22: “Lo dominicano agrupa a todas las razas, y las trasciende.” Precedents abound for this rhetoric: see Andrews 2016, 1–15, on the “official story” of successful racial integration and transcendence underpinning Latin American racial democracy. ⁸⁹ The chapter of El ocaso from which I am summarizing and quoting is entitled “La traición de los intelectuales”; the chapter’s very first footnote acknowledges Julien Benda’s 1928 La trahison des clercs but clarifies that Núñez’s real affinity is with another of Benda’s essays, “Esquisse d’une histoire des Français dans leurs volonté d’être une nation” (1932). ⁹⁰ Núñez (1990) 2001, 23: “En Santo Domingo, la hispanización del negro, desplazó de la mentalidad dominicana al negro cultural . . . . El haitiano puede refugiarse en las criptas inexpugnables del créole y el vodú. Puede reinventar su cultura africana. Vivir la ilusión de un mítico retorno a Africa. Todas esas emociones esencialistas han desparecido en el dominicano.” Núñez-style “Hispanophile discourses” are obsessed with denying the

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elsewhere in Núñez’s book, an ostensibly elevating and ennobling conception of Dominican culture as fully and healthily assimilated into Hispanicity turns out on closer examination to be little more than another script for white supremacy. The transcendence of race that Núñez has in mind is ultimately reducible to the desire to be assumed into whiteness. Moving along an interpretive arc all too recognizable nowadays to students of the “age of anger” and its populist eruptions,⁹¹ El ocaso faults both the elites whose greed for cheap labor inspires them to overlook—if not work actively on behalf of—the steady erosion of this transcendence and those black and brown migrants whose increasing numbers are an omen of the Dominican Republic’s negrification. While Núñez’s arguments have received the blistering critique they deserve, they have yet to be fully dislodged from their pedestal.⁹² They draw their vigor from the concerted rehabilitation of Trujillistas, such as Rosario Pérez, favorably mentioned in those dark corners of the internet where nationalists come together to disparage self-critical diagnoses of the Dominican Republic’s histories of racism.⁹³ They have retained their persuasive appeal for a significant portion of the Dominican electorate, as Balaguer—who in 1996 oversaw through proxies a presidential campaign of racist calumniations against his rival candidate José Francisco Peña Gómez, a Dominican of Haitian descent—knew all too well.⁹⁴ Most importantly for our purposes, they give a nice political-philosophical sheen to decades of xenophobic and racist thinking that marshaled under the sign of the classical continue to minimize or strive actively to discredit any positioning of the Dominican Republic within a Black Atlantic. The Sparta tradition, for one, is alive and well: in a 2004 issue of the journal Despertar, the editor Jorge Mora warned his readers that

existence of Dominican Vodú (Fumagalli 2015, 109–10). This denial’s grounding in U.S. crackdowns on Afro-Dominican religiosity: García-Peña 2016, 58–77. ⁹¹ On angry nationalisms, see now Mishra 2017; on populism, see Müller 2016. ⁹² See, e.g. Pérez 2002. On the generation of Dominican writers who have combated this species of Negrophobia, see Torres-Saillant 2006, 186; note, e.g. Abréu 2014 on the indissociability of haitianidad and dominicanidad. The enduring conservative and nationalistic strains of Dominican politics: Horn 2014. ⁹³ Núñez’s apologia for Rosario Pérez: Núñez 2015; cf. the comments posted under Prats 2015. Usefully on the persistence of trujillismo in the Dominican political imaginary: Soto Jiménez 2011. ⁹⁴ On this smear campaign, see Moya Pons (2010, 456–7; 2017, 151–2) for an optimistic take on the broad support for Peña Gómez despite racist dog-whistling.

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-  

Dominicans would be reduced to “helots” if Haitians were allowed to cross the borders with impunity.⁹⁵ So too is the Athenian tradition: in 2006, a Dominican contributor to a BBC online forum on Haiti’s future had sought to exonerate the Dominican Republic from any and all charges of having contributed to Haiti’s institutional and civic demise by claiming that such charges “were a campaign targeted at the ‘Athens of the New World.’ ”⁹⁶ The force of this tradition will be blunted only if and when a black Dominican classicism arrives on the scene to decolonize this imaginary— Junot Díaz’s play with Greek myth comes to mind—although such a black classicism will undoubtedly have its own internal tensions to negotiate.⁹⁷ In the meantime, there is the inoculation of satire. Consider this barbed notice from Ramón Colombo’s online column for the Dominican publication Acento, with its caustic riff on the friction between the country’s tourist “pitch” and its classicizing pretensions: What will a foreign visitor think of us if, upon arriving in Santo Domingo de Guzmán, the First City of the Americas, the Athens of the New World (which “has everything,” “where everything began”), he should see an individual— especially if that individual is a police officer—pissing in the street (correction: people urinate, animals piss) in full public view? He thinks: “And what country is this?” For this reason, I propose that, upon his arrival in this jungle, each foreigner should be handed a flyer that matter-of-factly states: “You have been duped. You have come to a country of enormous human backwardness, without law, where everything is possible.” (And that way he won’t be astonished.)⁹⁸

From Athens to jungle: Hellenophilia is unmasked as the internalized gaze of the foreigner, watching Dominicans (watch themselves) pee in the middle of the street. ⁹⁵ ¡Despertar! 2004, 8. ⁹⁶ See Claudio Cordero’s post under: “Foro: ¿tiene futuro Haití?” 2006. ⁹⁷ Some of these tensions were anticipated in C. L. R. James’s efforts to market classical Athens as a model for direct democracy among the formerly colonized (Quest 2017). Diasporic black classicism’s “dislocations”: Greenwood 2011. For Junot Díaz and the mythologizing properties of fukú, see McConnell in this volume (pp. 240–264). ⁹⁸ Colombo 2017: “¿Qué pensará de nosotros un visitante extranjero si, al llegar a Santo Domingo de Guzmán, la Primada de América, la Atenas del Nuevo Mundo (que ‘lo tiene todo’, ‘donde todo empezó’), viera a un individuo, sobre todo si es policía, meándose en la calle (digo bien: las personas orinan, los animales mean) a la vista de todo el mundo? Piensa: ‘¿Y qué país es este?’ Por tanto, propongo que, al llegar a esta jungla, a todo extraño se le entregue un volante que diga simplemente: ‘A usted lo engañaron. Ha llegado a un país de gran retroceso humano, y sin autoridad, donde todo es posible.’ (Y así no se asombrará.)”

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PART II

Journeys

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4 In Search of Henry Alexander Saturnin Hartley, Black Classicist, Clergyman, and Physician Michele Valerie Ronnick

The subject of this essay is Henry Alexander Saturnin Hartley (1861–1934; see Fig. 4.1), whose life and multifaceted career have been almost entirely overlooked by scholars.¹ He is worth deeper scrutiny, however, for his life serves as an important case study with which we can trace the way classics percolated up and down the Atlantic coast and through the Americas—scholarly work that is just starting to be done. Dr. Hartley’s peripatetic life took him from his birthplace in the British West Indies, across the Atlantic, to maritime Canada, South America, and into parts of the United States. His life forms another example of the prosopographical approach needed to track down and document accurately the history of black classicism.² Although received at different ¹ The only full-length article to mention Hartley is Judith Fingard’s (2002) pioneering study, which looks at the lives of Hartley and Reverend J. Francis Robinson (1862–1930), a young Baptist cleric, who when charged with incompetence and rash behavior was defended by James Robinson Johnston (1876–1915), the first black lawyer in Nova Scotia, which I cited in my biographical sketch (Ronnick 2008). The few contemporary accounts of Hartley’s life include New York Age 1890; Cleveland Gazette 1891; Marquis and Leonard 1901–2, 506. ² See, e.g. King 1996; Becker 1999; Ronnick 2001a, 2001b, 2002a, 2005, 2012.

Michele Valerie Ronnick, In Search of Henry Alexander Saturnin Hartley, Black Classicist, Clergyman, and Physician. In: Classicisms in the Black Atlantic. Edited by: Ian Moyer, Adam Lecznar, and Heidi Morse, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198814122.003.0005

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  

Fig. 4.1. Photograph reproduced from “Hartley, Henry Alexander Saturnin” in Watson 1986, 301.

times, promulgated, synthesized, and/or complicated by the lives and careers of a wide range of black people, knowledge of the classics was a “currency” of its own which was valued throughout the Black Atlantic. In the study of the particular details of Dr. Hartley’s life, we may find some universal intuition.

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Hartley was born on December 18, 1861, in Port of Spain, a city located on the east coast of the island of Trinidad. While the island had slaves from 1802 onward, when the first shipments of African people began to arrive, there were also indentured servants coming in from the Middle East, the Far East, and India. But Trinidad’s population of slaves was smaller than that of neighboring islands. In 1838 Trinidad had 17,439 slaves. By contrast, Jamaica with a land mass twice that of Trinidad had 360,000 slaves, a number that represented 90 percent of its population (Brereton 1996, 13–16). Furthermore, slavery did not dominate Trinidad for as long as it did other Caribbean islands. Its peak period lasted from 1780 to 1830, unlike on Barbados and Martinique, whose slave populations steadily grew from the mid-seventeenth century onward under the Dutch and English hegemony. In addition, the estates of the Trinidadian slave owners were small to medium in size. The island’s southwest corner, the so-called sugar belt, was almost entirely inhabited by Africans, including Foulahs, Homas, Yorubas, Ashantees, Congos, Biafrans, and Mandingoes of the Muslim faith (Epstein 2012, 222). The Law of Population (1783) had promised land grants to French settlers, free blacks, and other people of color who were willing to move. With such an incentive, people came from neighboring islands, such as Martinique, Grenada, St. Lucia, and Guadeloupe, introducing slavery and indentured servitude to Trinidad. The British took control of the island in 1797, and after 1807, when the slave trade was prohibited, the island’s population of slaves gradually declined until 1834, the year in which slavery itself was finally abolished. Another wave of about 8,000 people from various places in West Africa, such as Sierra Leone and the island of St. Helena, arrived through a system of planned emigration during the years 1841–61, and Port of Spain’s population grew from 18,980 in 1861 to 31,858 in 1881 (Brereton 1979, 134; 1996, 12, 43).³ This new population reinforced and reinvigorated many African cultural legacies in Trinidad that might otherwise have died out. Thus we can see that Hartley was born on an island that was home to many ethnic groups and people from disparate national and geographical origins. It was in no way a homogeneous place.

³ Trotman (1986, 26) states that during the years between 1837 and 1867 “10,000 people came and many were free.”

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  

His father, Stephen (d.1866), also known as Etienne, was of mixed blood that included an English and Scottish admixture. He was employed as a bookkeeper in Port of Spain at the grocery import firm of C. L. Haly and Company (Hartley 1890, 261). On December 27, 1860, he married Eleanor Jones Hartley (1830–88), who originally came from Bridgetown, Barbados, at the Church of the Holy Trinity in Port of Spain (Hartley 1890, 9). His father’s mother was of Hova descent, the free commoner class on the island of Madagascar. She was taken at age twelve from her home in Imanangora to Georgetown, Maryland, then to SaintPierre on Martinique in the French West Indies, and finally to Port of Spain, where she was purchased by Hartley’s grandfather, Henry H. Hartley, and later presented with papers of manumission (Hartley 1890, 252). Young Hartley had only about five years with his father, who died on January 26, 1866. The boy seems to have been the apple of his mother’s eye. He was perhaps the only one of her children to reach maturity; his memoir, a 301-page scrapbook of sorts titled Ta Tou Pragma Emou Biou or Some Concerns of My Life (1890), mentions a sister named Agatha, born January 3, 1863 (Hartley 1890, 272). His mother was both pious and frugal—a devoted Anglican church attendee who used her skills as a seamstress and embroiderer to augment the family’s income and also help those who were less fortunate (Hartley 1890, 272–3). They were both interested in books and reading, as a short note dated July 10, 1886, from a family friend J. T. Thomas, reveals: “I returned the Dante and Anacreon to your dear mother and mail accordingly to your request Xenop[h]ona [sic]” (Hartley 1890, 221). After her death on July 15, 1888, which occurred while Hartley was in Canada, he wrote a few months later to Pierre Genty, an old family friend in Port of Spain, saying: “Oh! could I like the authors of law, the warrior sons of Anchises, the subduers of the Sabines, could I have but caught her last breath” (for which he parenthetically supplied the Latin noun for breath, inflatus; Hartley 1890, 280). On August 13, describing himself as “her fatherless child whose education was her life-work,” Hartley gave what he called a panegyric in her honor during Sunday services at St. Philip’s Church in New Brunswick, Canada (Hartley 1890, 270–3). He also dedicated Ta Tou Pragma Emou Biou or Some Concerns of My Life to her, calling her “a woman of heroic soul, of chaste and immaculate character, of resolute will, unflagging determination . . . [and] a votary of Terpsichore, Thalia

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and Melpomene’s,” the Greek Muses of dancing, comedy, and tragedy (Hartley 1890, 2). Chief among the witnesses at the wedding of Stephen and Eleanor Hartley was Dr. Louis Saturnin (d.1873), a physician trained in Paris. The young Henry Hartley was his namesake, and Dr. Saturnin seems to have been something of a surrogate father. How he had become involved with the Hartley family is not clear, but Dr. Saturnin was a good friend for them to have. He belonged to a fine old Creole family who was part of the free “colored” plantocracy on Trinidad (Brereton 1979, 87). His mother was descended from a wealthy “colored” planter who had come to Trinidad from Martinique in 1791, and his father owned several estates. They were—in short—well connected. From Saturnin’s family and others like them came Trinidad’s professional class: the doctors, lawyers, and schoolmasters of the nineteenth century. They were, however, a minority in Trinidad’s stratified society. Saturnin studied medicine at the University of Paris and having specialized in tropical fevers came back to Trinidad to begin his practice in 1838. Known as “the doyen of colored doctors,” he was said to have been a “universal favorite” with his friends and patients (Brereton 1979, 87). But in 1867, having been for many years the superintendent of Trinidad’s Leper Asylum, Saturnin was dismissed by the island’s new governor, Arthur Hamilton-Gordon (1829–1912), for gross negligence. While sources suggest that this was justified, controversy erupted (Brereton 1979, 87). Henry was six years old when Dr. Saturnin lost his job, and he had lost his father the year before, but we can get a sense of the youngster from a line drawing he left us in his memoir which he dated precisely to “3 years, 1 month and 21 days” of age (Hartley 1890, 10). The drawing’s details, which were taken from a copy of a contemporary portrait perhaps, support the recollections of Trinidad’s Archbishop Louis JoachimHyacinthe Gonin (1814–89), who remembered Hartley many years later as a “little boy [with] long hair in curls hanging behind his back, playing in sportive mirth on the sandy beach” (Hartley 1890, 215). Their family friend Pierre Genty recalled Hartley in August 1889 as “un petit enfant in frock and wide flowing pantaloons with soft white neck bejeweled with cross and chain of gold” (Hartley 1890, 255). Hartley was confirmed on Palm Sunday, March 28, 1875, at Port of Spain’s Trinity Church in a ceremony presided over by the Rector

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  

Samuel L. Bruce Richards (Hartley 1890, 10–11). In December of 1878 Hartley passed the Cambridge examination at Queen’s Royal College (Hartley 1890, 90). Founded in 1859, the college was the leading secondary school on the island, and its curriculum was classically based. But in the following year for reasons unknown, Hartley abandoned his longterm plan to study for the Anglican ministry at Codrington College in St. John, Barbados. In February of 1880 he received an appointment to work at Port of Spain’s post office, but again for reasons unknown he resigned a few months later on July 17, 1880 (Hartley 1890, 90). On a subsequent trip back to the same office, he tells us that he and the beaver skin hat that he was wearing were pelted with mango seeds and stones hurled by a pair of clerks (Hartley 1890, 97). He immediately sought redress from the authorities, and one of the pranksters was fined (Hartley 1890, 91–5). With this incident began Hartley’s lifelong campaign for civil rights, proper social comportment (including the need for temperance), and his long association with “the dusky brethren of mystic tie,” that is, various Masonic lodges and fraternal organizations (Hartley 1890, 158; see also 101–33, 141–7, 186–202). During the nineteenth century, from Nova Scotia to the Caribbean islands, black masons (such as the Independent Order of Odd Fellows and the Ancient Order of Foresters) had established lodges, and these provided a transnational fraternity of support to their members (Ramsay 2011, 3, 6). In Nova Scotia, Hartley joined the Thanksgiving Lodge of the Independent Order of Good Templars and in 1888 founded a “black lodge of Oddfellows, the first benevolent society open to the black population of St. John” (Fingard 2002, 28). At his funeral in 1934, Masonic rites were performed, and many of his brethren marched in the funeral procession (Trinidad Guardian 1934, 3). In 1883 Hartley visited England and the Continent. On June 25, 1883, he married London-born Naomi Locke (1864–84). She was nineteen years old and he twenty-two. He lost her less than ten months later when she died in childbirth in Paris along with their twins, a boy and girl (Hartley 1890, 279). Hartley never seemed to recover from the loss. He returned to Trinidad in 1884 and worked in the Cooperative Dispensary Pharmacy in Port of Spain (Hartley 1890, 80, 83). That summer, on June 9, 1884, while attempting to stop an act of police brutality that he witnessed on the street by “certain police constables”

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against “Barbadian refugees,” Hartley was himself arrested for interference (Hartley 1890, 169). For three months, he waged a verbal war to clear his name through letters and articles published in the local newspapers in which he employed an occasional classical tag, such as Juvenal’s question (6.347) quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Hartley 1890, 19–21, 32–3, 59–68). In the end he had to satisfy himself with the Crown Colony’s final ruling that he had suffered “unnecessary treatment” and the charges against him would be dropped (Hartley 1890, 72, 77). During the fall of 1884 Hartley was licensed to preach by both the British Methodist Episcopal (BME) Church’s Port of Spain Mission and the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church’s outpost in Trinidad (Hartley 1890, 13). His joint licensure anticipated the merger of the BME and the AME churches, which occurred officially in Baltimore in late 1884. In August of 1885 he tried his hand at poetry. He dedicated his poem “The Beautiful” to Michel Maxwell Philip (1824–88), a classically educated lawyer and author of what has been called “the first piece of prose fiction in the Anglo Caribbean tradition,” a novel published in 1854 and titled Emmanuel Appadocca; Or, Blighted Life (Cudjoe 1997, xiv). No copy of Hartley’s poem seems to have survived, but Philip called it “a truly scholarly production” that “verily does honour to you as a son of the soil . . . as an alumnus of Queen’s Royal College, does honour to the respected ashes of your revered Father, does honour to your dear Mother, does honour to your communion . . . it rejoices your numerous friends, it [i]nspires me” (Hartley 1890, 216). During this period Hartley turned down a chance to go back to London and work at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. He said that he was “determined to forsake the world” and “humbly follow Christ” (Hartley 1890, 162). With that goal in mind, he set sail for the United States in December of 1885. His destination was New Haven, CT. He then spent a short time as a deacon and pastor at Bethel Church in New York City and moved on to the Bethel AME Church in Bridgeport, CT (Fingard 2002, 25). During this time a certificate dated January 31, 1887, from the AME Church indicates that he was supposed to join the Somerset Mission in Bermuda (Hartley 1890, 16). If he actually went, he must have stayed less than six months, for in June of 1887 he refused to accept a new AME posting in Arkansas and moved to Canada. Hartley was named deacon in the BME church in St. Catharines, Ontario on July 10, 1887 (Hartley 1890, 17).

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He was now on his way to becoming an “Africadian,” to use the phrase coined in the twentieth century by George Elliot Clarke (b.1960), the E. J. Pratt Professor of Canadian Literature at the University of Toronto (Hochbruck 2008, 228). On July 12, 1887, he was appointed by the BME Church to serve the Guelph, Peel, and Oakville Missions in St. Catharines, Ontario. On July 18, 1888, he was transferred again, this time to the Nova Scotia Conference of the AME Church. The years (between 1888 and 1890) that Hartley spent in St. John, New Brunswick, as the pastor of the St. Philips AME Church seem to have been his happiest. He was welcomed by liberal members of the clergy and by the small black community that had been drawn together by the church and their commitment to educational and social reforms (Fingard 2002, 26–7). This included a local hero and fellow Trinidadian, Henry Sylvester Williams (1869–1911), who studied law at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1893, and later, after becoming the first black to practice law in South Africa, supported pan-Africanism on the continent. AME Bishop Benjamin Tucker Tanner (1835–1923) praised Hartley, saying that he had “accomplished not a little” at “one of the most peculiar appointments” (Tanner 1889). In December of 1888 Hartley married Katherine Cunliffe, a black freedwoman from Fredericton, New Brunswick. Pierre Genty was among those back in Trinidad who were not at all pleased. They thought that Hartley had married beneath his own privileged station in life (Hartley 1890, 286–7). After spending five months honeymooning in the West Indies, the couple returned in May of 1889 to New Brunswick. Hartley’s first book was published in Nova Scotia during this period. Titled Classical Translations, its 134 pages offer the straightforward kind of work recognizable to contemporary classical scholars. The book opens with a preface and dedication to Samuel Leonard Tilley (1818–96), who was then the Lieutenant Governor of New Brunswick. “We happily dedicate this little volume as a token of esteem, and [a] tribute of tender regard to him,” wrote Hartley. He was clearly proud of his book, for he sent a copy of it, dated November 21, 1889, to Charles William Eliot (1834–1926), President of Harvard University from 1869 to 1909, with this inscription: “I request your kind acceptance on behalf of your distinguished seat of learning of this enclosed little work. I will be thankful for an acknowledgment [and] any expression of opinion.

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Yours faithfully, Henry Hartley.” Duly catalogued on July 9, 1890, the book is still in Harvard’s library in Cambridge, MA. In the preface Hartley tells us that he has “endeavored to pass away the winter nights . . . recalling to memory . . . songs of the bards” and the “rhetoric of orators,” and that the writing of his book has given him “mental recreation” and “recalled to mind the happiness of the scholastic life” and a “reminiscence thrice tender and cherished of Alma Mater” (Hartley 1889, 7). The first section consists of twenty-nine poems in total: ten from Horace, three from Catullus, one from Propertius, three from Tibullus, ten from Ovid, and two from Martial. The second section consists of a dozen excerpts from Cicero’s Pro Archia, including the beginning and the end of the speech. The third part begins with excerpts from Book 6 of Ovid’s Fasti concerning the month of June, followed by sections from the Epistulae ex Ponto 1.3 (to Rufinus), Heroides 1 (Penelope to Ulysses) and 12 (Medea to Jason), 2.16 from Ovid’s Amores about missing an absent lady, and a bit more from Book 6 of the Fasti. The book’s final pages offer some selections from Aesop’s fables: the horse and the ass, the wolf and the lamb, the lion and the mouse, the wolf and the heron, the widow and the sheep, and the gnat and the bull. It closes with some short pieces from three eighteenth-century French writers: André Chénier (1762–94), Jean Reboul (1796–1864), and Alfred De Vigny (1797–1863). The final selections leave readers thinking about the world. Passages about learning to play the flute, seeing the open sky, looking at a winter snow scene, or hearing a singing gondolier evoke thoughts of our short journey through time—celestial, seasonal, and elemental. Hartley’s Classical Translations of 1889 was a singular achievement. It is the first book of translations from the literature of ancient Greece and Rome made and published by a person of African descent in the western hemisphere. It is neither original Neo-Latin poetry, such as that written by the black Jamaican Francis Williams (1700–71), nor a mixture of original poems in English and some translations, as those by the African American Phillis Wheatley (c.1753–84).⁴ A little more than 100 years later Hartley was following in their footsteps, and his interest in classical languages put him in perfect step with other educated people of African

⁴ For a study of Williams and his poetry, see Ronnick 1998.

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descent from his era. In 1854 Michel Maxwell Philip (1829–88) used a quote from Euripides’ Hecuba (55–8) as an epigraph to his novel Emmanuel Appadocca; Or, Blighted Life (Cain 1997, xvi, xxxviii). In 1875 Richard Theodore Greener (1844–1922) became the first black member of the Society for Classical Studies (at the time called the American Philological Association). In 1881 William Sanders Scarborough (1852–1926) published the first textbook for ancient Greek written by a person of African American descent, First Lessons in Greek (1881), and in 1893 at Syracuse University William Lewis Bulkley (1861–1933) received the first doctorate earned by a person of African descent for work in a classical language in the western hemisphere.⁵ Soon after his book’s publication, Hartley was transferred to St. Marks Church in Amherst, Nova Scotia, in keeping with the customs of the AME and BME Church of moving their clergy around. He was not happy and pined for the more intellectual scene he had enjoyed at St. John. In August of 1890, in a sermon delivered at Highland Church to a group of visitors, Hartley boasted that he “might now be a professor of Greek, or Latin, or French, or German for he knew them all” (Hartley 1890, 231; see also Fingard 2002, 27). Offered a transfer on October 31, 1890, to Hammonds Plains in Halifax, he refused. But in spite of the turmoil, Hartley produced his second book, an autobiographical pastiche titled Ta Tou Pragma Emou Biou or Some Concerns of My Life, which he published in Amherst, Nova Scotia. Its title (which should actually be Ta Tou Pragmata Emou Biou, grammatically speaking), its various typographical errors, and its uneven narrative style that juxtaposes sections of prose with facsimiles of many documents suggest that the volume was put together in haste and that its text was given little or no attention by Hartley or those employed at the Daily Press Job Rooms, where the book was printed. Nevertheless, its contents form the backbone of our knowledge about him. Incidents in his memoir suggest that there were unusual spiritual forces at work in his life. Sometime in the early 1880s, on the Feast Day of Epiphany in Port of Spain, Hartley wrote: Mother, ourself [sic] and our old Fides Achates, our devoted servant, my respected nurse and friend Mrs. Bailey, having just returned from the Cathedral

⁵ For a study of Scarborough’s book, see Ronnick 2002b, 30–43.

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where moral matins, an unctuous sermon, a gem of excellence and celestial spirituality by the gifted servant of God, Dr. [Richard] Rawle [1812–89, Trinidad’s first Anglican bishop], and choral eucharist made up the soul-elevating service . . . were just returning from the Cathedral. [Having] alighted from our carriage, [we] betook ourselves to the several apartments of the house awaiting the summons of a breakfast bell, a luxury much required after a prolonged fast till 9 a.m . . . Sitting then in our study . . . we were reading Aeneas’ “Descent to Hell” in Vergil’s Aeneid when the sound of the parlor bell drew our attention as our servant boy, Jean (Jean Hartley), an unprotected, uncared for urchin to whom we took a fancy, and who was taken care of by mother, sent to school and taught by us also, attended to the alarm. (Hartley 1890, 129)

The boy found a man “of ebony skin,” unlike their own, whose strange language frightened him and the rest of the servants, the Indian Joseph Lalasing, the groom William Henry Thomas, and the cook Augusta Piper (Hartley 1890, 130–1). Hartley offers no explanation as to why his family was following a pagan author whom he describes as a “Latin bard” down to the underworld on the day of Epiphany (Hartley 1890, 130). Nor does he say anything about the sudden appearance of a dark-skinned stranger (whom the family later recognizes) at the start of a day commemorating the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles in the persons of the Magi. A second event—the Lower Cove Ghost incident in St. John, New Brunswick, in November 1889—is equally suggestive. Hartley claimed along with a few others to have seen a ghost at Lower Cove, which was located just outside the town. It was supposedly the ghost of a married man named Jackson who had left a widow (Fingard 2002, 27). According to Hartley, he tried to assuage it by speaking Latin directly to it and reading Psalms to it in Latin. A few weeks later in a sermon entitled “Spiritual Manifestations,” he defended his actions and contended that spiritual forms were sent to earth by the divine, “for which science ha[d] not been able to account” (Hartley 1890, 308–9). Suffice it to say, this did not go over well. He was pilloried by the press. The St. John Globe declared: Like all men subject to the influence of classicism he depends upon the dead languages when he should put his faith in the living . . . [H]is latest book shows that he has quite an acquaintance with persons, who thousands of years ago paid their obols to Charon and crossed the Styx into the Elysian fields beyond . . . We must subject him to the discipline of the Evangelical Alliance . . . before this uncanny, but intensely spiritual Lower Cover makes more trouble in that part of the city. (Hartley 1890, 306)

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Reverend William Lawson of the Carmarthan Street Methodist Church was quoted in another local paper, the Daily Sun, saying that the “Bible nowhere sustained the belief in ghosts,” and “if somebody saw a ghost in Lower Cover, somebody must have been deluded” (Fingard 2002, 27). Hartley bravely defended himself in a sermon preached on December 1, 1889 (Hartley 1890, 307–9). As evidence he offered the resurrection of Christ and his miracles, as well as divine “manifestations,” which “do not appear promiscuously, or to any and every one,” and said that the “apparition of spirits is clearly taught in the Bible” (Hartley 1890, 309; see also Fingard 2002, 27). But his thoughts on integration may have contributed to his troubles, too, for he said in St. John in 1888 that he “did not believe in race churches” and hoped that “separate churches would no longer be needed” (Fingard 2002, 28). Resuming his pattern of peregrination, Hartley left Canada in 1891. He moved to Nashville, TN, and enrolled in the Methodist-supported Meharry Medical School, which trained black physicians, and also worked at St. Augustine’s Church there. From 1893 to 1894 he was at a medical mission in Chatham, GA, and in a report of his service he described “gratuitous treatment” and “gratuitous instruction” given to the children there for which he received no payment “owing to the poverty of the people” (Diocese of Georgia 1891, app. 3, 126). From 1894 to 1895 Hartley was at St. Mary’s Church in Keokuk, IA, and spent the next two years at St. Mary’s in Vicksburg, MS (Diocese of Iowa 1914, 126, 128, 135). It not clear what he did from 1898 to 1899, but by 1900 he was back in Nova Scotia teaching at a school in the rural black community of Preston. At some point in 1904, after filling in for Reverend J. C. Coleman at the AME Zion Church in Halifax, he matriculated at Laval University in Quebec City and earned his medical degree there in 1906 (Fingard 2002, 31; The Enterprise 1896, 303). In 1910 he was admitted to the Nova Scotia Medical Society. At some point during this period, Hartley returned to Port of Spain and spent the last twenty-five years of his life serving the city as “the poor man’s doctor and a stalwart of the local labor party” (Fingard 2002, 25). Throughout his life, Hartley endeavored to help his fellow human beings. He melded his youthful interest in studying for the Anglican church with the example of his “god-father,” the physician, Dr. Saturnin, and at no point in his life did he cease to minister to human beings through faith and heal them through medicine.

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But Dr. Hartley never forgot his roots, and although he had been removed by time and travel from his days reading with his mother, studying classical texts, and publishing translations from them, when he died in October of 1934 he left instructions in his will that $1,000 should be sent to Wilberforce University, the leading educational institution of its day founded by black people for black people by the AME Church, to establish an academic award (Pittsburgh Courier 1934; Trinidad Guardian 1934; Xenia Gazette 1934). The funds were given so that a silver medal could be awarded annually to the year’s best Greek student, which was clearly the commemorative and posthumous embodiment of the intellectual and religious interests he had held in life.

Conclusion For Judith Fingard, Dr. Hartley was “urbane and educated, self possessed, superstitious and sensational,” but she was quite skeptical of his record. “Even if we give Hartley the benefit of the doubt,” she declared, “his version of events [can]not be believed without reservation” (Fingard 2002, 31). I think she has perhaps missed the point. It is quite clear that Hartley was a restless, ambitious, fearless, outspoken, self-confident, and self-promoting fellow. Within and outside the church, his career was marked with moments of controversy, and his actions seem often to have been misunderstood. His encounter with ghosts and study of Aeneas’s so-called descent to Hell seem otherworldly and hardly Christian. But they are very likely the result of Hartley’s own upbringing on an island populated by people of African descent who both remembered and practiced the old ways from Africa, such as the Yoruban belief in the spirit world or trust in the Obeah men who could work miracles. This in turn suggests that the apparent turmoil in Hartley’s life may stem in part from the confluence and collision of several cultures—African, GraecoRoman, Anglican, and Catholic—that he continually experienced and negotiated. In regard to his interest in language and his desire to end racism, he follows in the footsteps of his fellow Trinidadian John Jacob Thomas (1841–89), who published a groundbreaking defense of his island’s Franco-African language, The Theory and Practice of Creole Grammar (1869), and championed the Caribbean peoples and culture in Froudacity: West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude (1889). Such creolized

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and intercultural fusions would mark the life and work of later Trinidadians, such as C. L. R. James (1901–89), George Padmore (1903–59), and Eric Williams (1911–81), and shape the aesthetic vision of Derek Walcott (1930–2017), who was born 222 miles away on St. Lucia (Quest 2017, 238–43). Words from George Elliot Clarke’s 2004 poem “Lawyer Johnston’s Defence” describe well Hartley’s experience (quoted in Johnston 2005, xii–xv): Please remember what’s been proved. I played no Sambo or Uncle Tom Neither burnt-cork nor white powder Disgraced my face . . . I learned how to talk: I learned how to talk back— . . . To judges and cops You jurors who wear second-hand shoes Will appreciate that, in my time, Coloured chaps who wrote Latin and spoke Greek Polished shoes and handed out towels in men’s rooms. Citizens, when those alcoholic, persnickety Grits . . . Busted into the Preston schoolhouse To havoc and dismay our Negro pupils, I jumped into the papers and hurled shame On their shenanigans— . . . Please forgive me, though, for noticing, In scripture as in history . . . Backward-stumbling people hate anyone inching forward.

Henry Alexander Saturnin Hartley is the heretofore-unheralded herald of these men. Although his life was less exalted and never celebrated like theirs, he was buoyed up in the ocean of Black Atlantic classicisms by the very same currents by which they themselves would later be propelled. In this way, the Trinidadian-American-Canadian Hartley made a pioneering contribution to the history of black classicism in the western hemisphere.

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5 Roman Studios The Black Woman Artist in the Eternal City, from Edmonia Lewis to Carrie Mae Weems Heidi Morse

“What are you doing here?” an acquaintance asked photographer Carrie Mae Weems (b.1953) when they crossed paths in Italy during Weems’s 2005–6 residency at the American Academy in Rome. Weems had applied for and won a Joseph H. Hazen Rome Prize Fellowship and was spending the year photographing the city for a series titled Roaming (2006). Later, when introducing the work to American audiences during her first career retrospective in 2013 (the same year she received a MacArthur “Genius Grant”), it was the question itself, and its implied subtext, that best explained her goals: “What are you doing here? What place does Rome have in your art, or your art in Rome?” (Weems 2013). A version of that question has been asked of black Europeans again and again by those who view Europe as white, or who view the cultural and geographic spaces of the continent as belonging to particular racial or ethnic groups.¹ These viewpoints reflect a range of attitudes from ¹ For an introduction to scholarship on “Black Europe,” a term which, of course, provokes the question “what is Europe, when we talk about the Black diaspora in Europe?” (Small 2009, xxvii), see Wright 2004; Hine, Keaton, and Small 2009; El-Tayeb 2011. On black Italian studies, see Pugliese 2008; Andall and Duncan 2010; Giuliani and Lombardi-Diop 2013. I am indebted to Kira Thurman for these recommendations, which emerged out of our conversations about parallels between the study of black classicisms and Black Europe. Heidi Morse, Roman Studios: The Black Woman Artist in the Eternal City, from Edmonia Lewis to Carrie Mae Weems. In: Classicisms in the Black Atlantic. Edited by: Ian Moyer, Adam Lecznar, and Heidi Morse, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198814122.003.0006

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ignorance to willful denial of the diversity of Europe and its place within cross-cultural Mediterranean and Atlantic networks from antiquity to the present. One of the most succinct responses to queries like “Why are you here?”—in this case directed against immigrant labor activists in 1970s Britain—was “We are here because you were there!” (Small 2009, xxiv). Of course, Rome’s imperial history stretches back even farther than Britain’s, complicating the “here,” “there,” and “when” of cultural affiliation. Weems’s Roaming series offers another form of response: a visual meditation on bodies occupying spaces of exclusion to make space for belonging, not only in the present but also in the past. A standout in a generation of African American women artists who came of age in the 1970s and 80s, Weems is best known for photographs that foreground representations of African American women’s bodies in domestic scenes—like her Kitchen Table series (1990)—and in relation to intertwined histories of racism and American visual media.² Her early work was based in the U.S., Caribbean, and West Africa—all geographic regions that cue blackness and familiar narratives of African diaspora to audiences focused on Weems’s identity as an African American artist. Breaking this trend, Roaming shows Weems moving through the Italian capital city and its environs, inviting viewers to consider the relationship between the black woman artist and iconic vistas of Rome and its ancient past. In “The Edge of Time—Ancient Rome,” Weems, a lone female figure clad in a plain black dress, stands in the foreground at the precipice of a stairwell leading down into a maze of houses and buildings whose Mediterranean clay roofs spill upwards to the peak of an adjoining city hill. Does she belong? Whose histories are imprinted here? In “Department of Lavorare—Mussolini’s Rome,” Weems, again seen from behind, stands adjacent to an icon of fascist neoclassical architecture commissioned by Mussolini in 1937, the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, commonly known as the Square Colosseum. Here the imposing edifices surrounding her are visual reminders of Italy’s twentieth-century dictatorial regime.

² Contemporaries working in similar modes include photographers Adrian Piper (b.1948), Renee Cox (b.1960), and Lorna Simpson (b.1960). Weems and Simpson, who received M.F.A.’s from the University of California, San Diego, in 1984 and 1985, respectively, both frequently employ juxtapositions of text and image to probe visual histories of race- and gender-based discrimination; Cox and Weems regularly utilize self-portraiture.

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Echoing her use of self-portraiture in other work, Weems presents her own body as witness and guide into Roman architecture and Italian landscapes—from ancient to modern—“leading the viewer into those spaces highly aware,” she says, “and challenging those spaces, challenging them and marking them for what they are” (Art21 2010). Her recurring figure, like a dark silhouette or cutout, evokes both physical presence and haunting absence: the black woman artist has rarely been included in the grand narrative of Western art history. In her iconic essay “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” Alice Walker asks, “What did it mean for a black woman to be an artist in our grandmothers’ time? In our great-grandmothers’ day? It is a question with an answer cruel enough to stop the blood” ([1972] 1994, 402). Walker commemorates the artistry of women whose social status or whose work as enslaved laborers prevented them from launching careers as artists like the poet Phillis Wheatley (c.1753–84) and sculptor Mary Edmonia Lewis (1844–1907)—both exceptional figures in their time— were able to do. Despite their relative absence from the historical record, she argues, the trace of black women’s creativity can be found in their everyday labors—such as her own mother’s beautiful flower garden—as well as in the writing, art, and memories of future generations: “so many of the stories that I write, that we all write, are my mother’s stories” (Walker [1972] 1994, 407). Black feminist genealogies flourish by naming those who have come before, by recognizing the often-unmarked presences whose movements and passions have shaped today’s world. Walker’s comments are a call to look for these presences, not only in the expected places but also in those that are unexpected. The photographs in Carrie Mae Weems’s Roaming offer a way of thinking about the experiences of black artists, including those of previous generations, who have travelled or lived in Europe. One such artist was the free-born, mixed-race, nineteenth-century neoclassical sculptor Edmonia Lewis, who spent most of her career in Rome. Lewis’s chosen medium of white marble contrasts Weems’s black-and-white photographs, yet both artists’ oeuvres—especially their preoccupation with female portraiture—speak to the compelling question of the presence or absence of the black woman artist in recorded art history. In the so-called Eternal City, Lewis found not only the materials and cultural environment necessary to pursue her chosen calling but a new vantage point from which to investigate the very questions Weems

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grapples with 140 years later in Roaming: What does it mean to be a black woman artist? What kind of work do audiences expect her to produce? How might a shift in geographical perspective expose or transform those expectations? As Paul Gilroy (1993a, 17) points out in his introduction to The Black Atlantic, “Notable black American travelers, from the poet Phyllis Wheatley onwards, went to Europe and had their perceptions of America and racial domination shifted as a result of their experiences there.” While Gilroy frames his articulation of the “Black Atlantic” on the transatlantic travels of male intellectuals, such as Martin Delany, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Richard Wright, he invites study of what Europe meant to black women, even naming Lewis as one among many compelling case studies: “What of Sarah Parker Remond’s work as a medical practitioner in Italy and the life of Edmonia Lewis, the sculptor, who made her home in Rome? What effects did living in Paris have upon Anna Cooper, Jessie Fauset, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Lois Maillou [sic] Jones?” (Gilroy 1993a, 18). A small but dedicated handful of cultural historians have taken up Gilroy’s call, producing biographical materials on Lewis, who was of both African American and Ojibwe descent, and showing how her notoriety among American audiences flourished as a result of her transatlantic relocation.³ Much of the biographical scholarship focuses on Lewis’s movement within and beyond American abolitionist circles and her desire to leave behind the persistent verbal and physical abuse she faced in the U.S.⁴ In these readings Italy becomes a beacon of freedom from American racism that intensified in the year of her departure, 1865, as the nation grappled with social changes precipitated by the end of the American Civil War. During this era Italy was the center of artistic and cultural taste for a generation of artists, writers, and travelers hailing from Europe, Britain, and the Americas. Neoclassicism was the mode du jour, and Italy’s unique cultural history as the seat of the Roman Empire and the home of Renaissance masters like Da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Bernini attracted a core group of U.S. sculptors who drew on ³ See especially Richardson 1995; Buick 2010; Henderson and Henderson 2012. ⁴ Most notable among many instances was Lewis’s entanglement within a scandal at Oberlin College in which she was accused of poisoning two white female classmates and put on trial in 1862. Although she was proven innocent, she had been physically assaulted, morally impugned, and in 1864 she was accused of theft and expelled. For a full account, see Buick 2010, 8–10.

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Graeco-Roman art, history, and mythology to produce idealized figures in white marble. Edmonia Lewis’s entry into this elite milieu was an achievement in itself, but her arrival in Rome also enabled her to critique the increasing entanglements of Rome’s classical legacy with cultural constructions of race in transatlantic modernity. As considered from the perspective of classical reception studies, Lewis’s career—especially her most famous sculpture The Death of Cleopatra (1876), which was exhibited at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition—demonstrates the breadth and vibrancy of black women’s visual interventions into modern perceptions of the classical past. Nineteenth-century American culture was rife with references to classical Graeco-Roman antiquity in the visual arts, performance, fashion, and architecture. With increased archaeological interest in ongoing excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum, and a growing influx of Egyptian artifacts in the aftermath of Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt and Syria at the turn of the century, there was “more of a focus on seeing the ancient world than there had been in the eighteenth century” (Winterer 2002, 126; italics in original). Working in neoclassical sculpture gave Lewis the power to shape with her own hand the contours of ancient Mediterranean history as it appeared to the American public. Because her medium was visual rather than verbal, she was able to enter the classical tradition differently than a scholar or writer would have. Her work had particular impact for African American audiences who saw her Death of Cleopatra at the Philadelphia Centennial or who read or heard about her career in Rome. Scholarship on African American classical receptions during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries continues to be dominated by studies of classicists like William Sanders Scarborough and literary adaptations by classically educated authors such as Phillis Wheatley and W. E. B. Du Bois.⁵ There is a wealth of information waiting to be discovered about how African Americans who were not educated in Greek and Latin engaged with the classical tradition in their everyday lives. One way to address this gap is through increased attention to popular visual forms of classical adaptation that would have been accessible to a wider array of the population.⁶ ⁵ See, e.g. Ronnick 2004, 2005; Walters 2007; Cook and Tatum 2010. ⁶ Trafton 2004, Winterer 2007, and Prins 2017 are important examples of scholarship on the visual culture of nineteenth-century American Egyptology and women’s classical

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Visual classicisms such as Lewis’s neoclassical sculptures provide this opportunity at the same time as they illuminate the intertwined dynamics of gender and race in transatlantic receptions of classical antiquity. Most scholarship on Lewis’s Death of Cleopatra focuses on nineteenth-century American debates over the ancient queen’s racial identity: “Was she ‘The Queen of Egypt’ or ‘The Egyptian Queen’?” (Buick 2010, 183).⁷ Why, some critics ask, did Lewis not present a “black Cleopatra” like her contemporary William Wetmore Story, whose 1858 Cleopatra—also in white marble, but with facial features signaling African heritage—visually supported arguments by black nationalists like Martin Delany and Henry Highland Garnet that ancient Egyptians embodied the glory of the African race? Whereas Story’s sculpture capitalized on the rising tide of U.S. abolitionism, Lewis’s post-bellum production, modelled after Cleopatra’s profile on Roman imperial coins, depicted the Egyptian queen as the Romans remembered her, signaling the sculptor’s prioritization of a European perspective. Lewis had a lifelong interest in creating works that celebrated her African American and Ojibwe heritage: for example, her miniature group Forever Free (1867), which shows two former slaves with broken shackles celebrating Emancipation, and her series of characters from Longfellow’s Hiawatha (1855). When turning to a classical subject, however, Lewis eschewed visual markers of racial affiliation with Cleopatra in favor of repurposing ancient literary and visual sources, especially Plutarch’s Life of Antony, that shifted the debate from controversies over race in antiquity to an affirmation of the enduring presence of Egypt in Rome. When she created a Cleopatra triumphant in death, in her freedom from Rome’s imperial grasp, she celebrated a woman’s self-determination and freedom from bondage, a message that mirrored her own fierce independence. Like Carrie Mae Weems’s photographs in Roaming, Edmonia Lewis’s sculptures can and should be read as provocations. Both artists’ Italian oeuvres, though 140 years apart, grapple with Rome’s dominance in the receptions. Malamud 2016 documents the conflicting appeals of white slaveholders and abolitionists to the classical tradition, with significant emphasis on visual classicisms, though not those specifically produced by African American artists. ⁷ On Cleopatra as “a sign of racialized anxiety” (Trafton 2004, 195) in nineteenthcentury America, and Lewis’s Death of Cleopatra specifically, see Richardson 1995; Trafton 2004, 165–221; Buick 2010, 133–207. On race, U.S. abolitionism, and neoclassical sculpture, see Kasson 1990; Savage 1997; Nelson 2007; Dabakis 2014.

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cultural and artistic landscape of the West vis-à-vis the black artist. Of the muse-like figure that she embodies in the self-portraits in Roaming, Weems has said, “This woman can stand in for me and for you; she leads you into history. She is a witness and a guide” (quoted in Delmez 2012, 220). Just as Weems explores the felt impact of Italian geography and architecture on the twenty-first-century black woman artist, the imprint of nineteenth-century Rome—and so, too, of ancient Egypt—on Lewis’s sculptural productions, particularly Death of Cleopatra, is unmistakable. “Roaming” through black transatlantic history with Lewis and Weems reveals the genealogy of these imprints: their artwork insists on making visible the absent presences too often obscured—of Egypt (and so, Africa) in Rome, of the centrality of the black woman artist in modernity. In what follows, three photographs from Roaming act as visual and conceptual portals into Lewis’s Roman residency, while three of Lewis’s Roman studios—seen through the eyes of American visitors—tell the story of the production and reception of her masterpiece Death of Cleopatra. The first section, “When and Where I Enter,” uses Weems’s photograph of the same name, which quotes the nineteenth-century African American classicist Anna Julia Cooper, to frame Weems’s entry into Rome and Lewis’s entry into nineteenth-century transatlantic neoclassicism as extensions of Cooper’s black feminist project. The next section, “Piazza del Popolo,” locates Weems and Lewis at the traditional northern entrance to the city, where an Egyptian obelisk marks the focal point of “il Tridente,” the hub of nineteenth-century artists’ studios situated between the Piazza del Popolo and the Spanish Steps. “Death of Cleopatra” departs from locales featured in Weems’s Roaming series to trace the literary roots of Lewis’s artistic vision for Death of Cleopatra. A pamphlet that she compiled demonstrates the significant influence of Plutarch’s Life of Antony and American poet Thomas S. Collier’s “Cleopatra Dying” on her aesthetic choices. Finally, “Pyramids of Rome” returns to Weems’s and Lewis’s shared goal of documenting the ubiquity of Egyptian presences in ancient, modern, and contemporary Rome. The parallel careers of Lewis and Weems, their respective “Romes,” and the transatlantic circuits in which they move(d) offer a dynamic, historically layered response to Walker’s and Gilroy’s calls for locating creative inspiration and cultural affiliation in the unexpected as well as the familiar spaces of the African diaspora. Their art joins a historical arsenal of black feminist thought that refuses to be denied entrance—at the gates of Rome, Europe, classical antiquity, or anywhere else.

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“When and Where I Enter” Only the BLACK WOMAN can say “when and where I enter . . . then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.” —Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South ([1892] 1988)

In her photograph “When and Where I Enter—Mussolini’s Rome” (Fig. 5.1), Carrie Mae Weems positions her body, clad in a plain black dress, as the focal point of a set in Cinecittà, a sprawling film studio built under Mussolini’s rule in 1937 as a counterpart to the cultural dominance of American Hollywood. Stepping up to look out from a balcony framed by curtains, broken columns inscribed “Roma,” spotlights, and two cameras positioned above and to the left of Weems’s own lens, the female figure gazes out onto an undefined vista whose ambiguity—is it a cloudy sky or a painted canvas?—refracts the artificiality of the studio’s set.

Fig. 5.1. Carrie Mae Weems, When and Where I Enter—Mussolini’s Rome, 2006. © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

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Her contemplative stance questions the reality of the props and cameras surrounding her, posing a question for the viewer about the nature of perception, perspective, and reception. Weems’s Roaming series includes two distinctive types of photographs that reflect the multilayered history of Rome. Images subtitled “Ancient Rome” depict either timeless landscapes or landmarks of antiquity, such as the Piazza del Popolo with its Egyptian obelisk or the Pyramid of Cestius (12 ) modeled after Nubian pyramids, whereas photographs subtitled “Mussolini’s Rome” show sites constructed under Mussolini’s rule, such as Cinecittà and the Square Colosseum. In the “Mussolini’s Rome” photographs, Weems probes the role of architecture, visual propaganda, and classical receptions in the fascist dictatorial regime. Mussolini’s reactivation of visual iconography of Roman imperialism reflected an ideological orientation toward antiquity that celebrated ancient Rome’s expanding empire, including the annexation of Egypt in 30 , as a precedent for a new fascist Italy and its increasing colonization of North and East Africa: “Most important to his sense of Romanness, or romanità, was the Rome of the emperors, especially the first emperor, Augustus” (Painter 2005, 3). In his May 9, 1936 speech at the Palazzo Venezia announcing the successful invasion of Ethiopia, Mussolini declared, “Italy finally has its empire” (quoted in Painter 2005, 68)—an empire that consisted primarily of African territories. In the Cinecittà photograph, Weems exposes the artificiality of Mussolini’s constructed associations between Augustan Rome and fascist Italy through the framing devices of camera, lights, and props. Using a similar logic, photographs subtitled “Ancient Rome” explicitly refer to the material legacy of ancient Egypt and Nubia in Rome’s built environment, revealing a complex multiculturalism that is both a product of ancient and modern Roman imperialism as well as a challenge to cultural narratives of unified romanità. In addition to the photograph’s anti-imperialist message, “When and Where I Enter—Mussolini’s Rome” ([1892] 1988, 31) also redeploys the nineteenth-century black classicist Anna Julia Cooper’s most famous quote to echo through the entire Roaming series, confronting both classical and modern imperial legacies with the body and voice of a black woman: “Only the BLACK WOMAN can say ‘when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the

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whole Negro race enters with me.’ ”⁸ With these words, initially published in her 1892 collection of essays and speeches, A Voice from the South, Cooper—who is often hailed as one of the first to write from a specifically black feminist theoretical outlook—highlighted her belief in the importance of African American women’s participation in higher education (including classical education) and public discourse.⁹ For Cooper, it was not the exemplary men of W. E. B. Du Bois’s “Talented Tenth” that would uplift the race, but black women in their public and private roles as mothers, teachers, community advocates, intellectuals, and artists.¹⁰ Cooper introduced her words as a revision of those of abolitionist and black nationalist Martin Delany, who traveled extensively in Africa and Europe: “The late Martin R. Delany, who was an unadulterated black man, used to say when honors of state fell upon him, that when he entered the council of kings the black race entered with him” (Cooper [1892] 1988, 30). Cooper revises Delany’s inference that the black man is the best ambassador for the race by asserting authoritatively that it is the “BLACK WOMAN” who is the more accurate measuring stick of racial progress. Throughout A Voice from the South, Cooper introduces a catalog of eminent women—many of whom traveled or found supporters abroad—to rival the accomplishments of men like Delany. Prominent among them are authors, activists, and teachers like Phillis Wheatley, Sojourner Truth, and Fanny Jackson Coppin. She also addresses the relevance of her argument to nineteenth-century black women artists such as Edmonia Lewis. “From her studio in Rome,” she writes, “Edmonia Lewis the colored sculptress, continues to increase the debt of the world to her by her graceful thoughts in the chaste marble” (Cooper [1892] 1988, 276).¹¹ In a brief but resonant

⁸ Paula Giddings used the same quote as the title of her 1984 book When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America. For a rhetorical analysis of Cooper’s quote, see Alexander 1995, 351–2. ⁹ On Cooper as a forerunner of black feminist theories of intersectionality, see Lemert 1998; May 2007, 169–88. ¹⁰ Cooper herself received an extensive classical education at St. Augustine’s Normal School and Collegiate Institute and in the “Gentlemen’s Course” at Oberlin College. She devoted forty or so years to teaching Latin and other subjects to African American students in Washington, D.C. On Cooper’s classicism, see Haley 1993, 25–6; Vogel 2004, 86–7; Walters 2007, 7–9; Morse 2014, 91–154. ¹¹ May (2007, 191) suggests that Cooper and Lewis were personally acquainted: “Cooper may well have visited her while in Italy in 1900 after the Pan-African Congress in London.”

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anecdote, Cooper also relates the story of her friend Annie E. Anderson Walker (1855–1929), a painter whose 1890 application to the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC, was accepted on paper but rejected as soon as she “presented her ticket of admission in propria persona,” or “in her own person” (Cooper [1892] 1988, 113–14). Ultimately Walker moved to New York to attend art school, and then to Paris, where she enrolled in the Académie Julien, exhibited work at the Paris Salon, and spent another year touring Switzerland, England, and Italy (Farrington 2005, 52–3).¹² For Edmonia Lewis, the journey to Rome gave her a similar opportunity to pursue her artistic practice more freely. After attending Oberlin College between the years of 1859 and 1864, where she took courses in the Young Ladies’ Department, Lewis spent a year in Boston learning the basics of sculptural craft under her mentor Edward A. Brackett, and then departed for Rome by way of Florence in August 1865, when she was about twenty years old.¹³ Her departure allowed her considerable freedom from the whims of abolitionist patrons, among whom were Lydia Maria Child, Elizabeth Peabody, and Anna Quincy Waterston. Though Child in particular was a powerful advocate, she warned Lewis of undertaking projects beyond her skill level and was known to withhold money if she thought Lewis was spending irresponsibly (Buick 2010, 14–18). On the one hand, Child’s behavior steered clear of the inflated praise Lewis disliked: “Some praise me because I am a colored girl, and I don’t want that kind of praise,” she told Child in an 1864 interview, “I had rather you point out my defects, for that will teach me something” (quoted in Buick 2010, 13). On the other hand, Child’s directives proved frustrating for the aspiring artist, who was eager to graduate from portrait busts and miniatures to full-size statuary. Lewis’s move to Italy established her reputation as a full-fledged neoclassical sculptor. Assisted by fellow sculptor Harriet Hosmer and the actress Charlotte Cushman, who rented a room to Lewis upon her arrival in Rome, Lewis She is mistaken, however, in her identification of Lewis as the “friend” (Cooper [1892] 1988, 113) to whom Cooper refers as the subject of the Corcoran Gallery anecdote. ¹² Unfortunately, Walker’s return from Europe marked the end of her artistic career (Farrington 2005, 53). ¹³ At Oberlin, Lewis took courses in algebra and composition, as well as a range of subjects that may have included religious instruction, modern literature, drawing, geography, French, and beginning Latin. The Young Ladies’ Department did not offer Hebrew, Greek, or advanced Latin (see Buick 2010, 6–7).

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found her niche within a revolving circle of women artists that was known for progressive attitudes toward abolition, women’s rights, and same-sex relationships.¹⁴ She wore masculine attire, attended the opera, “took music lessons, visited museums and artists’ studios, and generally led what was called the ‘Art-Life’” (Dabakis 2014, 167). Notable among Lewis’s friends and acquaintances were the American sculptor Anne Whitney, whose Africa (1863–4), Roma (1869), and Toussaint L’Ouverture (c.1873) helped introduce a broad range of subjects into neoclassical sculpture and whose letters document some of their shared adventures in Rome; Sarah Parker Remond, the African American abolitionist, orator, and doctor who moved to Florence in 1866 and then to Rome until her death in 1894; and the British novelist and travel writer Amelia B. Edwards, who visited Rome for a year before embarking on an extended tour of Egypt, which she documented in A Thousand Miles Up the Nile (1877). As Cooper suggests in reference to Annie E. Anderson Walker, for the nineteenth-century black woman to appear in propria persona at the gates of high culture was to risk dismissal. But for Lewis, the journey to the gates of Rome brought her to the epicenter of transatlantic neoclassicism, enabling her to participate in a vibrant network of artistic and intellectual exchanges between the U.S. and Italy. In 1892 Cooper claimed for the black woman the right to say, “when and where I enter . . . then and there the whole Negro race enters with me,” and in 2006 Carrie Mae Weems repeated Cooper’s phrase to mark her own physical and conceptual journey through Roman history. Weems’s Roaming photographs press viewers to investigate the relationship between the black woman artist and the studios, landscapes, and streets of Rome in which she appears. Nearly all of the images in the series feature gates, doors, windows, shorelines, and other liminal spaces. Are they entrances inviting, challenging, or compelling the black woman artist to pass—in several senses of the word—or are they portals to a past in which she has rarely been seen?

¹⁴ While little direct evidence of Lewis’s own romantic or sexual relationships exists, many of her closest friends and mentors, including Harriet Hosmer, Charlotte Cushman, Anne Whitney, and Amelia B. Edwards, had romantic relationships with women. Trafton (2004, 212) highlights her relationships with Adeline T. Howard, a free black woman whom she met in Boston, and Adelia Gates, “the painter who accompanied Lewis on her trip to Naples with Frederick Douglass and his second wife in 1887.” For further details of Lewis’s and Howard’s relationship, see Buick 2014, 44–5.

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Fig. 5.2. Carrie Mae Weems, Piazza del Popolo I—Ancient Rome, 2006. © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Though she does not reference Lewis as directly as Cooper, perhaps it is not accidental that Weems’s photograph “Piazza del Popolo—Ancient Rome” (Fig. 5.2) features the location of Lewis’s first entry into Rome’s artistic community. The Flaminian Gate, the famed northern entrance through which Lewis passed on her way from Florence to the Eternal City in 1865, opens into the Piazza del Popolo and its ancient Egyptian obelisk, located just a few blocks away from Lewis’s first Roman studio.

Piazza del Popolo—4 Via Fontanella (1866–7) And, now, that very obelisk, with hardly a trace of decay upon it, is the first thing that the modern traveller sees, after entering the Flaminian Gate! —Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun ([1860] 2002)

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In “Piazza del Popolo I—Ancient Rome,” Carrie Mae Weems captures a twenty-first-century glimpse of the piazza that before the era of railroads offered nineteenth-century travelers on the Grand Tour their first view of Rome. In the photograph she circles the piazza, pacing northeast toward the church of Santa Maria del Popolo and the neighboring Flaminian Gate (now commonly known as the Porta del Popolo), which was first built as part of the Aurelian Wall in the third century . Signs of modern construction surround her, as a sphinx statue—one of sixteen commissioned by the nineteenth-century Italian architect Giuseppe Valadier to circle the piazza—stands watch on the left-hand side. The multilayered history of the Piazza del Popolo resonates through the image as the apex of the ancient Roman gate, redesigned by Bernini in 1655, peeks out from behind octagonal Renaissance domes, and the cobblestones of Valadier’s neoclassical piazza arc toward the winding terrace of the Pincian Hill. Weems’s photograph does not include the most ancient entity in the piazza, the thirteenth-century  obelisk that Augustus transported from Heliopolis to Rome in 10 , and which resided in the Circus Maximus until it was re-erected in the center of the Piazza del Popolo in 1589. Its presence, however, can be felt as the fixed leg of the compass of Weems’s winding steps. Just as Weems’s photograph marks the radiating presence of the Egyptian obelisk in the piazza, we too can read the roots of Edmonia Lewis’s artistic vision for her famous Death of Cleopatra vis-à-vis this ancient monument. As Lewis passed through the Flaminian Gate and beheld the Egyptian obelisk, and the city of Rome beyond it, what pasts did she see reflected there? Did she see herself, like Delany and Cooper’s “black woman of the South,” as an ambassador whose entrance into the Eternal City marked the entrance of “the whole Negro race”? Or did she see a more complicated history in which Rome already held within its walls and within its cultural legacy the enduring imprint of ancient Africa?¹⁵ Most of Lewis’s contemporaries subscribed to the first view when commenting upon the significance of her presence in Rome. In 1866 a Roman correspondent to the London Athenaeum, Henry

¹⁵ Anna Julia Cooper’s characterization of the black woman as an ambassador of her race was not meant to imply that European locales such as Rome were monolithic white spaces, but rather to extend Delany’s language to the black woman.

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Wreford, sensationalized her race vis-à-vis the perceived whiteness of the classical and neoclassical tradition: An interesting novelty has sprung up among us, in the city where all our surroundings are of the olden time. Miss Edmonia Lewis, a lady of color, has taken a studio here, and works as a sculptress in one of the rooms formerly occupied by the great master Canova. (“The Colored Genius at Rome” 1866; italics in original)¹⁶

Canova, of course, was the famous Italian sculptor whose works secured Rome’s centrality to neoclassicism for subsequent generations.¹⁷ For Lewis to have taken over his studio placed her within an artistic genealogy of inheritance that her contemporaries either celebrated or interrogated on account of her race. Wreford’s words were reprinted in numerous newspapers in Britain and the U.S., including the Philadelphia-based African American paper The Christian Recorder, which continued to follow her career well into the 1880s. Just as classical scholars like William Sanders Scarborough were singled out as proof that African Americans could learn Greek and Latin, Lewis’s decision to work in the fashionable neoclassical style—in one of Canova’s former studios, no less—meant that she was frequently cited as proof of black artistic potential.¹⁸ The second view, the more complicated view of Roman history that acknowledges the importance of ancient Egypt in the early empire’s politics, visual culture, and self-fashioning, was most evident in the writing and artwork of Americans who directly engaged with the architecture and built environment of the city.¹⁹ Lewis’s work—especially her Cleopatra—builds on this rising interest. Many travelers’ accounts of nineteenth-century Rome highlight the presence of Egyptian antiquities, ¹⁶ See also Henry James’s characterization of Lewis as an anomaly among the “white, marmorean flock” of lady sculptors in Rome, “a negress, whose colour, picturesquely contrasting with that of her plastic material, was the pleading agent of her fame” (James 1903, 257, 258). ¹⁷ On Canova’s reputation in the U.S., see, e.g. Margaret Fuller’s 1843 article devoted to the Italian sculptor in the transcendentalist magazine The Dial. ¹⁸ See, e.g. Cooper’s ([1892] 1988, 261) comments on Scarborough: “That one black man has written a Greek grammar is enough to answer Calhoun’s sneer.” ¹⁹ Recent scholarship on Egyptian presences in early imperial Rome has expanded beyond studies of Isis cults to a broader contextualization of Egyptian material and cultural influences as they impacted Roman society and Augustan imperial ideology. See, e.g. Bricault, Versluys, and Meyboom 2007.

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particularly obelisks, amidst the classical and contemporary edifices of the city. The sculptor Anne Whitney, a friend of Lewis’s who lived in Rome from 1867 to 1871, commented in a letter that, “The Egyptian obelisks brought here 2000 years ago . . . look strange + wild—One has to make an effort of the imagination, to connect them with anything else, not that is here, but that ever was” (1867a). Whitney’s emphasis on the antiquity of the obelisks reminds her correspondents of the longevity of the Egyptian dynasties that preceded Greece and Rome in the ancient Mediterranean world. At the same time, however, her perception of their “strange + wild” presence in Rome produces a dissonance between Egyptian and Roman antiquity: whereas she describes the Colosseum, for example, as “a solitary vertebra” jutting up from the remains of the ancient forum, the obelisks are transplanted rather than autochthonous ruins.²⁰ Egyptian obelisks and antiquities were often drawn into nineteenthcentury debates over cultural origins and influence, particularly in the context of pro- and anti-slavery arguments. Egypt had two primary cultural narratives with contemporary racial significance to Americans: the biblical Egypt of bondage was frequently compared to the slaveholding South (leading, for example, to Harriet Tubman’s appellation “Moses” for her participation in the Underground Railroad); whereas Ptolemaic Egypt, especially as perceived through the lens of Cleopatra’s ambiguous racial status and exoticized sexuality, was the focal point for debates over the African or Graeco-Roman “origins” of Western civilization.²¹ In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s bestselling 1860 novel The Marble Faun, Egyptian antiquities such as the Flaminian obelisk take on an aura of mystery and spiritual magnetism that amplified both narratives. The Marble Faun was a literary product—and producer—of the culture of American tourism in Italy. Because of its faithfulness to the city’s ²⁰ In contrast, for Romans of the early empire, the obelisks’ very foreignness was paramount: “the eternity of Roman power, of imperium sine fine (Virgil, Aeneid 1.279), required the fusing of Egyptian antiquity and Roman modernity and in the process created a timeless Mediterranean-wide empire” (Parker 2007, 218). ²¹ For a summary of the “the Exodus and Egypt tropes . . . as imagined narratives of origins” (Hartnell 2011, 125) in the context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American intellectual history, respectively, see Trafton 2004; Hartnell 2011. Gilroy (1993a, 207–8) discusses the Exodus trope as a useful vehicle for theorizing black experiences of exile, slavery, and diaspora in the modern Black Atlantic.

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landmarks (based on descriptions from Hawthorne’s travel notebooks), the novel even functioned as an unofficial guidebook. His characters, as well as their studios and sculptures, were modeled after the circle of American expatriates living in Rome when he visited. Prominent in this group was William Wetmore Story, whose 1858 Cleopatra sculpture preceded Edmonia Lewis’s own production of the Egyptian queen. A scene early in the novel features the Flaminian obelisk as an emancipatory symbol that directly contrasts the “repose of despair” taken by Story’s marble Cleopatra—a posture that signals Egypt’s conquest.²² As two characters look out over the Piazza del Popolo from a terrace on the Pincian Hill, the monument takes on biblical proportions: They saw, too, the red granite obelisk—eldest of things, even in Rome—which rises in the centre of the piazza, with a four-fold fountain at its base. All Roman works and ruins (whether of the Empire, the far-off Republic, or the still more distant Kings) assume a transient, visionary, and impalpable character, when we think that this indestructible monument supplied one of the recollections, which Moses, and the Israelites, bore from Egypt into the desert. Perchance, on beholding the cloudy pillar and the fiery column, they whispered awe-stricken to one another—“In its shape, it is like that old obelisk which we and our fathers have so often seen, on the borders of the Nile!”—And, now, that very obelisk, with hardly a trace of decay upon it, is the first thing that the modern traveller sees, after entering the Flaminian Gate! (Hawthorne [1860] 2002, 83)

Imagined here as a predecessor to the Old Testament pillars of fire and cloud that led the Israelites out of slavery (Exodus 13:21–2), the Flaminian obelisk becomes both a metaphor of freedom in the mind of emancipated peoples as well as an enduring material reminder of Egyptian antiquity to Rome’s modern denizens. These epistolary and literary meditations on Rome’s obelisks by American visitors underscore the prominence of Egyptian antiquities in the Eternal City, and their centrality to Lewis’s artistic choices. Lewis had easy access to collections of Egyptian antiquities at the Vatican and elsewhere, as well as Roman adaptations of Egyptian iconography, and she drew on these resources when designing the features and accoutrements of her Cleopatra. Rather than a Greek or Egyptian queen, her version of Cleopatra mirrors that recorded by the Romans. As

²² “It was the repose of despair, indeed; for Octavius had seen her, and remained insensible to her enchantments” (Hawthorne [1860] 2002, 98).

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William J. Clark, Jr. wrote in Great American Sculptures, “Miss Lewis . . . has followed the coins, medals, and other authentic records in giving her Cleopatra an aquiline nose and a prominent chin of the Roman type” (Clark 1878, 141, quoted in Gold 2012, 335). Not only do the features of her sculpture resemble those on ancient Roman coins, but the sphinxes she designed as the armrests for Cleopatra’s throne resemble Roman neoclassical copies, such as the sixteen sphinxes lining the Piazza del Popolo, much more than they resemble, for example, the Great Sphinx of Giza. Lewis’s relationship with British writer and Egyptologist Amelia Edwards was another source of inspiration that illustrates the aesthetic importance of Lewis’s Roman residency—and the personal and professional international networks that it cultivated—for her artistic vision for The Death of Cleopatra. Her friendship with Edwards, whom she later called “one of my dearest friends in London” (The Daily Graphic 1873), was flourishing during the writer’s visit to Rome from fall of 1871 to spring of 1872 (O’Neill 2009, 49–50). When Edwards sailed to Cairo in November 1873, Lewis was already planning her Cleopatra. The budding Egyptologist’s account of her travels, including her visit to the Temple of Hathor at Dendera and her description of “the famous bas-relief of Cleopatra on the back of the Temple” (Edwards 1877, 182), probably reached Lewis in letters exchanged during and after her journey. Drawing on her own European location as well as the travels of friends and acquaintances, Lewis incorporated a wide array of Egyptian iconography available to her through Roman and Egyptian sources. Lewis began her Roman residency in her 1866–7 studio that, as Henry Wreford had announced to readers on both sides of the Atlantic, used to belong to Canova.²³ Located at 4 via della Fontanella, just a block south of the Piazza del Popolo and tucked away between the busy Via del Corso and the Via del Babuino, the studio was a small room with an illustrious history. After Canova’s death in 1822, the suite had passed to his protégé, the Welsh sculptor John Gibson, who in turn mentored U.S. sculptor Harriet Hosmer for seven years until she moved to a larger studio on the nearby Via Margutta. When Gibson passed away in January 1865, Hosmer helped Lewis rent the room that she had occupied (Nelson ²³ When Whitney visited Lewis’s studio, she observed: “In the inside wall there is a marble tablet to the effect that Canova occupied it” (1867b).

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2007, 196). As Hosmer’s early biographer Cornelia Carr (1912, 21–2) describes, “To reach it, after passing through a gallery filled with Gibson’s own works and crossing a garden bright with flowers and ferns, one ascended a flight of steps to a small workroom lighted by an arched window.” Here Hosmer and then Lewis set out to establish their early careers, assisted by the notoriety of Canova’s name. It would have been easy for Lewis to rely on the aura of the Italian master, as well as on her affiliation with established sculptors such as Story and Hosmer, to direct her artistic trajectory. Instead, like Carrie Mae Weems walking through Roman spaces—marking them out as historic as well as contemporary spaces for blackness rather than facades performing whiteness—she confronted the hegemony of white, maledominated art history by conceiving of a Cleopatra whose story was parallel to hers. By drawing on ancient and contemporary authors from Plutarch to Thomas Collier and sidestepping imperialist narratives of Roman conquest, as the next section will illustrate, she cast Cleopatra as proud, regal, and free—a woman in charge of her own fate. Lewis’s occupation of Canova’s studio and her production of Cleopatra triumphant in death were not a claim to artistic inheritance, but rather an active revision of dominant cultural narratives of race and influence.

Death of Cleopatra—8 Vicolo di San Nicolo da Tolentino (1867–c.1882) He shall never say I met him Fawning, abject, like a slave— I will foil him, though to do it I must cross the Stygian wave. —Collier, “Cleopatra Dying” (1872)²⁴

The roots of Lewis’s artistic vision for Death of Cleopatra are manifold. Whereas previous sections narrated Lewis’s move to Rome and the impact of Roman and Egyptian sources on her aesthetic and conceptual approach to representing Cleopatra, this section demonstrates her

²⁴ The poem was reprinted in The Death of Cleopatra 1878, 37–40.

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classical and contemporary literary inspirations and her growing comfort with her Roman residency, including how she funded her masterpiece and advertised it to international audiences. Lewis designed her Cleopatra during the decade that she was solidifying her international reputation. By the fall of 1867 she had moved out of Canova’s room at 4 via della Fontanella and secured a larger studio at 8 vicolo di San Nicolo da Tolentino, which was about a twenty-fiveminute walk southeast by way of the Spanish Steps. The new studio was located in another hub of the international art community, anchored by William Wetmore Story’s famous residence at the Palazzo Barberini and his studio just down the street. Numerous American travelers wrote of Lewis’s warm reception of visitors and her popularity among elite European tourists: “When I called she was in her working-dress—an overfrock of tow cloth—and busy with the chisel; but she received me with a very pleasing and natural grace, with an absence of any affectation, which was quite charming” (Daily Albany Argus 1869). In 1873 a correspondent to the New York Times provided readers with a glimpse of what visitors saw as they walked from the “grandeur” of Story’s studio to the “modesty” of hers: Leaving the broad, fashionable street, and passing by an abandoned church, you come to an [sic] humble-looking house, where a glass door permits you to see a couple of workmen busily chiseling away at blocks of white marble. You enter and see a few rude beginnings before you, which make you at once turn to the right, where a small room contains some busts and a number of statuettes. You easily recognize Horace Greeley on one side, Longfellow on the other, and make out without difficulty the costume of Hiawatha and his beloved, who stand multiplied in various sizes before you. (New York Times 1873)

In the midst of these early works and unfinished sculptures may have been early studies for her Death of Cleopatra. At least as early as the summer of 1873, Edmonia Lewis told the press that she intended to submit “a beautiful statue” to the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, though she was secretive regarding its subject (The Daily Graphic 1873). She was on an extended visit to the U.S. between July 1873 and January 1874, including stops in New York, California, and St. Louis. This was not her first visit since her relocation to Rome. In fact, the St. Louis Globe reported that, “The lady has crossed the Atlantic eight times, and does not seem appalled at the prospect of having to sail over its stormy waters once more, even at the depth

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of winter.”²⁵ Lewis’s transatlantic crossings back to the U.S. helped her raise money for the larger-scale pieces she began to make in the 1870s, and the frequency of her voyages during this decade, coupled with the success of her Cleopatra, boosted her international reputation. By the summer of 1874 Lewis had received a visit from the Philadelphia Centennial commissioner, John W. Forney, who commissioned her Cleopatra (Nelson 2007, 172). Conceived in the early 1870s, modelled in 1875, and prominently displayed in Memorial Hall at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876, Lewis’s Death of Cleopatra (Fig. 5.3) was, as one reviewer commented, “a statue of marked power”: as an asp curls around her right hand and her stola drapes below an exposed breast, “her head lies on the back of the chair turned to the left, and her eyes are closed forever. The tragedy of an empire is ended” (The Death of Cleopatra 1878, 41–2). The antique splendor of the throne with its sphinx armrests and abstracted hieroglyphs conveys a sense of lost grandeur as it supports the Egyptian queen’s reclining form, rapturous in deathly release. Standing over five feet tall and made entirely of Italian Carrara marble, Lewis’s sculpture was cited in both black and white U.S. newspapers as the most impressive piece in Memorial Hall. Its visual dominance was accented by “a canopy of Oriental brightness” (Ingram 1876, 294) hanging overhead, which one reviewer identified as “gold and ebony,” and another as “scarlet” (The Death of Cleopatra 1878, 45, 48). Audiences already familiar with William Wetmore Story’s Cleopatra were introduced to a new vision of the queen, which many felt was more “worthy of her historical character” (The Death of Cleopatra 1878, 43). Lewis advertised her sculpture to an international audience by publishing a promotional pamphlet titled The Death of Cleopatra: A Colossal Statue in Marble Executed by Edmonia Lewis in Rome-Italy. Published in Rome in 1878, the fifty-four-page book includes lengthy excerpts from Plutarch’s Life of Antony, a poem titled “Cleopatra Dying” by American poet Thomas S. Collier, and reviews of the sculpture’s 1876 Philadelphia ²⁵ Reprinted in Cincinnati Enquirer 1873. Lewis visited Boston, upstate New York, and Baltimore in the summer and fall of 1869; Chicago in the summer of 1870; and New York in the summer of 1872. These three trips, in addition to her initial voyage to Europe and the first leg of her 1873–4 trip, made up the eight Atlantic crossings listed by the Globe. She would visit the U.S. at least six more times in 1875, 1876, 1878, 1879, 1898, and 1899. See Henderson and Henderson 2012.

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Fig. 5.3. Edmonia Lewis, The Death of Cleopatra, carved 1876, marble. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Historical Society of Forest Park, Illinois.

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debut. Though few critics have analyzed it, the pamphlet holds the keys to Lewis’s classical literary inspirations, as well as her translation of those sources into a visual medium.²⁶ Many sculptors used pamphlets to tell their artwork’s story. As Joy S. Kasson explains, “these documents took the place of the sculptor who could explicate his or her own works to visitors, and like a visit to the sculptor’s studio they suggested that each work of art communicated a particular set of ideas, told a particular story” (1990, 31). Lewis likely designed her pamphlet to accompany the second exhibition of her Death of Cleopatra in Chicago in May of 1878. The pamphlet introduced the idea of Cleopatra’s death as triumphant by inviting viewers to read her representational choices through the lens of classical and contemporary literature. The majority of Lewis’s pamphlet consists of passages from Plutarch excerpted or paraphrased from the popular Langhorne translation of 1868.²⁷ Lewis’s familiarity with Plutarch’s Lives, especially as a source text for Cleopatra’s story, is not surprising, since Plutarch was among the most read classical authors in nineteenth-century America.²⁸ The pamphlet includes the portions that best represent Cleopatra’s story, while glossing over Antony’s early career and accounts of the Parthian War and the Actium campaign.²⁹ Of particular note, as biographers Henry and Albert Henderson (2012, chap. 34) point out, is Lewis’s choice at the end of the narrative to replace Plutarch’s “χρυσῇ . . . κλίνῃ,” which the Langhorne brothers translate as “golden bed,” with a “golden throne” as the site of Cleopatra’s suicide: Octavian finds her seated “on the golden throne and dressed in all her royal ornaments” (The Death of Cleopatra 1878, 34). Her alteration of Plutarch’s account increases its applicability to her own sculptural design. Lewis also reprints Thomas S. Collier’s popular forty-eight-line poem “Cleopatra Dying,” which represents Cleopatra’s suicide after the battle ²⁶ The only critics to mention the pamphlet are Henderson and Henderson (2012, chap. 34) and Samuels (2016, 246–7). Lewis brought copies with her to Chicago in 1878. The only known copies are held by the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale-Firenze (Henderson and Henderson 2012, n. 659) and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. ²⁷ The Langhorne brothers first published their translation in 1770, and it was reprinted many times throughout the nineteenth century, including in London, New York, Cincinnati, and Philadelphia. ²⁸ On Plutarch’s influence in America, see Reinhold 1984, 250–64. ²⁹ The sections of Plutarch’s Life of Antony reprinted in Lewis’s pamphlet are 25–8, 29, 36, 37, 53, 54, 71–8, and 82–6. For the Langhorne translation, see Plutarch 1868, 633–58.

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of Actium as a refusal to be captured and displayed in Octavian’s triumphal procession in Rome: “I am dying, Egypt, dying!” Let the Caesar’s army come— I will cheat him of his glory. Though beyond the Styx I roam, Shall he drag this beauty with him While the crowd his triumph sings? No, no, never! I will show him What lies in the blood of Kings. (Death of Cleopatra 1878, 38, lines 9–16)

As in Plutarch and Shakespeare, Collier’s Cleopatra undermines the spectacle of imperial domination that she knows would follow her capture. Rather than endure a forced journey over the Mediterranean to Rome, Cleopatra calls on the strength of her dynastic association, the “blood of Kings,” to “foil” Octavian’s triumph: He shall never say I met him Fawning, abject, like a slave— I will foil him, though to do it I must cross the Stygian wave. (Death of Cleopatra 1878, 38, lines 21–4)

By the end of the poem her resistance to Octavian culminates in her decision to die “free, proud, and triumphant | The last sovereign of my race” (Death of Cleopatra 1878, 39, lines 39–40). By including Collier’s poem in her pamphlet, Lewis aligns her sculpture with a literary version of Cleopatra who maintains an unfailing allegiance to Egypt and her “race.” Classicist Shelley Haley’s reflections on Cleopatra, specifically her grandmother’s insistence that Cleopatra was black, help illustrate Lewis’s approach. In Collier’s poem and in Lewis’s sculpture, Cleopatra is not portrayed as a representative of blackness in antiquity, but rather as a symbol of resistance against slavery, racism, and imperialism: “In the Black oral tradition . . . [w]hen we say, in general, that the ancient Egyptians were Black and, more specifically, that Cleopatra was Black, we claim them as part of a culture and history that has known oppression and triumph, exploitation and survival” (Haley 1993, 29). In Death of

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Cleopatra, Lewis claims the Egyptian queen as part of the same chosen genealogy of women—mothers, grandmothers, artists, ambassadors, and witnesses—that Haley names, and whose presences illuminate the work of black feminist writers and artists from Anna Julia Cooper to Alice Walker and Carrie Mae Weems. Lewis’s counter-discursive rendition of a Cleopatra triumphant in death challenged an emerging tradition of spectacles of captivity produced by American neoclassical sculptors. Three decades before, Hiram Powers’s 1844 Greek Slave portrayed a modern Greek woman held captive in a Turkish harem, her shackled hand modestly covering her genitals. The controversial piece was the first American sculpture to feature female nudity and enslavement; her vulnerability was meant to court audiences’ sympathy, but it also romanticized her subjugation. As we have already seen, William Wetmore Story’s 1858 Cleopatra depicted Cleopatra’s total defeat. Her slouching posture and downcast gaze signaled Rome’s triumph over Egypt and Octavian’s triumph over the Egyptian queen.³⁰ Finally, Harriet Hosmer’s 1859 Zenobia in Chains depicted the third-century  queen of Palmyra walking in Aurelian’s triumph after her failed rebellion against Rome. Though Zenobia’s eyes are downcast, her dignity reflects that recorded in historical accounts. Lewis saw Hosmer’s Zenobia at the Childs and Jenks Gallery in Boston in early 1865, perhaps taking inspiration from the subject.³¹ With her Death of Cleopatra, Edmonia Lewis departed from visual messages of female captivity, enslavement, and loss of power by portraying death as a form of triumph. Lewis’s likeness captured a potency and intelligence that elevated Cleopatra’s suicide from the tragedy of romance—as depicted in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and The Marble Faun—to the “tragedy of an empire” (The Death of Cleopatra 1878, 41). Unflinching in the face of Antony’s death and Egypt’s annexation, Lewis’s Cleopatra chooses death over defeat, just like her historical counterpart who, according to Livy, repeated her final words over and over again in defiance of Octavian’s victory: “I will not be led in ³⁰ Other American sculptors of Cleopatra besides William Wetmore Story and Edmonia Lewis included Thomas Ridgeway Gould, Margaret Foley, and James Henry Haseltine (Richardson 1995, 42). ³¹ Buick 2010, 231; Dabakis 2014, 166. The Childs and Jenks Gallery was just down the street from Lewis’s studio, which The Boston Almanac lists at 89 Studio Building, 110 Tremont Street (Coolidge 1865, 156).

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triumph.”³² In representing the moment of Cleopatra’s death, which was also the moment of her escape from being paraded in chains down the Via Sacra in Octavian’s triumphal procession, Lewis chose to depict Cleopatra’s freedom in death: she dies an Egyptian queen rather than a Roman captive. By emphasizing Cleopatra’s resistance to Octavian, Lewis highlighted imperial Rome’s exploitation of Egypt—which paralleled Europe’s continuing plundering of its antiquities beginning with Napoleon’s invasion in 1798—and presented a powerful alternative to the chained queens and captives in existing neoclassical sculptures like Powers’s Greek Slave and Hosmer’s Zenobia in Chains. A brief account of Octavian’s triumphal procession of August 15, 29 , shows the extent to which Lewis was reimagining Cleopatra’s relationship to Rome and at the same time challenging modern ideologies of Rome’s (and Europe’s) cultural superiority. Because she had already committed suicide, Cleopatra herself did not appear in Octavian’s triumphal procession, but Plutarch and other ancient authors record that the emperor did parade an image, or copy, of her: “For in his triumph an image [εἴδωλον] of Cleopatra herself with the asp clinging to her was carried.”³³ Dio Cassius describes the “image [μίμημα] of Cleopatra, lying upon a couch in her death” as a central feature of the procession, and the elegist Propertius wrote that, “I saw her arms bitten by the sacred snakes and her limbs draw sleep’s hidden path.”³⁴ Personifications like Cleopatra were often carried on fercula (litters) (Östenberg 2009, 217); the effigy joined an array of war captives, looted sculptures, monuments, and other treasures meant to represent Rome’s incorporation of Egypt’s land and resources. Parading Cleopatra’s image down the Via Sacra exemplifies Octavian’s reliance on spectacle and visual display in order to bolster his public image and Rome’s imperial expansion. The obelisks he transported to Rome in 10  functioned similarly as monumental echoes of the triumph, as did other architectural projects, such as the Pyramid of Cestius, built in ³² Gurval (2011, 61) cites Porphyrio, On Horace’s Odes 1.37.31: “For also Titus Livius says that when Cleopatra was kept under guard and handled by Augustus with diligence and special care, she was accustomed to say over and again: ‘I will not be led in triumph.’ ” ³³ Plutarch, Life of Antony 86.3, translated in Östenberg 2009, 144. ³⁴ Dio Cassius, Roman History 51.21.8–9, translated in Östenberg 2009, 144. Propertius, Elegies 3.11.53–4, translated in Gurval 2011, 60.

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12  and modelled after Nubian pyramids of the Meroë region, which Rome had invaded in 23 .³⁵ Visual performances of Rome’s dominion over Egypt in Octavian’s triumph and in Roman imperial architecture established a precedent for exactly the kinds of romanità (to use the term anachronistically for a moment) that nineteenth-century Americans latched onto as performances of whiteness and that Mussolini would later deploy in his fascist rhetoric of a new Italian empire. In both the nineteenth- and twentiethcentury contexts, the spectacle of ancient Graeco-Roman pasts received and performed as modern identities was a cornerstone of the violent construction of racial hierarchies. For Edmonia Lewis to create a sculpture of Cleopatra in this context, particularly one that represented her freedom in death on a grand Egyptian throne rather than her bondage on a Roman ferculum, was to intervene in and expose the artificiality of Roman—and, for many nineteenth-century Americans, therefore white—imperial triumph. When Lewis’s Cleopatra crossed the Atlantic in 1876 it was not as Octavian’s captive but as the Egyptian queen who— like Lewis—chose “when and where to enter.”

Pyramids of Rome—4 Via Venti Settembre (1887) It is strange that starting life where I did and old as I am that I sh[oul]d be plowing this classic sea and on my way to the land of Moses and the Pharoahs [sic]. —Frederick Douglass, Diary Entry, February 14, 1887

A final postscript brings us to Edmonia Lewis’s last known Roman studio by way of Frederick Douglass, who visited her there in 1887, and Carrie Mae Weems, whose photograph “Pyramids of Rome—Ancient Rome” (Fig. 5.4) concretizes the often-unnamed presence of Egypt, Ethiopia, and Nubia in ancient Rome, as well as in the modern city. Again appearing as a guide into the history and affective presence of Roman landmarks, Weems stands in a crosswalk adjacent to the Nubian-style ³⁵ For “a reception studies approach” (221) to the role of obelisks in Augustus’ imperial project, see Parker 2007.

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Fig. 5.4. Carrie Mae Weems, Pyramids of Rome—Ancient Rome, 2006. © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

pyramid that rises up to a triangular apex in the upper left corner of the image. Built as a tomb for the magistrate Gauis Cestius in the first century  and incorporated into the Aurelian walls in the third century , the Pyramid of Cestius and the nearby Porta San Paolo form a southern counterpart to the Piazza del Popolo and Flaminian Gate. Both sites were popular destinations on the Grand Tour, and together in the geography of Rome as well as in Weems’s Roaming series they represent twin aspects of the city’s historical modes of ingress and egress. In the photograph, Weems’s body stands motionless between the pyramid and the gate, marking the liminal spaces of Rome’s whitewashed geography and history. Edmonia Lewis’s Roman studio—a historical contradiction to exclusionary narratives of white classical inheritance—was a destination of particular interest to African American tourists in Italy well into the 1880s. Writing to the Christian Recorder in 1878, the Reverend D. P. Seaton related that upon his arrival in Rome, “the first call

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I made there was to see Miss Edmonia Lewis. She was delighted to see me, and gave a cordial reception. I had the pleasure of visiting her studio where she exhibited several marble statues just finished which I regard to be a rare display of artistic genius.” Only after visiting Lewis did Seaton embark on a tour of the “prominent sights of Rome” (Seaton 1878). His enthusiasm for seeing the African American sculptor in her chosen home abroad was shared by readers of the Philadelphia-based Christian Recorder, many of whom had met Lewis or seen her Death of Cleopatra two years earlier during the Centennial Exhibition. A decade later, an even more famous visitor arrived at the door of Lewis’s new studio at 4 via Venti Settembre. Frederick Douglass and his second wife, Helen Pitts, spent a year abroad touring England, France, Italy, Greece, and Egypt, and on January 26, 1887, Douglass recorded in his diary a visit to the sculptor’s rooms: Called to see Miss Edmonia Lewis who had loaned Helen some Books—found her in a large building near the very top in a very pleasant room with a commanding view. No. 4 Via Vente [sic] Settembre, Roma—Here she lives, and here she plies her fingers in her art as a sculpturer. She seems very cheerful and happy—and successful. She made us obliged to her for kind offers to serve us in every way she could. (Douglass 1887b)

The Douglasses had likely previously seen Lewis at a gathering at the Palazzo Maroni, where Sarah Remond lived with her sisters, and which had a “reputation as a cultural center” of the black diaspora in Italy (Nelson 2007, 167). After their studio visit, during which Frederick Douglass sat for a portrait bust, Lewis accompanied the Douglasses and their mutual friend, the painter Adelia Gates, on a multiday tour of Naples, Pompeii, and the surrounding environs. On January 31 Douglass and Lewis visited the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli together, and by February 14 he and Helen had decided to extend their tour to include Egypt and were en route to Cairo. He wrote in his diary: “It is strange that starting life where I did and old as I am that I sh[oul]d be plowing this classic sea and on my way to the land of Moses and the Pharoahs [sic]” (Douglass 1887a). How much impact his acquaintance with Edmonia Lewis may have had on Douglass’s decision is not known, but it is striking that his interest in Egypt—and in Egypt’s place within Roman antiquity—rose sharply during travels together. In The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Douglass characterized Rome as a crucial site for investigating the multiracial history of the

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Mediterranean world. He wrote that he was “much more interested in the Rome of the past than in the Rome of the present” (Douglass 1892, 699). This Rome of the past included obelisks, the Pyramid of Cestius, and other examples of African antiquity’s architectural and cultural resonances within the Eternal City. For once in Italy, he insisted, the traveler: will want to see Egypt, the Suez Canal, the Libyan desert, the wondrous Nile— land of obelisks and hieroglyphs which men are so well learning to read; land of sphinxes and mummies many thousand years old, of great pyramids and colossal ruins that speak to us of a civilization which extends back into the misty shadows of the past, far beyond the reach and grasp of authentic history. (Douglass 1892, 702)

In passages such as these, Douglass celebrates ancient Egypt for its grandeur and mystery (as well as its connection to the biblical Exodus narrative as “the land of Moses and the Pharoahs [sic]”). But unlike Afrocentrists like Henry Highland Garnet his focus “is ultimately less on locating and celebrating the black sources of Western civilization than on exploring the multiracial origins and development of the West” (Levine 2002, 233). In doing so he lays claim to a classical heritage for Africandescended peoples—not just an Egyptian or Ethiopian heritage—and contests the dominant narrative of the exclusive whiteness of the classical Graeco-Roman tradition. As a fixture of nineteenth-century multicultural Rome and Black Atlantic neoclassicism, Edmonia Lewis is a prime modern example of Rome’s diverse history. Though few records of Lewis’s later career exist, it is clear that by the time of Douglass’s visit she had settled into her life in Rome and was happy to provide a friendly welcome, her very presence making it possible for black artists, writers, and tourists to experience Rome “from the inside.” As she guided Douglass through Rome, Naples, and the ruins at Pompeii, what landmarks and artifacts did she point out? What histories did they discuss? What traces of African antiquity emerged from the architecture of the city to resonate through her Death of Cleopatra, just as they would later resonate through Carrie Mae Weems’s photographs? “Roaming” through the Eternal City with Edmonia Lewis and Carrie Mae Weems invites us to reconsider these questions from the point of view of the black woman artist who enters Rome’s layered history not only as a modern ambassador of the race but as a reminder of her everlasting belonging.

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6 Africana Andromeda Contemporary Painting and the Classical Black Figure Kimathi Donkor

When we look at a work of art, especially when “we” look at one in which Black Folk appear—or do not appear when they should—we should ask: What does it mean? What does it suggest? What impression is it likely to make on those who view it? What will be the effect on present-day problems, of its obvious and, also, of its insidious teachings? In short, we should endeavor to “interpret” it; and should try to interpret it from our own peculiar viewpoint. —F. H. M. Murray, Emancipation and the Freed in American Sculpture: A Study in Interpretation (1916)

In his 1952 book Black Skin, White Masks, the anti-colonial activist, psychiatrist, and theorist Frantz Fanon made a startling critique of the racialization of Western culture, including its visual arts. According to Fanon, this racializing drive had produced a disorienting psychological assault on young African-Caribbean minds: The black schoolboy in the Antilles who, in his lessons is forever talking about “our ancestors, the Gauls,” identifies himself with the explorer, the bringer of civilization, the white man who carries truth to savages—an all-white truth. ([1952] 2008, 126)

Whilst the title phrase “white masks” does not occur within the pages of Fanon’s seminal work, this passage seems emblematic of what it implies: a hegemonic demand that black or African diaspora people assimilate Kimathi Donkor, Africana Andromeda: Contemporary Painting and the Classical Black Figure. In: Classicisms in the Black Atlantic. Edited by: Ian Moyer, Adam Lecznar, and Heidi Morse, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198814122.003.0007

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into a false, “all-white truth.” However, although Fanon’s thesis was a galvanizing springboard, the research documented here might also represent just the kind of diversion he was thinking of when he wrote: I should be very happy to know that a correspondence had flourished between a Negro philosopher and Plato. But I can absolutely not see how this fact would change anything in the lives of the eight-year-old children who labour in the cane fields of Martinique or Guadeloupe. ([1952] 2008, 205)

As an artist working with the methodologies of Britain’s Black Art Movement,¹ I have addressed directly the whitening phenomena critiqued by Fanon. Yet it is plausible to imagine the ardent revolutionary’s irritation at this current focus on an entirely mythic black figure with a close cultural proximity to Plato—namely, Andromeda, who in the tales of classical Greece and Rome was the legendary queen of ancient Mycenae. Before proceeding, I should clarify that, not being a classicist, I was in no position to discover Fanon’s hypothetical “black correspondent with Plato”—I cannot utter a sentence in Greek or Latin, and my practical archaeological experience is confined to the reading rooms of London’s public art libraries. Instead, my research methodology approaches the classical world from the perspective of a contemporary artist and painter immersed in the disciplinary concerns of a studio practice. Consequently, what follows represents my artistically motivated endeavor to understand and reimagine one specific “white mask” embedded within Western culture in ways that the sociologist of taste Pierre Bourdieu (1984) might have called a kind of artistic “habitus.” As an interloper in classicist academia, I was at first uncertain about Andromeda’s prominence within the field—with little grasp of whether my assertion that Andromeda is a “black figure” might be deemed commonplace or controversial (or even irrelevant). During the 1980s and 90s, whilst working with community-based, black-history discussion groups in London, I had read Martin Bernal’s Black Athena (1987) alongside other texts about the classical world’s African embodiments—such as Cheikh Anta Diop’s The African Origin of Civilization (1974). I therefore knew the study of antiquity was a field of racial controversy—but it was not from those sources that I first learnt of ¹ See Jackson 2012; Chambers 2014; Kaisary 2014; Bernier 2017.

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Andromeda. Instead, I had been aware more generally that the name recurred in both popular and artistic culture,² and it was through those avenues that I encountered hints of her many stories and eventually the intriguing question of her physical appearance. In 2010 I began work on my practice-led doctoral thesis “Africana Unmasked: Fugitive Signs of Africa in Tate’s British Collection” (2015) by producing new artworks and writing that engaged critically with the national collection of British art at Tate Britain in London. The goal was to research creatively how African subjects, themes, and objects (“Africana”) might function as unseen but important presences in the iconology of canonical British art, and so the art of Sir Edward Coley BurneJones became an early focus—principally because in 1884 he had painted the Africa-themed King Cophetua and The Beggar Maid, which is often on display at the museum. The work’s poetic legend provoked my curiosity about the Pre-Raphaelite artist’s use of mythology—including for his 1888 painting The Rock of Doom, which depicts Andromeda. Preparatory works (1874–5) for the Doom series of paintings are held by Tate, and once sensitized to this mythography, I noticed that other references mentioned her Ethiopian heritage. For instance, Tate’s online caption for Sir Edward Poynter’s 1869 Andromeda painting described her as “the daughter of an Ethiopian king” (Tate 2007)—even though Poynter’s painting, just like Burne-Jones’s, proposed visually that Andromeda was white. This seeming contradiction between on the one hand captions contextualizing Andromeda and on the other hand the artworks themselves resonated with my interest in unmasking such fugitive instances of Africana. Further reading led to The Black Andromeda, a 1992 research paper by the white British art historian Elizabeth McGrath, who considered the role of race in early modern European imagery. McGrath was not the first twentieth-century writer to consider Andromeda’s blackness—the subject was mentioned by the Jamaicaborn African American writer Joel Augustus Rogers in volume one of his 1940 survey of racial attitudes Sex and Race (Rogers 1970, 84) and in 1947 by the leading civil rights intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois in The World ² As a child I had seen the 1971 science-fiction paranoia movie The Andromeda Strain and as an adult had also viewed episodes of the twenty-first-century science-fiction television series Andromeda.

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and Africa (1965). The subject was reprised in 1983 by the African American classicist F. M. Snowden in Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient View of Blacks. McGrath referenced Snowden, and later the literary historian Sujata Iyengar also revisited Andromeda’s blackness in her Shades of Difference (2005), whilst the classicist Daniel Ogden produced a commentary in his 2008 survey of the Perseus myth. More recently in 2014, US academic Henry Louis Gates, Jr. took up the theme in his African American–focused online magazine The Root. However, McGrath was the first modern, professional art historian to analyze in depth the iconology of Andromeda’s African identity. And what she and other writers drew attention to was that from the early literary accounts of the myth in Euripides’ play Andromeda (composed in 412 ) until the fourth century , Andromeda was consistently (if not universally) identified as the daughter of King Cepheus and Queen Cassiopeia of Ethiopia.³ Her Ethiopian identity was so consistently mentioned that when the great Roman poet Ovid deviated from his own ascription and suggested an eastern rather than a southern origin, A. D. Melville in his 1986 translation was compelled to state: Andromeda was in fact Ethiopian, but in Latin poetry “Indians” and “Ethiopians” are more or less interchangeable. (2008, 216; emphasis mine)

Melville’s assertion might stretch the boundaries of fiction by implying that Andromeda was any more subject to the dictates of “fact” than the goddess Athena herself—because from a twenty-first-century, historical ³ In his 2001 survey of the origins of the term, David Adamo states that, “the scholars’ consensus is that the word ‘Ethiopia’ originated from the Greeks to designate African people both at home and abroad in terms of the color of their skins. This term, which Greek geographers generally used to refer to any member of the black people, derived from the words (burnt) and (face). Ethiopia, therefore literally means ‘burnt-faced person’ of Africa and African diaspora. This term was probably chosen by the Greeks to describe the Africans according to their ‘environmental theory’ that the dark color of their skins and the woolly or coiled hair of their heads were as a result of the intense heat of the sun” (Adamo 2001, 29; see also Skinner 2012). Certainly, Ovid’s princeps, Augustus, had no doubt that “Aethiopia” bordered his new Egyptian province in what we now refer to as continental Africa. The evidence for such clarity comes from the Res Gestae Divi Augusti, the 14  autobiographical list of the emperor’s deeds that was inscribed on monuments across the Roman world, some of which still exist. In his account Augustus specifically identified the cities of Napata and Meroë in relation to his Ethiopian campaigns. Napata was the ancient Egyptian term for the city now known as Karima in Sudan; Meroë was the ancient capital of the kingdoms of Meroë and Kush, both located in contemporary Sudan (see Welsby 1998; Cooley 2009; Dueck 2012).

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perspective, Andromeda appears to be a mythical character from the realms of belief, art, and fictional literature rather than a historical person. But, of course, Melville’s Andromeda “fact” was not intended to convey information about an everyday, real-life person: he meant “fact” in the specific sense of classical, literary continuity. Andromeda was Ethiopian “in fact” because she was said to be so, not only in Ovid’s first-century Metamorphoses but also in, for example, the fifth-century  plays of Sophocles and Euripides (Wright 2005), in the first- or second-century  book Bibliotheca—a prose compilation of mythological narratives (Simpson 1976, 73)—and in the third- or fourthcentury novel the Ethiopian Story by Heliodorus,⁴ as well as by many other leading mythographers of antiquity.⁵ Thus, McGrath and others held it to be a significant artistic, aesthetic, national, and racial conundrum that for thousands of years, virtually all Western visual artists (beginning with sixth-century  Greek vase painters) had consistently depicted Andromeda as a pale-skinned, often blonde or auburn-haired white woman. And this despite the “fact” that one of the principal classical sources, Ovid (who, according to McGrath [1992, 3], was “the greatest of all mythographers”), repeatedly described her as dark-skinned, black, or brown. Ovid’s intent is illustrated in a key passage from the Heroides, in which Sappho declares that: Candida si non sum, placuit Cepheia Perseo Andromede, patriae fusca colore suae, Et variis albae iunguntur saepe columbae, et niger a viridi turtur amatur ave. (Ov. Her. 15.35–8)⁶

⁴ The classical historian Daniel Ogden in his historiography of ancient Perseus mythology has written that Andromeda’s homeland was a significant “point of instability” in the transmission of the narrative, with texts naming sites from Joppa in the modern state of Israel to India (Ogden 2008, 82). However, he was also clear that from at least the fifth century  (when many of the major surviving classical texts were set to writing), “Ethiopia was to remain the favoured setting for literary accounts of the Andromeda episode” (2008, 83). Subsequently, in his book Dragons, Serpents and Slayers in the Classical and Early Christian Worlds (2013a), Ogden gives as a chapter heading: “The Sea Monster of Ethiopia, Slain by Perseus.” ⁵ One notably ironic exception to Melville’s assertion of “fact” comes from Herodotus, the “father of history,” who in his Histories (440 ) named Cepheus, Andromeda, and Perseus’s son Perses as local and apparently factual ancestors of the Persian King Xerxes (2008, 429). ⁶ Text from Arthur Palmer’s definitive 1898 edition.

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Correspondingly, Murgatroyd, Reeves, and Parker in their 2017 translation render this as: I’m not fair-skinned, but Perseus found Cepheus’ Andromeda attractive, and she was dark (from darkest Ethiopia) and white doves often have mates of a different colour, And black turtle-doves are loved by green parrots.

I have already mentioned that initially I was unsure of Andromeda’s significance for classical academia. One gauge was proposed by the white cultural historian, Adrienne Munich, in her book Andromeda’s Chains: If one looks under the entry “Andromeda” in The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature, one is given the terse command: “See Perseus.” As if somehow incidental to Perseus’s story the maiden is an auxiliary, not doing anything in her own right. An object for someone else’s heroic rescue, she is doomed without even the dignity of having her fate a consequence of her own actions . . . Andromeda apparently deserves no special reference of her own. (1993, 24)

However, even though her feminist interpretation noted Andromeda’s academic subordination to a masculine hero, Munich’s critique of the racial implications of the mythography also seemed to elide the question of how Andromeda’s specifically black and female identities intersected to create a similarly insidious mode of racial invisibility. In any event, to evaluate properly the historical and artistic significance of the Andromeda myth, I needed to consider closely its narrative content, and arguably perhaps the most direct method was to analyze one of the principal prose accounts—as found in the pseudoApollodorus’s Bibliotheca (c.1–200 ): Arriving in Ethiopia, which was ruled by Cepheus, he found the king’s daughter Andromeda exposed as prey to a sea monster; for Cassiepeia, the wife of Cepheus, had claimed to [surpass] the Nereids in beauty . . . The Nereids were enraged by this, and Poseidon, who shared their anger, sent a sea-flood and a monster against the land. Now Ammon had prophesied deliverance from this calamity if Cepheus’ daughter Andromeda were offered as prey to the monster, and compelled by the Ethiopians, Cepheus had done so and tied his daughter to a rock. As soon as Perseus saw her, he fell in love, and promised Cepheus that he would destroy the monster if he would give him the rescued girl as a wife . . . Perseus confronted the monster and killed it, and set Andromeda free. Phineus, however, who was a brother of Cepheus and had been promised Andromeda beforehand, plotted against Perseus; but when Perseus learned of the conspiracy, he showed the Gorgon to Phineus and his fellow plotters, turning them to stone

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on the spot . . . . Perseus, accompanied by Danae [his mother] and Andromeda [became] king of Tiryns; and Perseus fortified Midea and Mycenae in addition. By Andromeda, Perseus had the following sons . . . Perses . . . and later, in Mycenae, Alcaios, Sthenelos, Heleios, Mestor, and Electryon; he also had a daughter, Gorgophone. (Apollod. Bibl. 2.4.3–5)⁷

In summary, then: Princess Andromeda of Ethiopia was—as appeasement for the blasphemous vanity of her mother the queen—to be sacrificed to a sea monster. Fortunately, she was betrothed to and then rescued by the Greek demigod Perseus, whom she married and with whom she raised many children. Although, as Munich noted, Andromeda’s role might now seem passive, for writers in Classical Greek, Hellenistic, and Roman antiquity, her plight, survival, marriage, and motherhood were of enduring significance. Not only did her story form the centerpiece of both Sophocles’ and Euripides’ now lost or fragmentary plays titled Andromeda, but long before Ovid, she took poetic form in, for example, the Phaenomena by Aratus of Soli, who in the third century  recounted her divine transformation into a starry pattern of the night sky (Kidd 1997, 87). This catasterism (placing amongst the stars) eventually propelled her into the realm of science, as attested by the second-century  Egyptian astronomer Claudius Ptolemy. In the Almagest—regarded as a founding document of astronomy (Evans 1998)—Ptolemy listed Andromeda as one of forty-eight constellations fundamental to astronomical observation, designating its brightest star as Alpha Andromeda. In terms of their mythic significance for post-Hellenistic science, the only constellations with proper names were from the Andromeda myth cycle—including Cepheus, Perseus, and Cassiopeia. All other Ptolemaic constellations received more seemingly generic names, such as Centaurus (“The Centaur”) or Aries (“The Ram”). The partial exception to this nomenclature was “Heracles,” but arguably that served only to emphasize Andromeda’s centrality; according to the Bibliotheca, Heracles was her great-grandson (and the halfbrother by Zeus to her husband Perseus).⁸ ⁷ Translation from Hard 1997, 68. ⁸ One mytho-scientific consequence of Ptolemy’s adherence to the Andromeda nomenclature was that following the tenth-century identification of a “nebulous smear” within the Andromeda constellation by the Iranian astronomer Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi, the same object was in the twentieth century deemed to be the nearest galaxy to our own and is now named the Andromeda (or M31) Galaxy (Hodge [1992] 2013, 2).

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Alongside the realms of science, religion, literature, and art, Andromeda also gained political significance, with Alexander the Great among those rulers claiming descent from Heracles, Perseus, and (by logical extension) Andromeda, the mother of all Perseus’s children—as did the Seleucid dynasty which ruled Persia in the wake of the Macedonian’s fourth-century  conquests (Ogden 2008). Certainly, the Alexander Mosaic at Pompeii depicts the warrior king with a Gorgon inscribed on his breastplate (O’Brien 2003), suggesting kinship with Perseus, who slew the Gorgon Medusa. In his second-century eclectic dialogue The Learned Banqueters, Athenaeus quoted the chronicler Nicobule’s claim that so intense was Alexander’s devotion to his semi-divine ancestry, he could recite passages from Euripides’ Andromeda—and did so at his final, fatal feast (Young 1854, 860). Andromeda was, then, a figure who made recurring, conspicuous appearances in high classical culture as a princess of Ethiopia, closely associated with other important mythical and historic figures either as muse, companion, or ancestor: from Perseus, Heracles, Medusa, and Zeus to Sophocles, Euripides, Ovid, Ptolemy, and Alexander. Whilst not necessarily as prominent as her (mostly) male associates, there was no denying her enduring and often central role. However, although her fame and to some extent her Ethiopian identity were relatively consistent, it was additionally true, as mentioned earlier, that her visual portrayal as “white” was also notable for its consistency—even if that suggested a kind of geographic and narrative incongruity. Amongst the most ancient signs of Andromeda’s whiteness, there is a sixth-century  ceramic vase, held in Berlin’s Altes Museum (Ogden 2013b, 125). Fashioned anonymously in the Corinthian style, the amphora depicts a nude black-skinned man labelled Perseus throwing rocks at the sea monster Ketos, whilst a white-skinned clothed woman labelled Andromeda appears to hold more rocks in readiness. In considering this early evidence of a white Andromeda, it is worth noting that the classicist Mary Ann Eaverly recalls being taught that the Greek convention of depicting males as dark-skinned and females as lightskinned represented not racial difference but a naturalistic invocation of sun-bronzed, outdoor manliness in contrast to indoors, shaded femininity. However, her own 2013 study proposed that the male=dark/ female=light convention in Greek “black figure” pottery was probably derived from a comparable color/gender convention in prestigious

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Egyptian painting.⁹ Yet the question of race in Greek Andromeda painting has also been identified by commentators on red-figure pottery. A water vase in the British Museum from c.440  Attica prompted Cecil Smith to write in the Catalogue of Vases that, “The Ethiopians throughout (except Kepheus and Andromeda) have woolly hair, flat nose and thick lips. Kepheus and Andromeda are of the usual Greek type” (Smith 1896, 152). In fact, Smith could not use actual color differences to determine whether or not Andromeda conformed to his crude, ethnocentric description of an Ethiopian—because every figure’s skin had the same reddish brown glaze that defines red-figure pottery. Regardless of whether contemporary viewers agree with Smith’s analysis, it exemplifies how a white Victorian connoisseur of Greek art constructed Andromeda’s racial identity.¹⁰ It is a commonplace of art historical discourse that little survives of the once highly praised Greek mural tradition—even if the discovery of Macedonian royal tombs at Vergina and other finds have provided us with tantalizing examples (Franks 2012; Smith and Plantzos 2012; Pollitt 2015). Nevertheless, McGrath (1992) notes that commentators in antiquity reported artistic depictions of Andromeda as white despite her Ethiopian setting. And it was this curious circumstance that drove the narrative of Heliodorus’ epic romance the Ethiopian Story, which was written in the second or third century . The heroine, Chariclea, is a white girl born incongruously to the black queen Persina, who had in the moment of conception been looking at a picture of her own white Ethiopian ancestor, Andromeda. [I]f he had consulted the Imagines of Philostratus, Heliodorus would have been assured that Andromeda, though Ethiopian, was none the less depicted as white . . . making a remarkable and attractive contrast to all the other natives who assembled to cheer her rescuer. Philostratus describes Andromeda as delightful or charming . . . in her white beauty, but before making any simple assumption here about colour-prejudice it should be noted that the Ethiopian spectators are also [charming] for him in their exotic colouring (McGrath 1992, 3).

⁹ Although Eaverly (2013) warns sagely against projecting modern racial concerns mechanically onto ancient sensibilities, it is tempting to speculate about the contemporary implications of a Greek culture constructed as supposedly “European” opting to paint its male heroes black due to the influence of artists from a country we now consider African. ¹⁰ The British Museum website includes Smith’s racial analysis, but without his physiognomic descriptors.

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In fact, McGrath notes that Ovid’s several elaborations of Andromeda as black or dark-skinned in his Heroides and Ars Amatoria represented an exception both in classical mythography as well as in art and art writing.¹¹ For instance, the poet Manilius (Ovid’s near contemporary) wrote of Andromeda’s “snowy neck” (Sherburne 1675, 219), whilst a 10  fresco preserved in the ashes of Vesuvius at the Villa of Agrippa Postumus is just one of several Roman examples illustrating a pale heroine. Thus the evidence pointed to ancient artistic conventions of describing and depicting Andromeda as both Ethiopian and white,¹² living amongst people usually classed as Ethiopian and sometimes depicted as black. McGrath followed in detail how this seeming contradiction was discussed in early modern literature and art writing, citing the seventeenthcentury artists Abraham van Diepenbeeck and Joachim von Sandrart as the only two major Western painters to depict black Andromedas. However, from the early Renaissance through to the twentieth century, the myth—and Andromeda’s assumed whiteness—continued to be a theme for many of Europe’s most prominent painters, including Piero ¹¹ One ambiguity from Ovid arises because in the Metamorphoses, he describes Andromeda as like “a marble statue.” Yet, as McGrath (1992) maintains, the poet could have meant black marble. Ovid uses marble in his description of Andromeda as a metaphor not so much for whiteness as for stillness: “but for the light breeze stirring her hair and the warm tears coursing over her cheeks, he would have supposed she was merely a marble statue” (Ov. Met. 4.673–5; translation from Raeburn 2004). This usage is emphasized in Perseus’s battle with his Ethiopian love-rival Phineus, in which the hero turns his enemies into marble by showing the head of Medusa. In terms of race, nationality, and ethnicity, the epic battle scene deploys fighters from across the known world—amongst them Bactrians, Libyans, Egyptians, Indians, and Arabs, as well as Ethiopians. And in each case marble functioned as the literal material into which 200 multicultural warriors were transformed, suggesting again the stillness of death rather than a color. Throughout Greek and Roman antiquity, marble statues were frequently, if not universally colored, pigmented, and tinted by painters and gilders. According to Mark Abbe, “Roman statuary was richly embellished with various forms of painting . . . [which] belonged to the broader Mediterranean tradition of polychrome sculpture . . . Flesh tones on marble sculpture challenge common modern assumptions about classical marble statuary” (2015, 173). Although Ovid sometimes associated white marble with feminine beauty (such as for Atalanta’s rosy complexion), it cannot be assumed that his use of the stone to denote stillness automatically implies whiteness. Roman readers may well have understood his marble statues as a white or other substrate colored by realistic painting. ¹² If, as is suggested by Eaverly’s hypothesis of an Egyptian influence, Andromeda’s early artistic “whiteness” derived primarily from the Greek convention of painting women as pale, then the theory that this was itself the result of an African influence on Greek art would constitute yet another interesting irony.

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di Cosimo (1510), Titian (1556), Georgio Vasari (1572), Veronese (1578), Rembrandt (1630), Rubens (1639), Ingres (1819), Delacroix (1852), Frederic Leighton (1891), Odil Redon (1912), and Tamara De Lempicka (1929). So extensive was this practice, it might almost seem plausible to construct a potted history of canonical Western art entirely through depictions of Andromeda.¹³ Perhaps, inevitably—given her longevity and prominence—the white Andromeda migrated from aristocratic “high art” into modern popular culture, with Kilinski (2012) amongst those noting speculatively that King Kong—with its 1933 theme of black people sacrificing white woman Ann Darrow to a monster—bore narrative kinship to classical antecedents.¹⁴ There were also much more unambiguous references for the characters named Andromeda in three later sword-and-sandal blockbuster films. First came MGM’s 1981 Clash of the Titans, in which she was played by white Briton Judi Bowker. Then in 2010, another Clash of the Titans was released by Warner Bros, with white American Alexa Davalos in the role, followed in 2012 by Wrath of The Titans starring Rosamund Pike. With combined revenues of almost $1.0 billion, and featuring Oscar winners and nominees Laurence Olivier, Maggie Smith, Liam Neeson, and Ralph Fiennes, these films positioned white Andromedas at the financial pinnacle of Western mass consumer culture in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries—but with no hint of the disruptive racial dilemma posed by the classical setting of Ethiopia. Although overshadowed by the hegemony of cinema, a similar neoGothic/Romantic interest in Andromeda’s relationship to monsters, desire, and the supernatural also emerged in the Fantasy Art genre.¹⁵ And as with the 1988 painting Andromeda by Boris Vallejo, such figures invariably conform to the white trope established in fine art. Even so, it was as fantasy that perhaps for the first time in 350 years a black Andromeda emerged from the brushes of Romanian painter Corina Chirila, whose 2008 bikini-clad damsel seemed calm despite her golden chains and a pale dragon. Consequently, apart from the obscure ¹³ Picasso’s 1930 etched illustration for Ovid’s Metamorphoses, called The Combat for Andromeda between Perseus and Phineus, does not actually depict Andromeda. ¹⁴ Ann Darrow is an obvious pun on Andromeda. ¹⁵ Video gaming, whilst not immune to Andromedas, has not yet produced any major work featuring the heroine—Mass Effect: Andromeda, released in 2017, references the nearby galaxy without Ovidian themes.

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exceptions of Chirila and two seventeenth-century Dutchmen, the uniform visual representation¹⁶ of Andromeda as white constituted what Fanon identified ironically as an “all-white truth”—a hegemonic white visual space denying Ovid’s mythography of black beauty. Such was the artistic and literary landscape surrounding Andromeda before and after 2010, when I began researching Tate’s collection of British art. Encouraged by the intrigue of her contested African and black identities, I scoured the museum’s database hoping to discover how British fine artists had addressed the heroine’s racial identity. I learnt that the institution held nine artworks in which “Andromeda” formed part of the title or catalogue entry. They included two 1798 color studies on paper by Turner; a drawing and a gouache painting for The Rock of Doom by Burne-Jones; an 1843 woodcut engraving by John Linnell; an abstract 1962 painting Andromeda by Alexander Liberman; a 1937–8 painting Neptune and Andromeda by Alexandre Jacovleff; and a 1936 collage Perseus and Andromeda by David Gascoyne—as well as the monumental 1893 bronze sculpture by Henry Fehr titled The Rescue of Andromeda. In addition, Poynter’s Andromeda had been on loan from a private collection following the 2001–2 exhibition Exposed: The Victorian Nude—although by 2011 it was no longer on display. Tate’s Andromeda works thus ranged in method from Romantic to PreRaphaelite and from minimalism to surrealism—with the earliest produced in 1798 and the most recent in 1962. I also conducted additional searches for other elements relevant to the myth: Nereids, Perseus, Neptune/Poseidon, Medusa, Cetus, Gorgon, Jove/Jupiter/Zeus, Cassiopeia, Phineus, Atlas, and Cephus. I found more artworks but no identifiable Andromeda figures or references. Some of Tate’s Andromeda artworks were abstract and thereby devoid of any human figuration. Of the figurative works, though, all except one conformed to the pale-skinned trope, which suggested a question about methodology: How did British artists make decisions about Andromeda’s appearance? According to art historian Nigel Llewellyn, for ¹⁶ Wilk (2007, 198) recounts that by 1800 there were more than twenty-five operas about Perseus, Medusa, and Andromeda, including works by Vivaldi and Monteverdi—with Manelli’s spectacular Venetian production Andromeda posited by Parker (2001, 20) as arguably “where the history of opera begins.” Alongside opera itself, the heroine also inspired less grandiose work, such as Mozart’s concert aria Ah lo Previdi of 1777, but in any case the racial theatrics of opera and music are beyond the scope of this study.

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Western painters and sculptors from the Renaissance through to the Impressionists, “a facility with Ovidian myth” was vital “to achieve success in the higher genres” (quoted in Martindale 1990, 160). Indeed, as Charles Martindale (1990, 1) maintains, “from the twelfth century onwards Ovid has had a more wide-ranging impact on the art and culture of the West than any other classical poet.” And similarly the classicist Denis Feeney asserts of the Metamorphoses that, “The poem’s impact on the visual arts is . . . so pervasive as to be incalculable, with the names of Titian, Bernini and Rubens only the most obvious ones that first come to mind” (Ovid 2004, xxxiii). This consensus on Ovid’s importance for visual artists was upheld on Tate’s website caption for Henry Fehr’s Rescue of Andromeda, in which art historian Heather Birchall cited Ovid as a principal source of the heroine’s narrative (2003). And whilst artists’ precise reading habits are not always easy to discern, we do know with certainty that one of nineteenth-century Britain’s leading artists and teachers, Sir Frederic Leighton, introduced Ovid to his Royal Academy students as a specific source of classicist inspiration (1897, 152), at the same time also illustrating Andromedan myth in his own highly successful work. If reading Ovid (and thereby his proposal of an Ethiopian setting for the tale) was such a key preparation, then, how plausible was it to assume that British depictions of Andromeda as white were artistic “accidents,” instead of deliberate choices to conform with the painterly Western tradition of whiteness? Even if an artist were to posit Cassiopeia as a white queen of black Ethiopia (just as Victoria was a white queen of predominantly black Jamaica), would that still not imply a process of artistic deliberation? In at least one instance, this issue was partially sidestepped: prior to commencing his Doom series of paintings, Burne-Jones illustrated The Earthly Paradise by his friend William Morris ([1868] 2002; see also Burne-Jones and Burne-Jones 1906). That poem unambiguously placed Andromeda in Syria—and Burne-Jones may thus have avoided any Ethiopian blackness. Yet, as well as having Morris as a source, in 1875 Burne-Jones also visited the British Museum’s Attic vases for his research (Wildman and Christian 1998). Whether he saw the red-figured hydria of Andromeda (acquired in 1843) with its ethnographic Ethiopians is unclear, but in any event he recruited Margaret Benson to sit as his white Andromeda (MacCarthy 2012). Morris, though, certainly used both Ovid and the late-eighteenth-century classicist John Lempriere

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(1801, 91) as his sources (see Boos [1868] 2002)—and each had affirmed Andromeda’s Ethiopian identity. Consequently, his own choice of a Syrian setting was deliberate and probably followed the example of William Caxton, whose translation of Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye by Raoul Lefèvre ([1475] 1894, 214) gave “palestyne” as Andromeda’s fatherland. Irrespective of what literary sources Fehr himself used for his Andromeda sculpture, what I did discover was that for British artists and specifically for nineteenth-century painters, the relation of complexion, skin color, and race to classical antiquity was of definite significance. When Leighton painted an 1882 depiction of the historical Greek courtesan Phryne, he was repeatedly criticized: [His] “Phryne” is a brown woman,—a colour for which we do not understand the reason, as Phryne was a Greek, and therefore a white woman. (“The Builder” 1882; quoted in Smith 1999, 43)

Apparently, Leighton intended Phryne to be an “Aryan” woman with a suntan on account of the artist’s purported interest in ancient, naked, sun worship (Smith 1999, 41), but such was the anxiety about white racial purity that even this deviation was met with resistance, and to this day the painting’s whereabouts remains unknown.¹⁷ However, in 1891, Leighton, the long-serving President of the Royal Academy, painted his own Perseus and Andromeda, in which the heroine’s mass of straight, orange hair left no doubt about the racial specificity of her North European pallor. His princess cowered under the dark wing of the monster Ketos, and as Birchall proposed in her caption for Henry Fehr’s 1893 Rescue of Andromeda, it seemed likely that Fehr adopted ¹⁷ Leighton’s color coding of skin complexions was highly deliberative and bore an insidious relationship to his racial opinions. At the Royal Academy Schools, he taught that race was the primary influence on art history (1897, 69), and that both Britons and Dorian Greeks belonged to a “pure Aryan” race (89). In correspondence from his youthful travels in Africa, he repeatedly used the term “Nigger” and compared dark-skinned residents to apes, describing one black female singer as a “baboon” whose performance reminded him of “the monkey-house in the Zoological Gardens” (Barrington [1906] 2009, L7277). This represented an element of a more complex picture, however. Leighton also described some black men as “fine” in appearance and was particularly proud of his large watercolor A Negro Dance. Given his expressed views, it seems inconceivable to imagine Leighton painting a young black woman as though she were a paragon of desirable beauty, and accordingly his model for Andromeda was his long-standing muse, the white model and actress, Dorothy Dene (Munich 1993).

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this specific motif of vulnerability with the direct encouragement of his former teacher Leighton. Certainly, Leighton’s influence on Fehr was noted by the leading British art critic Marion Spielmann, who had observed that the most senior of British artists “took a kindly interest” in his putative protégé (1901, 138). Because my study focused on how Britishness intersected with African identities through art, I limited my purview to Tate’s National Collection, which provided an institutionally circumscribed and finite paradigm of artistic Britishness. This meant paintings not in the collection, such as Leighton’s Perseus and Andromeda or Poynter’s Andromeda, could not count as central research material. Unmasking Andromeda’s Africana identity meant working with the museum’s nine candidate artworks—and I decided that Fehr’s sculpture, being the most substantial and prominent, would be the anchor point for my research (see Fig. 6.1). The work, which is almost 3.0 meters high (excluding the 1.5-metre plinth), was purchased by the Chantrey Behest in 1894. Not only was it therefore one of the first artefacts that twenty-first-century visitors encountered near the museum’s Millbank entrance, but it was also an instance of the institution’s earliest constructions of British artistic identity. And yet despite his work’s proximity to the grandiose portico of such a prestigious institution, Fehr seemed comparatively little known to art history, with no published monographs or theses about him. A database search in the British Library Catalogue produced no results (either as the subject, title, or primary content of any document), and the National Art Library of the Victoria and Albert Museum held just three scant items of correspondence. However, his entry in the online database Mapping the Practice and Profession of Sculpture in Britain and Ireland 1851–1951 (“Henry Charles Fehr” 2011) contained a bibliography of primary source materials, and he was briefly mentioned in some books and journals. Fehr (1867–1940), the south London–born son of an immigrant Swiss merchant, was a prize-winning student at the Royal Academy Schools, who worked as a sculptor for almost fifty years until his retirement in 1937, producing memorials, reliefs, monuments, and portraits across the U.K. His more prestigious commissions included statues and bas-reliefs decorating the facade of the Middlesex Guildhall on Parliament Square— which in the early twenty-first century housed Britain’s Supreme Court. Spielmann was cautiously enthusiastic and in British Sculpture and

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Fig. 6.1. Henry Fehr, The Rescue of Andromeda, 1893. Bronze. Photographs © Kimathi Donkor, 2011.

Sculptors of Today (1901) described Fehr’s art as “clever” and displaying “courage” but with a “certain lack of depth in sentiment.” Since the artist’s death, though, historical opinion has been mainly unfavorable. Writing about the late-Victorian “New Sculpture” movement with which he was associated, Susan Beattie felt Fehr’s St George and the Rescued Maiden (1898) was: A striking example of the abuse of the New Sculpture’s delicate symbolist imagery and the misinterpretation of its motives . . . a double parody of Mercié’s Gloria Victis and Gilbert’s contemplative St George of 1896. (1983, 120)

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Similarly, Dennis Farr in English Art: 1870–1940 described the same work as “coarse and banal, if not comic” (1978, 89). Ambiguity about Fehr seems to have been shared by his peers—his nominations for election to the Royal Academy in 1893 and 1920 both failed. Despite this, he fostered a minor international profile, showing work at Les Palais des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1900 and even exhibiting with European avant-garde artists of La Libre Esthétique in Brussels—alongside Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Camille Pissaro, Pierre Bonnard, and Claude Monet (Block 1994). When he created The Rescue of Andromeda, it was as an “ideal” sculpture—which was the late Victorian term for freestanding, figurative works expressing general noble ideals through mythological or allegorical figures as opposed to portrait works memorializing specific noble historical individuals or events. Produced in plaster and exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1893 as Perseus and Andromeda (Spielmann 1901, 138), it was cast in bronze the following year when it was purchased “for the nation.” That the Perseus-Cetus-Andromeda myth is sometimes identified with the medieval romance of St. George and the Dragon (Collins 2000; Ogden 2008) and also that George is the patron saint of England¹⁸ open the possibility that the sculpture was acquired as much for its potential as a symbol of Anglo-British nationalism as for its other qualities.¹⁹ Even so, the appeal was limited: Spielmann wrote that though “remarkable” the sculpture had “certain faults”—particularly the “unfortunate superposition of Perseus on the dragon, and the dragon on Andromeda” (1901, 138). When the Tate Gallery opened in 1897, The Rescue was in the main sculpture galleries, but Fehr was upset when in 1911 it was displaced onto the exterior side balcony by the entrance. Writing to the Director Charles Aitken, the artist claimed that being “turned out of the inside collection” would “ruin his reputation” (Birchall 2003). That might well be true, but when I commenced my research his glossy black monument had been in place for almost

¹⁸ Two ironies worth noting here are that the earliest written account of St George (composed in 300–600 ) claims he was from the African state of Nabatia, whilst the most familiar story about George (the Perseus-like dragon/maiden legend) was located in an African city called Silena (Morgan 2017). ¹⁹ British Nationalism was explicitly mobilized in the campaign to found the Tate Gallery (Spalding 1998).

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100 years and was one of only two works displayed in the same location for the entire period.

Reimagining Andromeda So far, I have considered prior artistic practice and discourse on the myth of Andromeda and its links to African identity. However, as stated at the outset, my research was a practice-led methodology focused on the production of new artworks. That meant artistically re-interpreting the Andromeda myth in ways that were critically aware of the existing iconography. What follows is an account of how this process unfolded through my studio practice in relation to Fehr’s work. Central to the practice-led methodology was my identification of two artistic categories, which I called Masked Africana and Unmasked Africana. The term Masked Africana denotes artworks which embody a specific, constitutive connection to Africa or African people that is “fugitive”—meaning that this vital African connection is not visually apparent. Aside from their literal meanings, I wanted the terms “fugitive” and “masked” to signify artistic phenomena of visibility and invisibility by evoking key historical usages. In relation to masking, for example, many Africana artefacts have been stereotypically defined as “masks,” even when such a designation is unstable—as in the case of Tutankhamun’s desecrated golden tep-en-seshta, which is widely known as a “funeral mask” (Taylor 2010, 109; Assmann 2015, 108). And whilst it is an unremarked-upon fact that Frantz Fanon nowhere mentions white masks in Black Skin, White Masks, as mentioned above, my practice-led research into the masking function of Western artworks helps materialize what was implicit in his title. Similarly, the term “fugitive” evoked not only the fading of certain painting pigments, but also the relationship between many Western artworks and those enslaved plantation workers whose oppression and resistance were embodied by questions of presence and absence. One spectacular example of such fugitive Africana was epitomized by the famous twin portraits of Madame X by John Singer Sargent (1884a, 1884b), which nowhere signified explicitly that his wealthy sitter, Madame Virginie Gautreau née Avegno, was heiress to two of Louisiana’s leading slave-holding and Confederate families (Mount 1955). Whilst the exploitation of African American slave labor was implicit in the biography of the sitter, the terrorized lives of those

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forgotten victims remained fugitive in the visual language of the painting, perhaps reflecting the imposition of social invisibility on both the enslaved and those literal fugitives from the law who fled plantation captivity. Thus “Masked Africana” denoted a class of artworks (including Fehr and Sargent’s), whereas “Fugitive Africana” described those specific hidden connections that the artwork embodied—such as the Ethiopian Andromeda or the enslaved workers who produced Madame X’s wealth. In visually representing such fugitive artistic connections, I intended to produce new and experimental “Unmasked Africana,” which worked to undo (or “detourn”) the masking function of an old artwork by resituating and reinterpreting its motifs. This methodology elaborated on two prior approaches: Detournément and Black Art. In the 1960s, Situationists like Guy Debord proposed that artistic detournéments should appropriate imagery from “spectacular” artworks to produce radical, oppositional meanings (Knabb 2007, 14). And in the 1980s, Black Art practitioners like Lubaina Himid, Rasheed Araeen, and Donald Rodney produced work to “assist us in our liberation” by creating “an alternative set of values” (Chambers 1981). In relation to these methods, my strategy of making Unmasked Africana required four sequential phases, of which the first were my critical readings. Second, I made critical observations that were in turn (the third phase) followed by critical appropriation/synthesis. Finally, the fourth phase was critical evaluation. Through artistic critical readings, I tried to identify fugitive Africana in Tate’s collection of British art. This practice was analogous to the process of “oppositional decoding” proposed by Stuart Hall in his essay “Encoding/Decoding” ([1980] 2005). For Hall, a work is oppositionally decoded if the viewer interprets it in ways that directly counter the maker’s intention. Whilst Leighton, Burne-Jones, or Fehr might have intended that viewers perceive their Andromedas as “pure” white women, an oppositional decoding might read their artworks as instead a masking of the heroine’s mythical Ethiopian identity. In my next phase, critical observation, I considered which methods of observation would identify a recognizable and representable element of the masking artwork (including its entire form) that might then be incorporated into the third phase. And it was only through the third phase—critical appropriation and synthesis—that I could discover in practice which methods of mimesis, abstraction, and making would critically translate visual

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elements of the old masking artwork, whilst ensuring that those elements remained recognizable in a new unmasking artwork. It was through critical reflection (such as in the present text) that I considered in what ways artistic criticality had been produced through the entire process. My investigations into the black Andromeda constituted the critical reading that identified Henry Fehr’s The Rescue of Andromeda as an instance of Masked Africana in Tate’s collection—with Andromeda’s invisible Ethiopian identity constituting the sculpture’s specific and fugitive Africana element. Nevertheless, Fehr’s Andromeda was unusual amongst historical depictions in that the entire bronze, including all four mythological figures, has a jet-black patina (probably achieved using either liver of sulfur or ammonium sulfide). Ironically, this meant that in the translation from plaster to bronze, Fehr’s Andromeda had metamorphosed literally from white to black. However, in terms of considering her physiognomy for conventional signifiers of perceived beauty or “race” (both deemed significant by Ovid), it is only possible for the ordinary viewer to see Andromeda’s face in profile—due to its relative position. That profile suggested Fehr intended his heroine to conform to a so-called Greek ideal.²⁰ Having identified Fehr’s work as an instance of Masked Africana, I began my critical observations, hoping to discover more about its visual coding and seeking elements for appropriation through my unmasking

²⁰ It is plausible that the visual prominence of Andromeda’s facial profile in Fehr’s work may be attributed to a nineteenth-century, Western, white aesthetic obsession with the “ideal Greek profile,” a racialized signifier that privileged specific facial features in hierarchies of supposedly racial attributes. For example, the idealist German philosopher Hegel supported claims by the Dutch physiologist Pieter Camper that the Greek profile was the ideal of human beauty, and that in sculpture this was manifest in a straight line between the forehead and nose tip almost “without interruption,” along with a supposed Greek “facial angle” (Tibebu 2011, 99). In this stereotypical schema, “negroes” (that is, “black Africans,” or “Ethiopians”) were considered aesthetically, intellectually, and spiritually inferior to “Caucasians.” Similarly, Leighton, who was Fehr’s teacher, believed Greek art of the “Periclean Age” (fifth century ) produced an “ideal of balanced form wholly Aryan” and shared only by some white British women (Leighton 1897, 89). My studies of Fehr’s three human faces in his Rescue of Andromeda found that they all conformed to this supposed Greek ideal (see Fig. 6.1(a), 6.1(c)). Such ideas continue to inform popular Western culture: in Ridley Scott’s 2012 sci-fi hit Prometheus, the human protagonists encounter “godlike” humanoid aliens. These digitally animated beings each had a pronounced “Greek Profile” because, according to their designer Neville Page, Scott wanted, “an exercise in classic human beauty. Ridley was quite specific about his references of Roman and Grecian sculpture. ‘God like, classical’ ” (Page 2013).

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process. This on-site study began with observational drawings, using graphite pencils and sketchpads, and it is only stating the obvious to note that the most prominent element of the sculpture is not Andromeda (as in Leighton’s work) but the towering, naked, and entirely black young man, lithely muscular, who imposes a sense of hyper-masculine physical dominance—given that his giant stride places one firm foot on the back of a dragon. The huge blade in one hand and severed human head in the other evoke extreme violence, but also, Goethe’s association of Medusa with desire (Goethe 1999, 235) and Freud’s with castration (Freud and Hertz 2006; see also Garber and Vickers 2003). Just above the viewer’s eye level is the terrifying Cetus, part-reptile, part-bat, with predatory claws and outspread wings. Its jaws brimmed with crocodilian teeth, and it seemed to be both menacing and shielding the naked, slightly built Andromeda, whose gestures suggest terrified vulnerability. Chained by her ankles to the rock on which she squirms prostrate, her discarded robe is draped beneath her. She cannot see Perseus because the wing of the beast overshadows her while also shielding her gaze from beholding and thus succumbing to the Gorgon. Every surface of Fehr’s work is smooth, glossy, almost uniformly black, and crafted in just enough realistic anatomical detail to be plausible. Yet despite the athleticism and terror, there is not a single raised vein to indicate effort, which subtly heightens the supernatural status of the figures. Instead of the drawing-room restraint or courtly manners sometimes associated with Victorian sensibilities, the viewer is confronted with a scene of rage, terror, desire, death, and a monstrous Other—all of which belong to the re-emergence through the PreRaphaelites and then the New Sculpture movement of that neo-Gothic sensibility which had previously found expression in the British fine art of Henry Fuseli during the 1780s. From a vantage point on the other side of the Millbank highway, my enquiry in the first two sketches (see Fig. 6.2(i)) created rapid, boldly marked studies designed to quickly understand the scale and proportions of the sculpture. The drawings revealed that one source of the work’s physical aura lay in Fehr’s dramatic scaling of his figures. Perseus was gigantic by comparison to Andromeda—perhaps a similar disparity in scale to that in Pierre Puget’s 1684 marble sculpture of the pair. Her size was as a child to an adult, and the hero also dwarfed the monster Cetus— dominating the entire scene. To draw the sculpture from its front,

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Fig. 6.2. Kimathi Donkor, Study of Fehr’s Rescue of Andromeda (Nos I, II, III & IV), © 2011. Graphite on paper.

I moved into the museum’s front garden. From there Perseus’s hunched stance appears more menacing, his sword aimed directly at Cetus’s jaws. The hero’s head leans and turns slightly as though giving himself time and space to apprehend his opponent (Fig. 6.2(ii)). In this subtle gesture, I sensed that Fehr intended his hero to possess great confidence in his invincibility as the son of a god (Zeus), whereas Andromeda seems crushed beneath the expanse of Cetus’ wing. My drawn marks only discovered the wing in outline, as though I were resisting acknowledgement of the monstrous presence (Fig. 6.2(iii)).

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Cetus’ surprise is evident because its head is rotated completely around, indicating the realization that Perseus has approached from behind. Perhaps it was this turning that gave the sculpture moral ambiguity: Perseus is to Cetus as Cetus is to Andromeda—a predator. Perseus does not play fair, so to speak, by the rules of chivalry, as none exist between demigod and monster. What perhaps unites Perseus and Andromeda is not morality in the Christian sense of selflessness, but race—in that they perceive themselves as an immanent primordial Same, whilst Cetus and Medusa are Other? Cetus, his interrupting presence acting as a barrier between them, resists the couple’s desire to merge into a common identity. Yet in their motivations, all three seem partially interchangeable. Cetus desires to kill Andromeda, Andromeda and Perseus desire the death of Cetus. In moral terms, the Other is thus rendered Same. What counts, then, is not a struggle of Christian good with pagan evil, but rather that of a “will to power,” as formulated by Fehr’s contemporary, Friedrich Nietzsche: Let us admit to ourselves unflinchingly how every higher culture on earth has hitherto begun! [With men] of a still natural nature, barbarians in every fearful sense of the word, men of prey still in possession of an unbroken strength of will and lust for power [who] hurled themselves upon weaker . . . races. (2003, 192)

After having made my observational sketches and photographs, my next experimental proposal was to take the sculpture’s narrative potential and—rather than consider it entirely on its own terms—attempt to integrate further enquiry into my critical practice. Prior to the Africana Unmasked project, I had begun a cycle of paintings called Queens of the Undead about historical black women regarded as national heroines. One eighteenth-century woman, “Nanny of the Maroons,” was remembered in Jamaica as a military and civic leader who led a rural community of former slaves in guerrilla resistance to British counterinsurgency operations (Sherlock and Bennett 1998; Gottlieb 2000). Thinking about how to challenge the complacently racialized all-white Andromedas, I considered critically unmasking the Andromeda myth by translating the narrative to the Caribbean and introducing Nanny as Andromeda’s rescuer figure. This strategy was perhaps analogous to the transposition of classical themes found in Derek Walcott’s 1990 epic poem Omeros, which whilst set in the writer’s Caribbean homeland also referenced

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Fig. 6.3. (Left) Kimathi Donkor, Andromeda. (Right) Detail of Fehr, Rescue of Andromeda, 1893. (Left) © 2011. Digital 3D design. (Right) Photograph © Kimathi Donkor, 2011.

Homer’s Iliad. Similarly, for my proposed Andromeda artwork, colonial chattel slavery could be considered as the metaphorical “dragon” that preyed upon the innocent. For this artistic experiment I used my photographic and drawn studies of Fehr’s four sculptural figures to create computerized renditions in a virtual, three-dimensional digital space (Fig. 6.3), and these were then appropriated and synthesized into a new artwork Andromeda, Nanny, Cetus and Medusa (Fig. 6.4). Each virtual three-dimensional figure had a role analogous to those in Fehr’s statue, but with metamorphosed gender identities, species, dress, and spatial relationships—also translating the outdoor setting into an interior. I appropriated the gestures and postures of Fehr’s sculpture to produce a sense of figurative genealogy—that is, my figures had clear visual resemblances to Fehr’s prototypes. And I intended that these synthesized translations (or metamorphoses) could be read as both a response to and a break with the tradition of interpretations that had erased Andromeda’s Ovidian and Ethiopian blackness. This new Andromeda was not based on a portrait but was an imaginary persona whose contemporary jeans, trainers, and hairstyle would situate the mise en scène within a moment that resisted the stylistic, cultural claims of both the ancient world and the colonial empire. Presenting her as dressed made her possibly the first clothed depiction of the character in British fine art and so resisted the patriarchal objectifying

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Fig. 6.4. Kimathi Donkor, Andromeda, Nanny, Cetus and Medusa. © 2011. Digital painting; color image can be viewed at www.kimathidonkor.net.

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processes inherent in the traditional strategy, by which Andromeda models were: disrobed to be painted in that condition which we call art—but which is just another site of power where your human identity can be diminished by the exposure of your vulnerable body to a costumed and protected gaze. (Pollock 1999, 299)

With so much metamorphosis already in play, I succumbed to the temptation of representing Medusa as a black man adorned with the hairstyle I had worn for almost thirty years, the English name of which, “dreadlocks,” seems to invoke the kind of terror inspired by the serpentadorned Gorgon. It is an association often made, such as when reggae archivist Roger Steffens described Bob Marley as having “Medusa locks spiralling outward from his head in wild abandon” (1998, 253).²¹ My Cetus figure kept its overarching position in relation to Andromeda, but he was now humanized—a white man wearing a lounge suit, which in Western and colonized societies symbolized the conventional uniform of hegemonic, ordering power embodied by figures of commercial, political, and financial management. I intended his dress to function in a manner akin to the caustic Weimar Republic images of George Grosz—that is, to associate Cetus with the same predatory commercial ethos that had also provoked the Maroon resistance of Nanny. Consequently, Fehr’s sacrificial rock was metamorphosed into a bed, symbolic as a site of the countless rapes of enslaved African women by patriarchal “masters” during the transatlantic slave era. The most complete account of such behavior was documented in the thirty-seven-volume diaries of the eighteenth-century white English overseer, Thomas Thistlewood, who over a forty-year period meticulously documented the 3,852 rapes he inflicted on 138 female slave laborers (Hall 1999; Burnard 2004). After several weeks of intensive work, I felt this initial experiment had successfully translated the melodramatic violence of Fehr’s sculpture into new forms that critically addressed Andromeda’s African identity. However, I also felt my representation of her as purely a victim did not do sufficient justice to her simultaneously elevated place in classical mythography. Even with the substitution of a black female rescuer for the Perseus figure, Andromeda’s prone, cowering position intersected too ²¹ See also Cashmore 1979; White 1983; Johnson 1992; Narain 2004.

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closely with Fehr’s patriarchal celebration of female submission, and so as a singular work I thought it did not fully invoke that sense of embattled dignity which her social status as a royal princess and consort to the son of Zeus/Jupiter might have implied. Consequently, I decided to free my next work from so close a dependence on Fehr’s hierarchic priorities by developing a new line of research aligned with the less frenetic narrative conventions of portraiture. To accomplish this, I invited Risikat—a British woman of Nigerian heritage—to sit for a portrait that would again reimagine the ancient figure’s Ethiopian identity.²² This next experiment tried to project a contemporary historic subject’s Africana heritage into the mythographic domain of Andromeda rather than simply trying to pull Fehr’s sculpted postures into the realm of Africana. The triangulation of Britishness, Africana, and Mediterranean antiquity might also suggest parallels with Bernardine Evaristo’s novel The Emperor’s Babe (2001; see also Walters in this volume, pp. 223–239), which accomplished its own sense of contemporaneity through the studied London vernacular of its heroine. Just as the Ethiopian Andromeda was said to have voyaged with Perseus to reign over Mycenae in Greece, a key intention of my new unmasked image would be its portrayal of a woman whose own immediate heritage personified the diasporic, postcolonial settlement of African peoples in Europe—a portrayal that evoked her embodied subjectivity through details that were sympathetic rather than objectifying. Again unlike her artistic predecessors, this new Andromeda was neither disrobed nor chained, but nor was she any longer menaced by the immediate rapine of monstrous Otherness as had been the case in my earlier studio experiments. For the portrait, my sitter assumed an upright, seated posture with her ankles crossed and a slight contrapposto—relaxing the strenuous contortions imposed by Fehr on his model. Thus Andromeda’s poise was intended to reveal a self-possessed woman resistant to the racialized male gaze of post-Renaissance mythographers, with their demand for female nudity, victimhood, and the symbolic erasure of black identities. In the middle distance behind her, a clearly recognizable element of Fehr’s sculptural torment and bestial hunger was depicted through the wings ²² Risikat Donkor, as well as being my sitter in 2011, was also my partner—we married in 2013.

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of Cetus spread out into the night sky. In this new work, the dais was symbolically situated on a representation of the ribbed dome at Millbank, which I had digitally flattened into a circular grid and painted as though illuminated by moonlight. Although it was possible to see dimly the bronze hand of Fehr’s Andromeda making her plea, there was no Romantic superman—or superwoman—descending from heaven to reiterate the spectacle of victimhood. Only the representation of a faint jet stream above the horizon of the Atlas Mountains served as a reminder that when the painting was underway, a new generation of flying warriors were tasked with supposedly rescuing Africans from “monsters.”²³ But in the center of a cloudless sky and appearing just above the queen’s head, I also painted the galaxy named after her and making its nightly orbit. The painting, entitled The Rescue of Andromeda (Fig. 6.5), was first exhibited in the 2011 group exhibition Precious Little at the gallery of St Martin-in-theFields in London’s Trafalgar Square, with Emeritus Professor Elizabeth McGrath amongst those who attended the opening preview. When the tragically short-lived, African American, neo-fauvist painter Bob Thompson created two small gouaches called Untitled (Perseus and Andromeda) in 1964 (1964a, 1964b), he seemed to have reveled in audacious interpretations of Titian’s grand 1554–6 commission for King Philip II of Spain. One of Thompson’s Andromedas had a pale complexion with reddish hair, whereas the other was bright orange with blue hair. Thus, although color conventions were evidently a theme for him, neither figure seemed definitively Ethiopian, which suggested them as plausible instances of a black artist producing Masked Africana. And when the similarly ill-fated Jean-Michel Basquiat tackled the subject in 1988 with his large duo-tone Pegasus, he eschewed figuration almost entirely, opting instead to write “Andromeda” repeatedly, along with the word “schwarz,” meaning “black” in Germanic languages (see Heyd 1999). Therefore, whilst I cannot exclude the possibility that others have made contributions that antedate my own, it is feasible that my 2011 Rescue of Andromeda was the first depiction of a defiantly black “Andromeda” by a black painter. And although Fanon might not have been at all impressed by this minor act of resistance to centuries of ²³ I am here referring to the use of airpower by Britain and France in 2011 to attack the Libyan armed forces, which they accused of intending to commit massacres in Benghazi.

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Fig. 6.5. Kimathi Donkor, The Rescue of Andromeda. © 2011. Oil paints on canvas, 120 cm  90 cm; color image can be viewed at www. kimathidonkor.net.

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white masking, I do think his transatlantic odyssey to rescue France from her Nazi nemesis and his subsequent marriage there to Josie Dublé—a woman from across the color line—make it hard to imagine a real-life couple more likely to understand Ovid’s Perseus and Andromeda than Frantz and Josie.

Appendix: Referenced Artworks (Not Illustrated) Anonymous. c.1323 . Tep-en-seshta of Tutankhamun. Gold, gemstone, colored glass, and mixed media sculpture. Egyptian Museum, Cairo. https://www. britannica.com/biography/Tutankhamun/images-videos/media/1/610635/68746. Accessed July 22, 2019. Anonymous. c.575–550 . Corinthian amphora. Black-figure ceramic. Inv. no F1652. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. http://www.smb-digital.de/eMuseumPlus? service=ExternalInterface&module=collection&objectId=685799&viewType= detailView. Accessed August 30, 2017. Anonymous. c.440 . Attic Hydria. Red-figure ceramic. Inv. no 18431103.24. British Museum. http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/ collection_object_details.aspx?assetId=276782001&objectId=399162&partId= 1. Accessed August 30, 2017. Anonymous. c.10 . Perseus and Andromeda. Fresco. The Metropolitan Museum, New York. http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/ 250945. Accessed August 30, 2017. Basquiat, J.-M. 1988. Pegasus. Acrylic paints, pencil on canvas. Private collection. Burne-Jones, E. C. 1874–5. The Rock of Doom. Gouache, gold paint, graphite, and chalk on paper. Tate Britain. Burne-Jones, E. C. 1884. King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid. Oil paints on canvas. Tate Britain. Burne-Jones, E. C. 1885–8. The Rock of Doom. Oil paints on canvas. Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany. Chirila, C. 2008. Andromeda. http://theartofkorinna.yolasite.com/greekmythology-and-history.php. Accessed July 22, 2019. Cosimo, P. di. 1510. Perseus Freeing Andromeda. Oil paints on panel. Uffizi Gallery, Florence. Delacroix, E. 1852. Andromeda. Oil on canvas. Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. De Lempicka, T. 1929. Andromeda. Oil on canvas. Private collection. Fehr, H. C. 1898. St. George and The Rescued Maiden. Plaster of Paris. Lost. Gascoyne, D. 1936. Perseus and Andromeda. Printed papers on paper. Tate Britain, London.

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Ingres, J. A. D. 1819. Perseus and Andromeda. Oil on canvas. Detroit Institute of Arts. Jacovleff, A. 1937–8. Neptune and Andromeda. Tempera on canvas. Tate Britain. Leighton, F. 1859. A Negro Dance. Watercolor. Lost. Leighton, F. 1882. Phryne. Oil paints on canvas. Lost. Leighton, F. 1891. Perseus and Andromeda. Oil paints on canvas. Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. Liberman, A. 1962. Andromeda. Oil paints on canvas. Tate Britain, London. Linnell, J. 1843. Untitled. Woodcut engraving on paper. Inv. no. A00756. Tate Britain, London. Picasso, P. 1930. The Combat for Andromeda between Perseus and Phineus. Etching from the illustrated book Les Metamorphoses by Ovid. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Poynter, E. 1869. Andromeda. Oil on canvas. Perez Simón Collection, Mexico. Puget, P. 1684. Perseus and Andromeda. Marble, The Louvre, Paris. Redon, O. 1912. Andromeda. Arkansas Arts Center. Rembrandt. 1630. Andromeda, Chained to the Rocks. Oil on panel. Mauritshuis, The Hague. Rubens. 1639. Perseus Freeing Andromeda. Oil on canvas. Museo Del Prado, Madrid. Sargent, J. S. 1884a. Madame X (Madame Pierre Gautreau). The Metropolitan Museum, New York. Sargent, J. S. 1884b. Study of Mme Gautreau. Tate Britain. Thompson, R. 1964a. Untitled (Perseus and Andromeda). Private collection. Thompson, R. 1964b. Untitled (Perseus and Andromeda). Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, NC. Titian. 1556. Perseus and Andromeda. Oil on canvas. Wallace Collection, London. Turner, J. M. W. 1798. A Model Posed as Andromeda. Pencil, watercolor, and gouache on paper. Tate Britain, London. Vallejo, B. 1988. Andromeda. Oil on canvas. Reproduced in Vallejo and Bell 2007. Vasari, G. 1572. Perseus and Andromeda. Oil on slate. Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. Veronese, P. 1578. Perseus Freeing Andromeda. Oil on canvas. Musée des BeauxArts de Rennes.

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PART III

Tales

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7 The Tragedy of Aimé Césaire Adam Lecznar

This essay is concerned with the form of tragedy, and the attempt by the Martinican poet, playwright, and politician Aimé Césaire (1912–2008) to rework its central structures in the context of the Black Atlantic. I will argue that Césaire’s use of the tragic genre represents a particular mode of understanding the balance between the exploration of mythological and historical time in the past of the black race. Within the broad conceptual scope of the idea of classicism as set out in this volume, I plan to probe some of its more transitive possibilities: to approach classicism—and classicizing—as a mode of molding certain content (be that history, fiction, or even biography) into a particular form, and to think of that form as containing its own inherent message, philosophy, or mode of reflection. Tragedy is only one type of this formation, and only one of many formal options available to authors (the possibilities of the novel and visual art, to give only two examples, are explored elsewhere in this volume); but I believe that tragedy is particularly worthy of study in this regard because it carries with it a capacity to interrogate a certain set of modern ideas of the past that are of particular relevance to the Black Atlantic. The tragic form has to do with understanding the dualities of despair and hope, resignation and action, destruction and creation, violence and healing within history: and for Césaire, the fact that these options are so readily reached for and so easily remembered in the past of the Black Atlantic makes tragedy a powerful mode for approaching, understanding, and sharing his attitude toward the present of the black race, and, in turn, its future.

Adam Lecznar, The Tragedy of Aimé Césaire. In: Classicisms in the Black Atlantic. Edited by: Ian Moyer, Adam Lecznar, and Heidi Morse, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198814122.003.0008

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In his original formulation of the Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy invokes tragedy only briefly, arguing that his model of diasporic cultural interaction is intended to argue against “the tragic popularity of ideas about the integrity and purity of cultures” that he sees present in many exclusivist narratives of cultural and racial identity.¹ Gilroy’s use of the adjective “tragic” here is in part simply a figure of speech, but it also points toward a sense that the historical trajectory of black nationalist thought can be understood as analogous to a tragic drama, whereby the huge popularity that attended movements propagating ideas of racial distinctivity has undergone an unpredicted and shocking Aristotelian peripateia (or reversal of fortune). One such movement that Gilroy invokes in The Black Atlantic, as well as in other works, is négritude, an influential movement of black nationalism that originated in the francophone world of the early twentieth century.² Aimé Césaire was one of the three central founders of this movement, along with the Senegalese Léopold Sédar Senghor and the Guianese Léon-Gontran Damas which has become strongly connected with an essentialist notion of black identity due to its interest in how the nature of being black (or of black being) endows its subject with specific qualities that are precisely not shared with other races.³ Another mobilization of tragedy within the symbolic ambit of the Black Atlantic is to be found in the work of David Scott on the significance of tragic temporality to the understanding of postcolonial historical and cultural identity. In different works, Scott has focused on how attitudes toward the Haitian revolution of the late eighteenth century and the Grenadian revolution of the late 1970s have changed according to shifting perceptions of their success and their resonance with the contemporary world.⁴ In Conscripts of Modernity (2004), Scott shows how C. L. R. James introduced an increasingly tragic tone to the 1970 edition of his seminal work The Black Jacobins when compared to the first 1936 edition, linking this to James’s growing disquiet about the future of postcolonial nation states and his attempt to express it through his analysis of the figure of the Haitian slave leader Toussaint Louverture. The focus of the present essay has clear overlaps

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Gilroy 1993a, 7. See Wilder 2017 for a recent re-evaluation of the movement. For the origins of the movement, see, e.g. Irele 1981, 67–88; Kesteloot 1991, 120–58. See Scott 2004, 2008, 2013.

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with Scott’s project, not least because Césaire’s drama Le tragédie du roi Christophe, or “The Tragedy of King Christopher” (first written in 1963 and rewritten in 1969), takes its subject matter from the aftermath of the Haitian revolution. But I also want to go further than Scott in teasing out the possibilities provided by the tragic form of drama for effectively classicizing the past—and allowing that past to be understood and disseminated. Césaire was not the only writer to turn to tragedy in this period, and not even the only francophone author concerned with the fate of the French postcolony: to name only three, Bernard Dadié, Kateb Yacine, and Albert Camus all wrote tragic plays in the middle part of the twentieth century that reflected on the limitations of imperialism.⁵ Césaire should thus be understood as intervening in a broader tradition of tragic thinking throughout the Black Atlantic, one that also comprises the anglophone world in figures like Wole Soyinka, Ama Ata Aidoo, Ola Rotimi, and Rita Dove. Barbara Goff and Michael Simpson theorized one manifestation of this tradition, the African, Caribbean, and African American reception of Sophocles’ Theban plays, in their 2007 work Crossroads in the Black Aegean, with a focus on their postcolonial political implications. The focus on Césaire that I pursue in this essay departs from previous studies like Goff and Simpson’s because by exploring Césaire’s literary and philosophical journey toward the writing of tragic plays, it becomes possible both to isolate some of the specific concerns that he felt he could explore through the tragic form and to understand the implications of his plays for how tragedy and race are bound together in the conceptual space of the Black Atlantic. For example, as we will see, Césaire’s decision to link his tragic vision to that of Friedrich Nietzsche from The Birth of Tragedy displays the ways that the concept of tragedy can incubate cross-cultural intellectual connections between historical and racial traditions. In exploring the way in which Césaire marries mythology and history by means of the tragic form, this essay will proceed in two parts. It begins with an exploration of the turning point of 1956 in his thinking and his artistic praxis as the moment when he simultaneously resigned his position in the French Communist Party, thus changing the course of

⁵ For this tendency in French drama of this period, see Poniewaz 2009.

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his political career on his native island of Martinique, and began to write tragic dramas. Here I consider the evolution of his position around this juncture vis-à-vis the black community in which Césaire was negotiating his roles of intellectual, artistic, and political leadership. I then examine The Tragedy of King Christopher to demonstrate how Césaire articulated these changes in artistic practice, thus bringing out the thematic explorations and groupings that he used to structure his tragic worldview. The mode of classicism that will be brought to light is one that combines a concern for tracing the origins of the black race with an understanding of the necessity of plotting out a future for that race. As we will see, this future both draws on the rich vocabularies of the natural and human world and enshrines a narrative of the past that pits a reckoning with its wrongs against the remembrance of its hopes.

Césaire’s Mythic Origins The main example of Césaire’s approach to the conjunction of myth and history early in his career is his epic poem Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, “Notebook of a Return to my Native Land” (henceforth, Notebook), published in part in 1939 and then fully in 1956. This poem recounts the ambivalent return of its narrator to his home island Martinique; it became almost instantly renowned for its importance to négritude, the anticolonial movement of black cultural nationalism that Césaire helped to establish, along with Senghor and Damas, during the seven years he spent in Paris as a student between 1932 and 1939. Négritude focused on rehabilitating the idea of a black essence in the face of white prejudice. This essence was predicated on a heightened receptivity to natural and irrational forces that existed both in contradistinction to white concerns with rationality and in common with pride in the cultural legacy of black Africa. In Notebook, Césaire is more interested in the first of these connections than the second. Even when the poem’s narrator does invoke elements of his past, he does so in a predominantly symbolic way. The poem is itself supposed to recount a historical event of a more personal kind, the return that Césaire himself made from Europe to the Caribbean in 1939, but is immediately framed by the timeless cycles of nature: the first words, “Au bout du petit matin” (At the brink of dawn), are repeated in the poem’s first movement and become a key to its concern with a

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present that is always beginning but never quite begun, a landscape surveyed beneath the rising sun but never quite glimpsed in the full glare of its rays. This landscape is the object of a long list of complaints: At the brink of dawn, life prostrate, no one knows where to forward its aborted dreams, the river of life desperately torpid in its bed, with no turgescence or depression, uncertain in its flow, lamentably empty, the heavy impartiality of boredom evenly casting shadows over all things equal, the stagnant air undisturbed by the bright flight of a bird. (Césaire [1956] 1995, 82–3)

The river of life, “le fleuve de vie,” is stopped here, and there is no hope of movement. It becomes clear that this stagnation was the cause of the narrator’s departure in the first place, and his hope is that on his return he would be able to help this island: “And so I have come back!” This marks a turning point in the poem and introduces a new repetitive emphasis on the phrase, “Ce qui est à moi” (What is mine), which briefly structures the poem. This immediately inaugurates an international narrative of black identity with which the narrator associates, taking in the Caribbean, Florida, and Africa, as well as locations that recall the violence of the black past, including the slave ports of Bordeaux, Nantes, and Liverpool and the plantations of Virginia, Tennessee, and Georgia. Amidst this account of the global memory and reach of the black experience, the narrator invokes a hugely important geographical space and historical event: the slave rebellion on the French island colony of Saint-Domingue, now split between Haïti and the Dominican Republic, led by the slave leader Toussaint Louverture in 1791. Césaire describes Haiti as “where negritude stood up for the first time and said it believed in its humanity,” and then swiftly expands on why this is the case: What is mine too: a small cell in the Jura, the snow lines it with white bars the snow is a white gaoler who mounts guard in front of a prison. What is mine a man alone, imprisoned by whiteness a man alone who defies the white screams of a white death (TOUSSAINT, TOUSSAINT LOUVERTURE) a man alone who fascinates the white hawk of white death a man alone in the infertile sea of white sand an old wog rising against the water of the sky (Césaire [1956] 1995, 90–1)

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The name of Toussaint Louverture interrupts the poem as if shouted from outside, a capitalized chant that hints at the intrusion of communal concerns into what is otherwise a mostly individual meditation on the rehabilitation of black identity; and what is emphasized is not his life and achievements but his death in a prison in the European Alps in 1803 after he had been betrayed to the French by his fellow rebels.⁶ The memory of Toussaint and his actions in Haiti is thus invoked here, and although it is intended to function metaphorically for a historical event it is treated entirely symbolically and in constant interconnection with a white world. It is black history, but it is a black history of destruction and defeat, where its central symbol of Toussaint as a “man alone” only gains his specificity against a constant backdrop of whiteness, whether in screams, death, nature, or sand. Just as blackness will shortly be troped in relation to its natural affectivity, so here is whiteness understood as a representation of nature’s brutal barrenness. After this brief memorialization of Toussaint, the archetypical “he,” or hero, of black history, and his encounter with the inevitability of death, the poem begins to oscillate more regularly between the positions of an “I” and a “we,” as the narrator explores the complexity of articulating his own experiences and feelings about the nature and history of his black identity. It is at this point that the narrator thinks more seriously about his responsibility to a community in need of a fresh narrative of black history which would counteract the blood-soaked, violent memories that he recounts further on in the poem: So much blood in my memory! In my memory are lagoons. They are covered with death’s head. They are not covered with water lilies. In my memory are lagoons. On their banks no women’s loincloths are spread out. (Césaire [1956] 1995, 100–1)

The blood pooling in the narrator’s memory is not an idyllic, pastoral lagoon of a long-lost Eden but is connected to the death that he immediately associated with Toussaint—and its identity as the repository of black corpses that have resulted from the history of slavery. This split between history and myth is not absolute: Césaire is not at this point of ⁶ At the conjunction of his poetical and dramatic work, Césaire wrote a biography of Louverture entitled Toussaint Louverture: La révolution et le problème colonial (1961). This followed his more polemical work Discours sur le colonialisme (1955). See further Figueroa 2009.

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his literary career able to call for a wholesale rejection of the mythologized, sexualized narrative of “water lilies” and “women’s loincloths,” since this is a central part of the conceptual arsenal of négritude. Rather, his narrator invokes the psychic burden incumbent on somebody operating with these two models of the past, both untethered in their own ways from historical reality and either offering a narrative of total annihilation or total bliss. The attempt to come to terms with black history in a way that avoids these two paths then reappears when the narrator tries to understand the nature of collective, racial memory in terms of the “we” of the black present: No, we have never been amazons of the King of Dahomey, nor princes of Ghana with eight hundred camels, nor doctors in Timbuctoo under King Askia the Great, nor architects in Djenne nor Madhis, nor warriors. We do not feel the itch of those who used to hold the spear in our armpits. And since I have sworn to suppress nothing in our history (I who admire nothing so much as sheep grazing on their afternoon shadow), I will admit that for as long as I can remember we have always been quite pathetic dishwashers, shoeshiners with no ambition, looking on the bright side, rather conscientious witch-doctors, and the only undeniable record we ever broke was at endurance under the whip. (Césaire [1956] 1995, 104–5)

The collective memory of Toussaint’s efforts in Haiti is contrasted with the absence of a certain style of mythologized, glorious African past, embodied by the Kingdoms of Dahomey, Ghana, and Timbuctoo, and is part and parcel of an attempt to offer a more realistic and truthful narrative of the people about whom the narrator sings: he has already argued, “Who and what are we? Admirable question!” (Césaire [1956] 1995, 92–3). But again, the poem’s narrator presents a binary choice of stereotypes, where “we” are either “amazons of the King of Dahomey” or “pathetic dishwashers”; history is tinged with myth, either affirmative or degrading but in both ways unrealistic. Here, Césaire’s poem anticipates the claim “either I’m nobody or I’m a nation” originally written by Derek Walcott and then later copied by Junot Díaz (see McConnell’s essay in this volume).⁷ It is out of this attempt at founding a stable “we” past the binary of a selfish and self-satisfied “he” and “I” that Césaire returns to the idea of négritude toward the end of the poem. The narrator is pushed toward ⁷ See pp. 255–256.

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fashioning a new definition of négritude by the experience of encountering and laughing at a poor black man on a Paris tram.⁸ His shame at the memory of his own callousness when faced with the poverty of someone so intimately connected to him by their shared race makes the necessity of a form of black identity that can obliterate difference all the more significant: my negritude is not a stone, its deafness hurled against the clamour of the day my negritude is not an opaque spot of dead water over the dead eye of the earth my negritude is neither a tower nor a cathedral it reaches deep down into the red flesh of the soil it reaches deep into the blazing flesh of the sky it pierces opaque prostration with its straight patience. Eia for the royal Kailcedrate! Eia for those who have never invented anything for those who have never explored anything for those who have never subdued anything those who open themselves up, enraptured, to the essence of all things ignorant of surfaces but enraptured by the movement of all things indifferent to subduing but playing the game of the world truly the eldest sons of the earth porous to all the breaths of the earth. (Césaire [1956] 1995, 114–15)

At first, négritude is defined by what it is not: it is not characterized by the same stillness and stagnation that the narrator had attributed to the landscape of the island he was trying to escape at the start of the poem at the break of dawn; nor is it “deaf,” “opaque,” or “dead,” and it is not connected to mute products of human civilization like the tower or the cathedral. Following this, its objective qualities are again avoided, as it is described in terms of its activities: it “reaches” and “pierces” just like the tree to which it is subsequently likened. The “royal Kailcedrate” that Césaire mentions here is a type of mahogany tree, the cailcedrat or khaya senegalensis, found in West Africa. Figured as such, his négritude becomes the function of a connection between humanity and nature, as well as a distance from the all-too-human and dominating deeds of invention, exploration, and subjugation.⁹ J. Michael Dash has described ⁸ See McConnell 2013, 46–53. ⁹ For the significance of trees and vegetal symbolism more generally to Césaire throughout his life, see Ngal (1975) 1994, 166–79; also see Césaire 2005, 11, where Françoise Vergès

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this variously as a “poetics of erasure” and a “poetics of origination”;¹⁰ on both readings, Césaire seems to locate the identity of the black race at least in part in its ability both to exist beyond the destructive demands that civilization asks of its adherents and to cultivate a type of being more akin to the tree than to the cathedral or the tower, “enraptured by the movement of all things | indifferent to subduing but playing the game of the world.” The invocation and description of négritude here forms part of a kind of prolonged and mythical moment, which has neither past nor future and only exists in a rapturous, static, Edenic present. The possibility that the qualities of this temporality might become the qualities of a specific identity is something which Césaire emphasizes in the final lines of the passage quoted above: “truly the eldest sons of the world | porous to all the breaths of the earth.” Part of the attraction of this model of existence is that it is without memory and therefore allows the forgetting of the bloody idyll that the narrator has described previously: it acts to repress this tradition of violence in favor of a more peaceable shared identity. It is also without activity: its blissful passivity allows it never to invent, explore, or subdue. This seems to be Césaire’s favored attitude toward négritude’s historical embeddedness throughout the 1940s, as we can see from a 1944 essay entitled “Poetry and Knowledge”: I even believe that man has never been closer to certain truths than in the first days of the species. At the time when man discovered with emotion the first sun, the first rain, the first breath, the first moon. At the time when man discovered with fear and rapture the throbbing newness of the world.¹¹

It was also in this essay that Césaire would make a particularly signal advertisement of his intellectual links to the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and in particular to the concepts of Dionysus and Apollo that are most extensively explored in Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, out of the Spirit of Music (1872).¹² In this essay, Césaire uses a conceptual dualism that would prove extremely popular in the literary and

recounts how during a series of interviews with him in 2004, he would regularly order his chauffeur to stop the car so he could point out local trees to Vergès. ¹⁰ Dash 1998, 63, 83. ¹¹ Césaire 1990, xliii. See Césaire 1990, xlii–lvi, for the essay as a whole. ¹² For Nietzsche’s role in négritude and Césaire’s thought more generally, see Arnold 1981, 745–55; Frindéthié 2008, 18–23.

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philosophical culture of the twentieth century, and employs it to argue that the second half of the nineteenth century demonstrated a great change in the history of French poetry, when the “pulsing novelty” of the world was again remembered by authors like Rimbaud, Baudelaire, and the Comte de Lautréamont: Poets have always known. All the legends of antiquity attest to it. But in modern times it is only in the nineteenth century, as the Apollonian era draws to a close, that poets dared to claim that they knew. 1850—The revenge of Dionysus upon Apollo. 1850—The great leap into the poetic void. (Césaire 1990, xliv)

Here Dionysus is associated with the void, as well as the reconnection of poetry with the Edenic form of consciousness and being that Césaire had previously connected with négritude. Césaire’s engagement with the poetic movement of surrealism was a strong influence on this attitude. After a meeting with André Breton (one of the main protagonists of the surrealists) on Martinique during the early 1940s, Césaire had become increasingly associated with the movement, and it offered a convincing Nietzschean vocabulary by which he could articulate his poetic approach.¹³ Césaire’s journey to the writing of this essay was also indelibly marked by seven months that he spent on Haiti, the first time that he had visited the island, between May and December 1944 (where he delivered the first version of “Poetry and Knowledge” as a lecture at a philosophical congress in Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti). Ngal records a story (doubted by later scholars) that Césaire’s trip to Haiti—the location where he had placed the origins of négritude and the mythical beginning of the movement in the actions of Toussaint Louverture—had such a profound effect on him that it cured him of a lifelong stammer; whatever the truth of this story, it is clear that Césaire felt Haiti to be a centerpiece of his artistic and intellectual project, a space that confirmed many of his most deeply felt beliefs.¹⁴ This is evident at the conclusion of the essay ¹³ See Richardson 1996 for a selection of writings on the connection between surrealism and the Caribbean, including André Breton’s essay on Césaire “A Great Black Poet” (191–8); for Frantz Fanon’s response to what he perceived to be Breton’s cultural patronization of Césaire, see Fanon (1952) 2008, 26–7. ¹⁴ See Ngal (1975) 1994, 32; Arnold 1981, 14; for further exploration of Césaire’s relationship with Haiti, see Pageaux 1984; Césaire 2005, 52–5; Maurouard 2009. In this

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when Césaire stresses the significance of myth to the aesthetic and metaphysical worldview that he is establishing: In other words, myth is repugnant to science, whereas poetry is in accord with myth. Which does not mean that science is superior to poetry. To tell the truth, myth is both inferior and superior to law. The inferiority of myth is in the degree of precision. The superiority of myth is in richness and sincerity. Only myth satisfies mankind completely; heart, reason, taste for detail and wholeness, taste for the false and the true, since myth is all that at once. A misty and emotional apprehension, rather than a means of poetic expression. (Césaire 1990, liii; italics in original)

“A misty and emotional apprehension,” “Appréhension brumeuse et émotionelle”: the mythical appreciation of the world that expresses a poetic and not a scientific understanding is here characterized as something “misty,” something cloudy, foggy, and bound up with the weather and nature, just as négritude had been related to the being of the tree in his earlier poem. The metaphor of the tree is also repeated in this essay, where Césaire argues for what he terms “the superiority of the tree over mankind” since “the tree is fixed, attachment, and perseverance to essential nature”: The superiority of the tree over mankind, of the tree that says yes over mankind who says no. Superiority of the tree that is consent over mankind who is evasiveness; superiority of the tree, which is rootedness and deepening, over mankind who is agitation and malfeasance. (Césaire 1990, xlviii)

These examples drawn from Césaire’s poetic and critical work demonstrate some of the central ideas that underpinned Césaire’s early form of classicism and his formation of the past. One is the idea of sensuality and attunement with nature that was central to négritude, as demonstrated by the discussion of the narrator’s black identity with the cailcedrat, as well as the association of the black race with the rejection of human technology. Another is the attachment to the symbolism of revolution and its historical emergence on the island of Haiti through the figure of Toussaint Louverture, which enters Notebook abruptly and structures its historical allusivity in the capitalized echo of Toussaint’s name. At this point the sheer eruptive force that is symbolized in

connection, Césaire’s approach to highlighting the birth of the Haitian nation on Hispaniola as a crucible of black identity operates in direct contrast to the anti-Haitian Dominican nationalism described by Padilla Peralta in this volume; see pp. 88–89.

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Louverture’s name can only be glimpsed on the margins of the narrator’s consciousness, and necessarily so, since Césaire is still operating under the influence of a paradigm of black identity that treats the kind of titanic human agency and agitation required for revolution as anathema. But as we will see in the next section, it is possible to perceive alterations to this position later in Césaire’s career, and especially in his tragic writings, as the category of “invention” becomes increasingly significant in his attempt to treat artistically the issue of black identity. To use the terminology of Nietzsche, this marks a shift from Dionysus to Apollo, from ecstasy to action. By tracing the evolution of these conceptual bedrocks in Césaire’s transition to tragedy, I want to chart the attractions of the tragic mode to his evolving poetic praxis and the way this informed his tragic drama.

The birth of tragedy in 1956 The year 1956 contained two significant events that seem to have implicitly informed Césaire’s turn to the writing of tragic plays.¹⁵ In the first instance, it was the year that he resigned publicly from the French Communist Party. This was a volte-face for Césaire; communism’s professed lack of concern about racial difference in the face of class division was attractive to movements like négritude, and in 1946 Césaire had been elected mayor of the capital of Martinique, Fort-de-France, while running on the party’s ticket. But ten years later, in a year of major controversies for the communist party in Europe and just a day after the outbreak of the Hungarian Uprising, Césaire wrote a letter of resignation to Maurice Thorez on October 24 that signaled a heightened concern with constructing a narrative of négritude which sensitively reconstructed the black experience of history.¹⁶ Césaire declared, “I have become convinced that our paths and the paths of communism as it

¹⁵ For another account of the turning point of 1956 for Césaire, see Frutkin 1973, 43: “In his writing before 1956, Césaire was concerned mainly with the renaissance of the Negro heritage and the unmasking of colonialism. After 1956, there was a notable shift of emphasis: Césaire now concentrated on scrutinizing the problems of decolonization and independence for black countries.” This shift from a focus on the mythology of heritage to the mechanics of the future is a key way of understanding the evolution I trace in this essay. ¹⁶ See Césaire 2010b for this letter; for his broader political career, see Frutkin 1973, 37–42; Nesbitt 2013, 86–117.

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has been put into practice are not purely and simply indistinguishable, and that they cannot become purely and simply indistinguishable” (Césaire 2010b, 147). He then invoked the very category of history as central to his reasoning: The singularity of our history, constructed out of terrible misfortunes that belong to no one else. . . . What else can be the result of this but that our paths toward the future—all our paths, political as well as cultural—are not yet charted? That they are yet to be discovered, and that the responsibility for this discovery belongs to no one but us? (Césaire 2010b, 147)

In conclusion, he argues that, “we need to have the patience to take up the task anew . . . the strength to invent instead of follow; the strength to ‘invent’ our path and to clear it of ready-made forms, those petrified forms that obstruct” (Césaire 2010b, 152). We can already detect a changed attitude toward the past and the future here: Césaire emphasizes the necessity of building a bridge between a specific black past and the paths snaking into the future. Furthermore, the concepts that Césaire uses to describe this forward movement, particularly the recurring idea of “invention,” clearly echo the more Apolline concepts he had previously excluded from the black sensibility. It is striking in this regard that these obstructing forms are not explicitly described but are alluded to as things themselves that are yet to be fully understood. Césaire reimagines négritude in a way that combines its belief in the innate specificity of black experience with certain elements of a civilizational narrative that resembles white European discourses. In contrast to these fresh calls for political emancipation, Césaire’s position as a figurehead of black artistic expression was long established, and had been noted in particularly vivid terms a month earlier by the African American author James Baldwin. Reflecting on his encounter with Césaire at the First International Congress of Black Writers and Artists that was held in Paris in September 1956, Baldwin would make the following statement: Césaire had spoken for those who could not speak and those who could not speak thronged around the table to shake his hand, and kiss him . . . What made him so attractive now was the fact that he, without having ceased to be one of them, yet seemed to move with the European authority. He had penetrated into the heart of the great wilderness which was Europe and stolen the sacred fire. (Baldwin 1961, 37, cited in Frutkin 1973, iii)

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This passage displays a rather different way of reading Césaire’s engagement with European legacies from the first. For while in a political sense Césaire was trying to fashion himself as a leader who wanted to reject Western ideology, in an artistic sense Baldwin cast Césaire as a black Prometheus, ready and willing to seize and spread European knowledge. But lurking behind Césaire’s impassioned rhetoric in his letter to the French Communist Party—and Baldwin’s admiring commentary on his Promethean qualities—is a sense that his relationship with the black community has altered. Césaire now understands himself not just as another member of a broader community—and négritude as the existential category that binds him to his fellow black people—but rather as a leader of that community as it tries to emerge from mythical stasis and carve out or invent a future free of “those petrified forms that obstruct.” It is ironic in this regard that it was to one of the oldest and most venerable forms of European civilization that Césaire turned in order to effect this progression from out of the influence of European society; but as we will see, tragedy offered a way of molding the past of the black people that Césaire now felt he spoke for into a form that could articulate the hopes and fears that Césaire had for it. The association with the Titan Prometheus (which we will return to below) is significant here. Césaire is concerned with tragedy both as a way of understanding the possibilities of his own role as a solitary political leader and as a way of reflecting on and presenting the lessons of a black cultural past. Césaire uses tragedy to create an art form that embodies the connections between the Afrodiasporic past and European cultural tradition. What would become Césaire’s first tragedy when it was rewritten as a theatrical piece in 1956, entitled And the Dogs Went Silent . . . : Tragedy (henceforward And the Dogs), was in fact first published as a poem in 1946 in the collection Miraculous Weapons. In its first manifestation, it was a dramatic poem that drew heavily on the model of the Aeschylean Prometheus Bound.¹⁷ It features a central protagonist symbolically named The Rebel, recounting his inevitable journey toward death in

¹⁷ See Davis 1997, 128–30. Juin (1956, 4) argues that this play is still heavily indebted to surrealism. See also Fonkoua 2010, 298–9, for the epic quality of this play: “The revolt of the Rebel is transformed into an epic gesture, and thus makes us aware of the ineluctable character of freedom that marks the venture in which every oppressed people is engaged” (translation mine).

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the aftermath of a failed slave rebellion. The three acts of the poem-cumdrama depict his torture at the hands of white colonial authorities, as well as his rejection of the entreaties of his Mother and his Lover to reconcile with those authorities. The construction of the figure as a symbol manifests the slippage between the historical and the mythical registers of this episode, as does Césaire’s decision to create a “postface” to the dramatic poem in its original published form that is entitled “Myth.”¹⁸ Césaire’s decision to make the protagonist a martyred slave leader has been linked to his desire to recall the example of Toussaint Louverture, and Ngal uses this connection to argue that Césaire creates the same blank historical slate as I have diagnosed in his earlier poetry: In doing this, the poet abolishes time. That’s to say that the present time of the Rebel reinstates the original time of the hero Toussaint Louverture, instituted as the “first times.” (Ngal [1975] 1994, 206; translation mine)

According to Ngal, Césaire tries to prolong the prelapsarian epoch initiated by Louverture’s actions, and in this connection the play also illuminates the Nietzschean resonances in Césaire’s approach to tragedy, as he would explore in an interview from 1964: It’s true that Greek authors from antiquity, who I admire, have had a considerable influence on me. I was also extremely impressed by Nietzsche’s book on Greek tragedy. And actually I wanted to write a Greek tragedy in And the Dogs Went Silent . . . but not with the goal of presenting it to the public. The text is not at all conceived for the stage. (Quoted in Ngal [1975] 1994, 205; translation mine)

The question of performance is a rich one in relation to Césaire’s tragic plays, but not one that I will have space to consider in this essay: suffice it to say, one reason that Césaire seems to have focused on the writing of drama between 1956 and 1969 is because he enjoyed a productive relationship with a particular director, Jean-Marie Serreau, and Césaire would attribute his decision to stop writing plays at least partially to Serreau’s death in 1973.¹⁹ Here the reference to performance seems to emphasize the fact that And the Dogs was originally written as a poem; and in conjunction with the reference to Nietzsche, it gestures toward a

¹⁸ See Césaire 1983, 158–9. ¹⁹ See Delas 1991, 90–3; in more depth, Auclaire-Tamaroff and Barthélémy 1986, 107–48.

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philosophical, metaphysical, and perhaps symbolic understanding of the idea of tragedy that originally gestated as a mode of thinking about poetry and only later became a way of fashioning a theatrical play. Indeed, one way of reading the relationship of this poem-drama to Césaire’s later play is the way in which And the Dogs represents a continuation of the symbolic mode of understanding black history that he had first trialed in Notebook.²⁰ But it is interesting that Césairean tragedy is not intended to have an audience in this first instantiation: the shift between the significance of tragedy as a personal working through of the burdens of political leadership and as a means of communicating something about political pasts and futures to an audience is of great importance in considering the changes in Césaire’s tragic praxis across his career. After And the Dogs Césaire published three plays between 1963 and 1969: The Tragedy of King Christopher, A Season in the Congo, and A Tempest.²¹ The first two respond to episodes in the history of Haiti and the Democratic Republic of Congo, respectively; the first, the abortive monarchy initiated by the former slave Henri Christophe in the northern section of the island from 1811–20, and the second, the demise of the first Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba in the early 1960s, just five years before Césaire wrote the play. The third, a postcolonial reimagining of Shakespeare’s Tempest, has been read as an allegorical treatment of the contemporary Civil Rights Movement in the United States, where the black Caliban is put face to face with a white Prospero. In their totality, these three plays can be read as a sort of Black Atlantic trilogy, examining the development of black identity in three of its main geographical contexts (the Caribbean, Africa, and America), as well as in three very different temporal moments (the early nineteenth century, the mid-twentieth century, and the mythological, literary time of Shakespeare’s Renaissance drama). The choice of Henri Christophe as the subject matter of the first of these plays, and the only one after And the Dogs explicitly titled as a tragedy, serves as an immediate point of departure from the view of the

²⁰ See J. Allen 2017 for a reading of the poem-drama as a symbolic katabasis in the manner of Dante’s Divine Comedy. ²¹ For Césaire’s drama in general, see Ngal (1975) 1994, 247–70; Davis 1997, 126–62.

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Haitian revolution contained in Notebook.²² There it was Toussaint Louverture, the slaves’ quasi-mythical leader, whose name reverberated in the poem as an affirmative though muffled chant.²³ Now we have Christophe, and the political point is correspondingly different. Rather than remembering the success of revolution, Césaire wants to invoke the difficulties of leadership and the corruptions of power: black identity is no longer something always in the process of symbolic emancipation but something prey to the concrete difficulties of ruling and being ruled. In this we can perhaps perceive a rejection of the mythical rhythms of revolution in favor of a historical temporality constructed by the exigencies of the political. In this emergent present the drama of Christophe is more significant than the myth of Toussaint, and a retelling of Christophe’s post-revolutionary attempt at nation-building is all the more necessary.²⁴ Césaire would later explain in an interview why he chose the historical events surrounding Christophe as the subject of the play, as well as the message that he wanted the play to impart: Until now, Christophe had been depicted as a ridiculous man, his megalomania has been emphasised, his boastfulness [sa vantardise]. He’d been made into something of a bourgeois gentleman . . . a parvenu, you see? A little bit like Idi Amin. That’s something like how people have understood Christophe. But I wanted to challenge this idea . . . Of course, he’s ridiculous, but I wanted to show that all of that is the superficial side of his personality . . . and that behind these ridiculous things there is a greatness to his personality. I wanted to show this journey from superficial ridiculousness to authentic greatness. And more than this ridiculous side to his personality, I think, there is a Promethean side. He’s Prometheus.²⁵

Césaire explains his decision to approach Henri Christophe as a tragic hero as being part of his broader desire to challenge the preconception that he was a violent, boastful tyrant like Idi Amin, and to retrain his audience’s attention to his Promethean qualities.²⁶ This echoes Baldwin’s ²² On this play, among voluminous literature, see Harris 1973, 71–122; Mbom 1979, 51–70; Pageaux 1984, 201–13; Pallister 1991, 53–66; Leiner 1993, 91–108; for Césaire’s use of tragedy more generally, see Klaffke 1987. ²³ See Wilder 2005, 225, for the utilization of Toussaint Louverture by Léon-Gontran Damas, one of Césaire’s fellow founders of négritude. ²⁴ See Nesbitt 1997–8. ²⁵ Dunn 1980, 3. See further Rowell 2008, 995. ²⁶ See also Césaire 2005, 53: “In The Tragedy of King Christopher, I describe the difficulties of a man who has to rule a country like Haiti, a very complex country” (translation mine).

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characterization of Césaire himself in 1956 and is a corollary of the switch from myth to history: Césaire wants to disrupt the mythical associations of Henri Christophe and place him securely within history—on a plane where his achievements can be understood and linked up with contemporary ideas and challenges to the black population for which he is writing. The invocation of Prometheus is also striking: critics have often invoked the Titan in relation to Césaire’s dramas, since each of them features a central protagonist who struggles against some kind of cosmic, political, or social order and suffers failure or destruction.²⁷ However, Césaire’s Christophe is not Prometheus the romantic icon, operating on the prodigious plane of the universe, but a human with titanic pretensions shackled by political realities.²⁸ In what follows I will focus on the first of the three acts that make up Césaire’s play, since it is here that his Promethean qualities are most on show—before Henri Christophe’s plans begin to unravel, their limitations become evident, and his destruction becomes inevitable. Césaire dwells on the complexity of this polarity of myth and tragedy at the very beginning of the drama. It commences with a cockfight between two birds named Christophe and Pétion, the two central political protagonists of the play. As the “Announcer-Commentator” who narrates this opening tableau explains after one of the cocks has won (the playscript does not specify which): After this feathery battle, let’s catch our breath and speak of things plainly. Yes, that’s been the custom of this country lately. In the old days you’d name the cocks “Tambour-Maître” or “Becqueté-Zié” or, if you like, Great Drummer and PeckOut-His-Eye. Now, we name them after our politicians. Here’s Christophe, there’s Pétion. I didn’t like it at first. But when you think about it, by God! As a fashion it’s no sillier than the rest. (Césaire 2015, 6)

The renaming of the birds points the way toward a broader reconceptualization of the central symbols of the island of Haiti: as the character suggests, “speaking plainly” has recently become the dominant mode of Haitian discourse, and so the symbolism of the cockfight has altered in step with this elision of metaphor. It is now a representation for real events, involving historical personages, rather than a battle in and of itself. This beginning foreshadows Césaire’s decision to modulate the

²⁷ See above n. 17.

²⁸ See further Logan 2016.

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tragic (mythical) rituals of ancient Athens through reference to historical events in Haiti. Of course, this shift in meaning also works the other way around: not only have rituals assumed the significance of historical events, but the events themselves can now no longer be understood as occupying purely their specific historical space. Rather, they now represent a type of ritualistic and mythical conflict that stretches them out on a canvas of human atemporality. By connecting the events of the play from the outset with the development of the cockfight, Césaire demonstrates the overriding concern of his play with the tragic rituals through which we understand human activity and belief, as well as the passage of life and death.²⁹ This allegorical scene is followed immediately by a more concrete staging of the historical situation with which Césaire is working: instead of two cocks bearing the names Christophe and Pétion, we see the characters themselves, the former slave Henri Christophe and the Mulatto president of the republic Pétion. The pivotal argument between them follows when Christophe refuses the role of President of the Republic of Haiti, instead deciding to set up a monarchy in the northern province of the island. The confrontation between the ritual and the political in these two scenes again highlights the latitude that Césaire is willing to take with the dictates of history in the play. Both Pétion and Christophe declare themselves centrally concerned with how to ensure that liberty continues to hold on an island so recently emancipated and thus prevent the possibility of tyranny; and at the very close of the scene, Christophe disrupts this strong opposition of freedom and servitude with his drive toward a freedom based on the embrace of difficulty rather than its avoidance: Liberty, no doubt, but not an easy liberty! And that is why we have a State. Yes, Mr. Philosopher, something thanks to which this people of transplants roots itself, buds and blossoms, throwing in the face of the world its perfumes, the fruits of its flowering; why not say it, something that, if need be by force, obliges it to be born to itself and to surpass itself. (Césaire 2015, 12)

The vision of the tree appears again, where Christophe invokes the state as a force that can make “this people of transplants” root, bud, and ²⁹ See Cartledge 1997 for the connection between Athenian drama and the ritualistic context of the cockfight, drawing on Clifford Geertz’s (1973) seminal essay on Balinese cockfighting; see also Loraux 2006, 35–7.

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blossom in the face of the world. In the next scene Christophe explains why he believes this is so necessary in Haiti: Haitian people: Haiti has less to fear from the French than from herself! The enemy of this people is its indolence, its shamelessness, its hatred of discipline, its spirit of sensual torpor. Sirs, for the honor and survival of this country, I won’t have it said in the world, or whispered even, that ten years of black freedom, ten years of black negligence and irresponsibility, will suffice to squander the treasure that our martyred people amassed in a hundred years of labor and blows of the whip. (Césaire 2015, 15–16)

An ambivalent picture of black history emerges here: Christophe enunciates a split between his fear that Haitians will actively destroy their freedom through certain characteristics and traits (including their “indolence” and “spirit of sensual torpor”) and his belief that they need to act quickly and decisively in order to redeem their past. This voices a similar idea to the one animating Césaire’s narrator in Notebook when he described the lassitude of the island that he had left behind and to which he was now returning. But here the progression is not a personal, poetic attempt to reckon with the bloody lagoons of memory, but rather an angry attempt to fend off their return, coupled with a fear that “the treasure” of their violent past will be squandered if they do not properly embrace the possibilities of civilization that they have now been given. This reasoning is intended to explain Henri Christophe’s decision to establish a monarchy on the northern part of the island. This decision is specifically attributed by his secretary Vastey to an understanding of the importance of form: Form—that, dear sir, is civilization! The proper forming of men! Think of it, think! Form, the womb from which arise being, substance, the Man himself. Everything, really. The void, yet a prodigious void, a generator and shaper. (Césaire 2015, 17–18)

Vastey proceeds to depict Christophe as Prometheus, but this time as Hesiod’s creator rather than Aeschylus’ martyr: There is one who instinctively understands it: that is, Christophe. With his magnificent potter’s hands, kneading the clay of Haiti, he at least . . . I won’t say he knows, but better still, he senses—smelling it, the serpentine path of the future—the form itself. That is something, believe me, in such a country as ours! (Césaire 2015, 18)

Here Césaire characterizes Christophe as less concerned with rebellion than with how to help his subjects respond to the empty violence of their

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enslaved past. The natural affectivity of before still holds; Henri Christophe does not necessarily know, but rather feels and scents these movements. He has instinctively harnessed this sensuality for the purposes of historical development—and one that is able to engineer the future out of the empty content of the present. But on Césaire’s reading Henri Christophe does not just want to form man; he also wants to build across the looming existential void that Vastey has just mentioned. In Act 1 Scene 6 Christophe takes up this demiurgic role explicitly, and we begin to appreciate Vastey’s understanding of it when he makes the following comment to his secretary: You see, Vastey, the human material needs recasting. But how? I don’t know. We’ll do what we can in our nook of the world. In our little workshop! The smallest county in the universe is immense, if the hand is broad and the will does not falter. Forward march! (Césaire 2015, 31)

Christophe’s personal desire to form his people—and his invocation of the metaphor of pottery and of human creation by his very own hand—is then shifted onto a broader scale in the next scene, the final one of the first act. Césaire incorporates a subtle echo of a previous biblical account of forming a people and forming an identity when Christophe asks a French bishop, Corneille Brelle, to recite his liturgy in Latin. Brelle has just introduced an architectural metaphor into his discussion with Christophe, saying “you have placed a good corner stone and built a fine house” (Césaire 2015, 34); and he then quotes these biblical verses: Mane surgens Jacob erigebat lapidem intitulum, fundens oleum desuper votum vovit Domino Nisi Dominus aedificaverit domum in vanum laboraverunt qui aedificant eam. Nisi Dominus custodierit civitatem, frustra vigilat qui custodit eam. (Césaire 2015, 35)

This is a Latin version of two sections from the Old Testament. The first three lines are from Genesis 28:18, 20, a passage translated in the King James Bible as follows: And Jacob rose up early in the morning, and took the stone that he had put for his pillows, and set it up for a pillar, and poured oil upon the top of it . . . And Jacob vowed a vow [to the LORD].

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This is the prelude to the story of Jacob’s Ladder, following the biblical protagonist’s dream of seeing a ladder leading to heaven, when he is led upon waking to set up and consecrate the stone that he had been using as a pillow to mark the place as sacred to the Lord. But rather than reprinting the actual vow that concludes this chapter in Genesis, Césaire takes the next part of his biblical allusion from a different part of the Old Testament, as Cornelle Brelle now interpolates a reference to Psalm 127:1: Except the LORD build the house, they labour in vain that build it: except the LORD keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.

What links these two passages is their shared focus on the act of erecting a physical structure as a means of, and metaphor for, worshipping the Christian God; and as Ann Meyer shows, this section from Genesis formed a significant part of the medieval Latin liturgy for dedicating the French Gothic Church of Saint Denis in the twelfth century.³⁰ Césaire’s incorporation of an untranslated passage of Latin draws attention to the incongruous presence of archaic European forms in Christophe’s Haitian court while also, and more importantly, creating a connection between Christophe’s desire to build and form his people and the physical act of building, something that will be capitalized on more explicitly as the act progresses.³¹ This then leads into the very end of the first act, when Henri decides that in the spirit of Jacob he must leave a more tangible inheritance to his people than the court and the monarchy. He makes this decision in rejection of the advice of William Wilberforce, who has just sent a letter to Henri to mark the first anniversary of his coronation that Henri reads out: One does not invent a tree, one plants it! One does not extract its fruit, but allows it to bear them. A nation is not a creation, but rather a gradual ripening, year by year, ring by ring. (Césaire 2015, 36)

By placing the verb “to invent”—that crucial word in Cesaire’s lexicon— so prominently at the start of Wilberforce’s advice, Cesaire draws

³⁰ See Meyer 2003, 84–6. ³¹ On the metaphor of building in Césaire’s play, see further Conteh-Morgan 1983; see also Césaire 2010a, esp. 140–1.

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attention to the British abolitionist’s appropriation of European civilizational discourses which he then withholds from Henri; Wilberforce figures the formation of culture as a natural process and advises against any element of human intervention. Predictably this vision is not urgent enough for Henri: Well, isn’t that good! Be prudent! Sow, he tells me, sow the seeds of civilization. Right. But unfortunately, those grow damn slowly. We must give due time. But we don’t have time to wait when it’s precisely time that has us by the throat! To entrust the fate of a people to sun, rain, and the seasons, what a strange idea! (Césaire 2015, 36; italics in original)

Here the metaphors of natural affectivity and connectivity between humans and the world that Césaire had emphasized so strongly in his earlier works are shown in a darker, more impotent light, since it seems passive in terms of how it might actually affect the life—and the future— of the people it concerns. The limitations and possible dangers associated with this position are then brought out by the character of Henri Christophe’s wife, Madame Christophe, who draws attention to the significance of his having become a King: A king indeed. Christophe, do you know how, in my little Woolly head, I think of a king? I’ll tell you! In the midst of savannahs ravaged By spiteful sun, he’s the full and vigorous leaves Of the great mombin tree, under which Cattle, thirsting for shadow, take refuge. But you? But you? Sometimes I ask myself— Because you try to do everything, To control everything—if you aren’t instead The great fig tree that takes all the plants Growing around it and strangles them! (Césaire 2015, 38)

Here Madame Christophe likens Christophe to two trees, the mombin tree, which shelters its fellow natural creatures, the cattle, from the sun with its leaves, and the fig trees that spread their invasive roots out and strangle surrounding plants and trees. These are two different forms of kingship, one which protects the people and the other which uses them for the king’s own gain. In its tragic configuration, the metaphorical

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connection of humanity to a tree has taken on a very different stamp compared to its earlier mythical construction: rather than illustrating the openness of black identity to nature as part of his understanding of négritude, it is now an all-too-slow form of being, and one that is also potentially a negative exemplar of how Christophe will rule and use his power. But the present is still haunted by that prior metaphorical configuration: like the cailcedrat, the mombin tree offers a symbol of something that protects and leads but which is now accompanied by its antithesis, a fig tree that begins life as a parasite on another tree before gradually enveloping it and killing its host. It is now that Christophe hits upon a plan of what he will do to shortcut the natural rhythms that Wilberforce had recommended him to respect. This plan consummates the fears of his wife, for it is at this point that he begins to advocate the building of a huge fortress, the Citadelle Laferrière. At the very close of Act 1 he announces his plan for the Citadelle, a building project that will represent “the first step out of chaos, the first march on the heavens” and the manifestation of his belief that “this people must claim for itself, must will and succeed at, something impossible! Against fate, against history, against Nature!” (Césaire 2015, 40). He continues: Not a palace. Not a strong-house to protect my goods. I say the Citadel, the liberty of all the people. Built by the whole people, men and women, children and elders, built for the whole people! . . . Yes, Mr. Engineer, to each people its monuments! For this people forced to its knees, a monument that will set it upright! Right here! Rising! Watching! (Césaire 2015, 40)

Christophe thus connects the freedom of his people to the building of the Citadelle, a physical structure that will lift them from their knees and affirm their worth. As the play progresses, the audience watches this plan fail as Christophe forces, in a state of increasing insanity, all parts of his population to work on the Citadelle, recreating the conditions of slavery and forced labor that he was so eager to leave behind. But overshadowing this is the initial image of Christophe’s hope: Césaire plays off the king’s eventual self-destruction against his initial attempt to counteract a historical savagery only a few decades past. At this point, and at the very end of the act, Henri begins to hallucinate that the Citadelle is coming to life: Ah, look! Don’t you see that it lives? It sounds its charge through the fog. Its lights blaze at nightfall! It cancels the slave ship! Vast procession on horseback!

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My friends, who have drunk bitter salt and the dark wine of the sand, both I and you thrown down by the heavy swell, I have seen the enigmatic prow, with spray and blood in its nostrils, beat through the wave of contempt! May my people, my black people, Salute the fragrance and floodtide of the future.

(Césaire 2015, 40–1)

Once again Césaire emphasizes Henri’s sensual receptivity to the smell of the future’s tide: it is a natural, affective force, but nevertheless something that will be born out of heavy work. Henri plans to put his entire population to work and to have them construct this building as a way of banishing the void from which they have supposedly emerged; yet his hallucination shows this building coming to life, growing horns, and carrying out the “annulation du negrier,” the cancellation of the slave driver. This drive to build civilization incorporates an ostensibly contradictory “poetics of erasure” that J. Michael Dash discerned in his poetry; but here it is put at the service of history, of a concern with travelling into the future rather than emerging from the past. The Citadelle Laferrière was completed and still exists today; and in the remaining parts of Césaire’s drama, he depicts Henri Christophe gradually losing his mind as he becomes more and more violent, more and more concerned with ensuring that every single one of his subjects participates in the forced labor involved in constructing the Citadelle, before killing himself. In the vision of his immense building project and the hopes that Césaire represents in Christophe in the opening act, Césaire fashions the Haitian king as a tragic hero in direct contradiction of his historical reputation. Throughout the play, Césaire plays originary emptiness and civilizational structure off against each other, exploring an opposition between narratives of natural growth and human construction. In this way he demonstrates himself to be concerned with teasing out the difficulties attendant on creating a national and racial identity, and whether this ought to be considered an organic process, or as a growth that can be controlled by human hands and minds. Césaire’s decision to use a tragic narrative in the representation of this episode in Haitian history embodies his decision to pit the timeless mythology that he had earlier assigned to négritude against a much more pronounced— and much more complex—sense of the importance of the past to the present in the confines of the Black Atlantic. Césaire’s decision to plot his tragic drama of black identity around the Nietzschean polarity of Dionysus and Apollo also poses questions about

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the connections between diaspora and reception as models of cultural and literary praxis. Both imply, and indeed require, the imperative to reconnect with a past that is for some reason distant, whether because of geographical or temporal rupture, and both require a sense of agency and choice in order to mold the concepts of the past across that gap so that they speak to the present. This, I would suggest, is the fundamental condition in which classicism most often develops: the desire to understand present conditions through past structures, as well as the necessary elisions and improvisations that need to take place for this to happen. Just as Césaire develops a way of understanding the potential of tragedy for articulating the debates that structure diasporic identity, torn between the lure of metaphysical essences and the complexities of historical reality, so it is the case that tracing the conceptual history of tragedy leads us to encounter this same division, between searching out the contours of a transhistorical tragic worldview and understanding how that worldview functions anew in different historical and cultural contexts. Often this requires a subtly altered and renewed version of the past or of the past’s legacy: and this is the purpose that Nietzsche’s formulation of tragedy performs in Césaire’s tragic superstructure, offering a definition of the concept that makes it immediately relevant to his purposes (and this is a possibility inherent in all diasporic cultural traditions, which often involve radically heterogeneous geographical, cultural, and historical points).³² What makes the tragedy of Aimé Césaire such a helpful text in this context is that it draws its readers into the project of creating a literary past that might serve a political present, of experiencing a diasporic, conceptual journey on the part of the tragic genre that encompasses philosophy, drama, race, and history, and which elucidates what happens when old narratives of classical meaning have grown obsolete and new narratives are in the process of being forged in the fires of necessity.

³² For the repetition of this structure in criticism of Césaire, see, e.g. Wilder 2005, 291: “The tensions enacted within the Cahier between rationality and irrationality, Apollonian instrumentality and Dionysian exuberance, worldliness and transcedentalism, universality and particularity, also shaped Césaire’s life as a public intellectual.”

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8 Bernardine Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe An Account of Roman London from the Black British Perspective Tracey L. Walters

Britain has always been multicultural, and to a greater or lesser extent, multiracial, certainly from the 16th Century where there were significant Black populations in the country. . . . The Emperor’s Babe is a dig at those Brits who still harbor ridiculous notions of “racial” purity and the glory days of Britain as an all-white nation. —Bernardine Evaristo, “Q & A with Bernardine Evaristo” (McCarthy 2003)

In June 2016 when the United Kingdom voted to withdraw from the European Union, some suggested the controversial referendum, also known as Brexit, was partially motivated by a growing anti-immigration sentiment fueled by conservative propaganda. In cities like London, Manchester, and Birmingham, which have dense multicultural populations, Britons voted against Brexit. Conversely, those in less diverse suburban and rural areas supported the measure. Much of the strong rhetoric touting British nationalism was reminiscent of an earlier racist discourse on ethnicity heralded by politicians like Enoch Powell. In 1968 Powell—a trained classicist and member of Britain’s Conservative party—delivered his infamous “Rivers of Blood Speech,” a xenophobic Tracey L. Walters, Bernardine Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe: An Account of Roman London from the Black British Perspective. In: Classicisms in the Black Atlantic. Edited by: Ian Moyer, Adam Lecznar, and Heidi Morse, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198814122.003.0009

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diatribe decrying the overflow of Caribbean and South Asian immigrants migrating to England during the late 1950s and mid-1960s. Like many other conservatives of the day, Powell feared England was becoming a multicultural nation overrun with immigrants and their offspring, who were compromising the purity of British culture. As he drew toward the end of his speech, Powell alluded to Book 6 of Virgil’s Aeneid to make a dramatic statement about the bleak future of Britain’s multi-ethnic, racially charged society: “[L]ike the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood’ ” (Powell 2007). According to Mary Beard (2007), the Roman to whom Powell refers is probably Virgil. She maintains Powell misconstrued the quote made by Sibyl, a prophetess who predicts the “battles Aeneas would face with the indigenous peoples of Italy before he could create his brand new, multicultural city” (Beard 2007). Ultimately, as Beard explains, Virgil “was offering a long-term message about ethnically mixed states: Rome would become a joint, shared community after all the bloodshed. But this was not what Powell had in mind. . . . [H]e was going for classical legitimation for his own Sibylline prophecy about immigration” and growing racial tensions between the immigrant populations and the native British (2007, emphasis in original). Powell frequently turned to ancient Rome to propagate ideas about nationalism and immigration. David Olusoga’s (2016) work on the history of Black Britons references a different speech given in 1961, where Powell reflects upon efforts of the ancient Greeks to rebuild their fallen city. As Olusoga observes, Powell: compared the English, as they abandoned their colonies and returned to their home islands, to the people of Athens, who returned to their city in the fifth century BC after it had been sacked by the Persians. There they supposedly found, within the city, “alive and flourishing in the midst of the blackened ruins, the sacred olive tree, the native symbol of their country.” (Olusoga 2016, 13)

When ruminating on England’s uncertain future, Powell alludes to the Athenian olive tree with a symbolic identifier of his own. He characterizes England as a mighty oak tree “standing and growing, the sap still rising from her ancient roots to meet the spring, England herself” (Olusoga 2016, 13). Powell was confident England could resurrect itself as a great nation, free from its obligation to the Commonwealth. Unfortunately, the classical allusions Powell used as a rhetorical strategy to reflect back to a time when Britain was white and monocultural were

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ill-matched. In each instance, when defending his case against multiculturalism, Powell harkened back to historical periods when the steady flow of immigrants from Africa and the Middle East to ancient Britain (and other parts of what we call Europe) had already occurred. Moreover, the virulent anti-immigration, racist language in his speeches was inconsistent with racial attitudes expressed in the texts of the ancient Greco-Roman writers he so readily quotes. The idealistic notions of a monolithic cultural society, yearned for by some Brexit advocates and Powell, do not exist in a vacuum. Prominent political figures in other nations, like France’s Marion Le Pen, who ran for president in 2017, and U.S. President Donald Trump, also virulently embrace cultural nationalism and reject the merits of multiculturalism. Unfortunately, this kind of rhetoric can be used to manipulate misguided individuals to support political agendas they do not fully understand (evidenced by some pro-Brexit voters who later supported a repeal of the referendum). The perennial discourse on nationalism invites deconstructivist readings of history that shed light on the historical amnesia of nationalists who ignore the role of the transatlantic slave trade, colonialism, capitalism, and globalism in the establishment of contemporary Western multicultural societies. Postnationalists like Paul Gilroy call for a new theoretical framework to discuss nationalism and culture. Gilroy subverts essentialist notions of “Britishness” with his concept of the Black Atlantic, a “transnational and intercultural” (Gilroy 1993a, 15) network connecting Britain, the Caribbean, Africa, and the Americas. He posits there is no Britishness or “Africanness” because the interconnected histories of human beings across the Atlantic have resulted in a Black Atlantic sensibility, a shared cultural heritage that binds our cultural and national identities.

An Unlearning and Re-education of British History When Gilroy developed his concept of the Black Atlantic, he did so in an effort to teach students at London’s South Bank Polytechnic to challenge epistemes based on a Eurocentric “history and legacy of the enlightenment” (Gilroy 1993a, ix) with scholarship by black intellectuals who had alternative perspectives on modernity. He introduced his students to the

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idea that “the experiences of black people were part of the abstract modernity they found so puzzling” (Gilroy 1993a, ix). Moreover, he wanted to “produce as evidence some of the things that black intellectuals had said—sometimes as defenders of the West, sometimes its sharpest critics—about their sense of embeddedness in the modern world” (Gilroy 1993a, ix). Gilroy’s new Black Atlantic resulted in a paradigm shift that gave people of African descent an opportunity to understand how their histories were linked. It also enabled them to mark their place in Western history outside the context of slavery. A number of contemporary Black British writers—Zadie Smith, Caryl Phillips, Andrea Levy, and the novelist and poet Bernardine Evaristo—have drawn from Gilroy’s theory of the Black Atlantic to build fictional tales tracing the enmeshed histories of European and Africans across time and space. They have also worked within the Black Atlantic framework to debunk the argument that Britain was established as a monocultural nation. Evaristo, the daughter of a Nigerian father and Irish mother, frequently rewrites and fictionalizes the histories both of her own life and of the British nation, sometimes going as far back as Roman antiquity to write about the invisible histories of African-descended people in Europe. In Evaristo’s view, Roman London was an exemplary model of multiculturalism and inclusivity. In an interview with Karen McCarthy, Evaristo asserts: Rome itself was multicultural with people from all over the empire living there. We’ll never know how multicultural Londinium really was, but it was a busy port city. . . . It would have been peopled by people from all over the Roman Empire. . . . The Roman Empire stretched over 9,000 kilometers at its greatest extent, including North Africa. (McCarthy 2003)

Evaristo’s interest in the Roman Empire developed after reading British historian Peter Fryer’s Staying Power in the 1980s. Fryer claims Africans lived in England before the English even inhabited the island: They were soldiers in the Roman Imperial army that occupied the southern part of our island for three and a half centuries. Among the troops defending Hadrian’s wall in the third century AD was a “division of Moors” (RIB) 2042, named after Marcus Aurelius or a later emperor known officially by the same name. (Fryer 1984, 1)

Fryer’s revisionist history was one of many texts that helped “re”-educate Evaristo in her quest to gain a comprehensive understanding of the

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various diasporic histories in Britain. Fryer’s revelation about African soldiers in the Roman army also inspired Evaristo to include the famous African-born Roman soldier, Septimius Severus, in The Emperor’s Babe (2002). Like most in Britain, until she conducted her own research, Evaristo knew little about the expeditions of African royalty or the transatlantic slave trade that brought blacks to Britain from the Caribbean and Africa as early as the 1700s, as written about by Vincent Carretta and Gretchen Gerzina. She was taught Britons of African descent arrived in England during the 1940s as part of the Windrush generation. The Windrush generation were men and women, mostly from the Caribbean, who were recruited by England to help rebuild the “mother country” during and after World War II. Eager to learn more about the histories of blacks in Britain, Evaristo applied for and received a poetry society residency at the Museum of London. Researching at the museum gave Evaristo a more expansive view of history. Her discovery of the Roman galleries and their empirical evidence of an African presence inspired her to unearth this neglected history and write a short poem which later developed into The Emperor’s Babe, an imaginative rendering of the life of a young woman of African descent living in Roman Britain. With The Emperor’s Babe, Evaristo challenges the prevailing notion that Britain became multicultural in the twentieth century and, more significantly, calls for a revisionist approach to history, one that acknowledges the presence and important historical contributions of Africans in ancient Britain. History, Evaristo once argued, is “recorded by those with the power to do so. There are always different versions of the ‘truth.’ ” Evaristo claims she does not “feel at all precious” about British history because “so much has gone unrecorded as well as undiscovered” (McCarthy 2003). The Emperor’s Babe is one of many novels by Evaristo questioning who controls history, especially when race and gender are involved. Evaristo demonstrates that when history is narrated through the lens of the white male, it denies the perspectives of the subaltern—the poor, the formerly colonized, and women—the opportunity to tell and validate their own histories. Moreover, while postcolonialism enabled formerly oppressed groups to contest the histories of the colonizer, only male voices are privileged with the opportunity to write back to the center. Gayatri Spivak’s oft-cited essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” argues subjectivities of the subaltern, especially women, are often muted by intellectuals who

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inadvertently become substitute spokespersons for the oppressed. Spivak queries: Can the subaltern speak? What must the elite do to watch out for the continuing construction of the subaltern? The question of “woman” seems most problematic in this context. Clearly, if you are poor, black, and female you get it in three ways. If, however, this formulation is moved from the first-world context into the postcolonial (which is not identical with the third-world) context, the description “black” or “color” loses persuasive significance. (Spivak 1988, 294)

Evaristo, a black British woman, insists the subaltern can make their voices heard. Through her literature, she shares the stories of black men and women who have been expunged by historians and overshadowed by white heroes in European history.

Europe’s African Roots Other works by Evaristo, Soul Tourists (2005), Lara (2009), and Blonde Roots (2008), are also dedicated to the reshaping of black histories, cultures, and identities. Soul Tourists is a satirical excavation of European history, spotlighting the contributions of blacks in Europe whose histories have often lain dormant and been deemed irrelevant by Eurocentric historians. Readers are introduced to unknown figures like Mary Seacole, a Jamaican nurse who served in the Scottish army in the nineteenth century and nursed British soldiers in the Crimean War (1853–6). Joseph Boulogne, the first black colonel in the French army, also makes an appearance, along with Russian novelist Alexander Pushkin and his Abyssinian grandfather Ibrahim Gannibal. By writing about these individuals, Evaristo educates readers about a long forgotten European/black diasporic history. Lara, a semi-autobiographical novel in verse, interweaves the histories of Evaristo’s Irish mother and Nigerian father, both immigrants who migrated to England in the late 1940s. The story of her parents’ interracial marriage and the biracial first-generation British children they raised in multicultural London bears similarity to the protagonist of The Emperor’s Babe. Lara also follows the protagonist to Africa and Brazil, where she goes in search of her ancestral roots. In comparison to the aforementioned novels, Blonde Roots trades historical realism for speculative fiction. Here Evaristo’s satirical rewriting of history imagines

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how the course of history would have been different if blacks had enslaved whites and kept them under a brutal system of plantation slavery, destroying their families and stripping them of their humanity. Finally, The Emperor’s Babe goes back in time to consider the experiences of Africans living in Britain during the Roman occupation. Working within an Afrocentric feminist framework, Evaristo’s intent is to turn history on its head, so to speak, and present an alternative version of Roman history informed by Gilroy’s Black Atlantic and the scholarship of intellectuals like Peter Fryer, Ivan Van Sertima, and George G. M. James, scholars who share ideological views antithetical to the Western hegemonic intellectual tradition of ancient Greco-Roman historiography. These historians argue for alternative readings of ancient Greco-Roman history and position African civilization as a major influencer on Western civilization. Some charge Western scholars with erasing the scientific and philosophical contributions of ancient Africans from the annals of European history. James, for example, accused the ancient Greeks of stealing the Egyptians’ knowledge base and declaring it as their own. As a result, “this theft of the African legacy by the Greeks led to the erroneous world opinion that the African Continent made no contribution to civilization, and that its people are naturally backward” (James [1954] 1998, 7). Certainly, James’s assertion is provocative, but it is also effective in persuading individuals to consider unlearning the histories they so readily accept as truth. It should be noted that scholars who dare question long-standing Eurocentric versions of history have often been undermined or embroiled in public debates about the credibility of their scholarship. In 1987, for example, Martin Bernal published Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785–1985, Volume 1), a controversial critique of Eurocentric history in which—much like James and others—he claimed that the Greeks stole their knowledge of science and math from Africa and the Middle East. Furthermore, he suggested racism and anti-Semitism caused Western scholars to bury this history so they could promote their own hegemonic beliefs about the superiority of Western civilization. Consequently, Bernal was castigated by classicists like Mary Lefkowitz, who aired her grievances in Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse To Teach Myth as History (1996). Lefkowitz’s rebuttal to Black Athena undermined Bernal’s research as baseless mythology. Evaristo’s novels prove she agrees with historians like

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Bernal who present alternative versions of history. In numerous interviews she has credited Afrocentrists like Ivan Van Septima and J. A. Rogers for their insight on what she calls “hidden aspects of European and American history” (Niven 2001, 15).

The Myth of Persephone and the Politics of Gender The Emperor’s Babe is a satirical and fictionalized account of British history. Like Lara, The Emperor’s Babe is a novel in verse. Writing in poetry rather than prose gives Evaristo the flexibility to present her history in the tradition of the African griot, a recorder of history, literature, and myth. According to Hale (1998, 23): The Western-trained historian or folklorist . . . may understand history as a documented phenomenon that differs from epic, legend, and saga. If one places the notions of history and literature into one category broadly defined as interpretation of the past, the griot as historian emerges as a “time-binder,” a person who links past to present and serves as a witness to events in the present, which he or she may convey to persons living in the future. In this sense, the griot’s role as a historian is somewhat more dynamic and interactive than what we have seen in the western tradition—the scholar who spends years in the library.

As the griot, Evaristo has creative license to interpret history and connect it to the present so that Britain, and more specifically Roman London, is depicted as a thriving multi-ethnic city where immigrants can transform their lives from impoverished laborers to thriving entrepreneurs. In contrast to the twentieth century though, the Africans in The Emperor’s Babe live in a society free from racial discrimination. Within this city are achievements of prominent African figures like Septimius Severus, the Roman emperor who played a vital role in the politics of the day as a successful military leader in the Roman army. Indeed, it is crucial to underscore the relevance of a man like Severus, but Evaristo is also compelled to consider the African women who played a vital role in history, thus she tells the story through the lens of a black female protagonist. In an interview with Sofia Muňoz Valdivieso, Evaristo described the task of writing the novel as “slipping into the skin of a dead black woman in Roman London” (Muňoz Valdivieso 2004, 4) and giving her a place in history. The gynocentric perspective of Evaristo’s

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story evidences her determination to ensure women of color do not suffer the fate of having their voices muted from this reshaping of history. The Emperor’s Babe is a Bildungsroman written in the style of the mock epic, much like Gwendolyn Brooks’s The Anniad (1994). Brooks’s book is a coming-of-age story chronicling the simple life of Annie Allen, an ordinary “sweet and chocolate” naive young girl who is seduced by a suave “Tan Man.” Tan Man, the “Paladin,” captures Annie’s heart and steals her virginity before abruptly leaving to go off to war. During his departure, a distraught Annie anxiously awaits his homecoming. When Tan Man returns from the battlefield, he feels insignificant and powerless in the war games, which has now made him feel impotent as though his “life was little as a sand.” Fearful of his own weakness and vulnerability, he rejects “meek” Annie and trades her for a “gorgeous and gold shriek” (Brooks 1994, 104). Annie is shocked by Tan Man’s callousness and paralyzed by grief. After a year passes, though, she comes out of her stupor and experiences a metamorphosis as she begins embracing life and indulges in pleasures that give her delight: music, literature, and fashion. Finally, she learns to enjoy life independent from Tan Man. Annie’s transformation is interrupted by Tan Man’s brief reappearance when he returns diseased and dying. After his passing, a mature Annie thinks of him only fleetingly in “the minuets of memory” (1994, 109). While there is no clear evidence that Evaristo was inspired by Brooks’s poem, the similarities are too numerous to be ignored. Not only do both writers take on the challenge of writing a novel in verse, but they each allude to the Persephone and Demeter myth. This tale about a young woman who is raped, abducted, and forced to live in the underworld until she is rescued by her mother who negotiates an arrangement for a temporary return to earth during the springtime has resonated with other black female authors. Black women writers like Toni Morrison and Rita Dove are drawn to the Persephone and Demeter myth because it parallels the atrocities of the ancient world (rape, incest, and infanticide) with modern realities for black women. In The Emperor’s Babe, Zuleika is the ancient heroine Persephone who “evidence[s] her ability to survive through the chaotic experience of puberty and all that it entails: the loss of virginity, blossoming sexuality, thwarted love and rejection, and the death and rebirth of self” (Walters 2007, 71). Evaristo’s intertextual reference to the Persephone and Demeter myth features prominently in the novel.

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Finally, like The Anniad, The Emperor’s Babe takes on the structure of the feminine epic/mock epic, which trades the traditional external male heroic battle on the field of war for the inner turmoil of the female protagonist. Moreover, Justine McConnell’s reading of the novel suggests that Evaristo—in addition to gendering and racializing the epic—also creates a “transnational epic,” a new form of epic that “refuses to conform” to the conventional epic model (McConnell 2016, 108). Starting in medias res, the story set in 211 CE chronicles the challenges faced by Zuleika, a sassy aspiring poet of Sudanese ancestry who struggles to find voice in patriarchal Roman society. Adhering to the form of the mock epic, the principal characters are introduced: Zuleika’s parents, husband Lucius Aurelius Felix, and best friends Alba and Venus. At eleven years old, unsuspectingly, like Persephone, Zuleika is stripped of her innocence and forcibly married to a Roman senator, Lucius Aurelius Felix, a man she describes as “thrice my age and thrice my girth” (Evaristo 2002, 4). Felix takes on the role of Pluto, the god of the underworld, who abducts Persephone. The intertextual reference to the Persephone and Demeter myth is also emphasized through a visual representation of the story captured in a mosaic displayed in the villa that Zuleika shares with Felix: “The Rape of Persephone in four gory stages— | all flailing limbs, flowing locks, a torn frock, | red streaks, screaming handmaidens, | a bearded Pluto, thunderous greys, | a pitchfork, wing’d babies” (2002, 76). After Felix consummates the marriage, Zuleika recounts the brutal details of the encounter with imagery similar to the mosaic: “you tore me unformed, | drew blood before eggs ripened” (2002, 67). The pain is so intense that she passes out. Zuleika describes herself figuratively descending to the underworld: “Pluto came for me that night, | and each time I woke up, it was my first night | in the Kingdom of the dead” (2002, 29). This “kingdom of the dead” mirrors Persephone’s confinement in the underworld. When keeping in mind Evaristo’s postcolonial reading of history, it is worth considering other ways of conceiving her allusion to the Persephone and Demeter myth. The rape and abduction of Zuleika’s African body by her Roman husband might also be interpreted as a commentary on Europe’s forced abduction (first imperialism followed by colonialism) and successive rape (removal of natural resources) of the African continent. Despite Felix’s constant sexual advances, Zuleika does not conceive. Just as the earth remains barren, Zuleika bears no children. For several

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months, Zuleika is imprisoned in her villa, bereft of visitors, save for her parents. Each time she sees her mother much like Demeter, the woman is melancholic. With Felix often away on his travels across the Empire working and spending time with his mistress, Zuleika lives in isolation. She desires to break free and find purpose in life, but constant monitoring by Traino, her husband’s guard, leaves her confined to a life of alienation. Periodically, she visits childhood friends Venus and Alba, both of whom are impressed with her transformation from street urchin to Illa Bella Negreeta, a sophisticated Roman woman dressed in the finest silk gowns. However, as Phillips observes, “though Zuleika has both come of age and ascended socially, she constantly refers to her life as feeling unsettled and increasingly alien from anything she herself craves” (2004, 568). A heartfelt confession about her loneliness to Alba spurs the hunt for a lover. Soon Zuleika catches the eye of the powerful Roman emperor of African ancestry, Septimius Severus. Despite being married, Severus is a willing participant in Zuleika’s pursuit of a paramour. The two develop a short passionate affair that temporarily fills Zuleika’s emptiness. Like the forbidden pomegranate eaten by Persephone, which begins the cycle of death and rebirth when she ascends from the underworld in the spring and returns in the fall, Zuleika tastes the fruits of life with Severus and experiences her own metamorphosis. Severus rescues Zuleika from the isolation of her villa and brings her back into the world where she can experience life, going with him to the games, traveling on his ships, and most importantly, allowing her to express her sexual desire freely and attain mutual sexual satisfaction. Their connection is not simply amorous, but also ancestral: they are both cultural hybrids—Africans by ancestry, but Roman in nationality. The fact that Zuleika and Severus come from neighboring countries is important. Not only is Evaristo showing that Africans from different regions immigrated to Roman London, she is also pointing out that the Sudanese and Libyan people were familiar to each other, so Zuleika and Severus might have spoken similar African languages or shared the same customs. In her naïveté Zuleika believes she has found her soulmate, but the romance is cut short when Severus dies at war, and Zuleika goes back to the underworld alone. Back at her villa, she returns to mourning in the underworld, but protecting the memories of what she describes as a “death so sweet that nothing would ever match it again; | nascentes morimur, from the moment | of being born, we die, after all. | I had

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lived my life” (Evaristo 2002, 242). Felix, who learns about the affair from Zuleika’s slaves, is enraged by her infidelity and poisons her to death with arsenic. Evaristo shows Zulieka’s life can be treated disposably because as a woman, specifically an African woman, her life has no value in Roman society.

The Black Atlantic To give readers a sense of life in Roman Britain, Evaristo makes good use of the archival material she gleaned from the Roman galleries. Throughout she catalogs the names and occupations of various characters like “Lucan Africanus the baker of Fenchurch,” “Dinesh the bow legged | mystic” with his “cobra-in-a-basket-act,” and “Thorsten, a Saxon fishmonger” (Evaristo 2002, 102). There are also lengthy descriptions of the foods people ate, “songbirds | soaked | in asparagus sauce | with quails’ eggs, dormice | cooked in honey | and poppy seed, salted fish | with oyster dressing, | fried jellyfish, (and) bear cutlets” (2002, 129), as well as descriptions of the many instruments played by the musicians at the opera. The city of Londinium closely resembles London in the twentyfirst century. It is alive with activity, teeming with people and crammed with brothels, shops, and markets lining the streets. Although Londinium is the setting for the narrative, cultural markers link the novel to present-day London. Toggling back and forth between ancient and modern London is most clearly noticeable through language, a hybridized fusion of creolized Latin, Jamaican patois, contemporary urban slang, and standard English. As McConnell observes, “by interweaving Latin throughout Zulieka’s dialogue, the ancient language and the modern British slang sit side-by-side in positions of equality, and reflect the same intermingling that Zuleika feels with regard to her own identity” (2016, 109). Also, the multilingualism of this community serves as an example of Gilroy’s Black Atlantic, where the intermixing of languages and dialects influenced different cultures. In addition, the novel features anachronistic pop cultural references to music, art, and fashion. In one scene, for example, the protagonist goes to a bar where she sees, “Little Rex on antelope drums, | Prince Mahmood III on the lyre, | [and] Puff Daddy Favius on the tuba” (Evaristo 2002, 117). Zuleika’s family is among many immigrant families in Londinium. Her parents, formerly from Sudan, left Khartoum hoping for a

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prosperous life in England. As Zuleika recounts, when her father arrived in Londinium he was a penniless refugee, tramping the streets in search of employment. Through his entrepreneurial spirit, he managed to open a string of small stores that grew into a thriving business. In these stores he hires “all sorts to work in them, | a Syrian, Tunisian, Jew, Persian, | hopefuls just off the olive barge from Gaul, | in fact anyone who’ll work for pebbles” (Evaristo 2002, 4). This passage emphasizes both the ethnic heterogeneity of the city and the potential for immigrants like Zuleika’s father to attain status and wealth. Contrary to the perception in the national imaginary, which portrays Africans in Britain prior to the twentieth century (with the exception of African royalty) being enslaved or impoverished, the Africans Evaristo describes had access to social mobility. In fact, Olusoga attests to the fact that Romans of African descent existed on various class levels, pointing to archeological findings of Romans of mixed African ancestry from two burial grounds in York, one for the wealthy and one for the poor. As he maintains, “Africans moved at all levels of society” (2016, 31). As evidence, he presents the case of the Ivory Bangle Lady of York, a North African woman of mixed ancestry from the third century who was discovered by archeologists in 1901. The woman’s stone sarcophagus included “a number of luxury grave goods: some blue glass beads, fragments of five bone bracelets, silver and bronze lockets, two yellow glass earrings” (2016, 31). Just as this woman existed, there may have been others. Evaristo’s characterization of Zuleika as an affluent woman can be taken as a truth rather than an imagined reality.

Gender in the Ancient World A clear objective of The Emperor’s Babe is to parallel contemporary social issues (class inequity, female oppression, and homophobia) with ancient society to show “the still problematic terms of the inclusion of black women within both the British nation state and the national imaginary” (Aquarone 2010, 52). Zuleika’s oppression as a woman is very clearly defined throughout the narrative. Although Zuleika is an aristocratic woman with slaves and ample real estate, she lives within a patriarchal society where the social mores dictate that women have limited authority. She is the property of her husband Felix. Her raison d’être is to be his wife and mother to his children. While gender oppression is easily

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identifiable, race is a more complex issue. In the novel, “white and black people alike undergo forms of subordination due to hierarchical power structures underpinning Roman society” (Aquarone 2010, 55). Evaristo takes the position that the white supremacist attitudes about race promulgated during the Enlightenment period were absent from early ancient Greek and Roman societies; in antiquity, Evaristo suggests, the color of one’s skin did not determine one’s fate. This idea was initially supported by Benjamin Isaac, whose early work argues that the concept of racism did not exist, mainly because during antiquity there was no “term in Greek and Latin for ‘racism’, for ‘prejudice’ or discrimination” (2006, 33). It should be noted that in later works Isaac took a different position, but originally he along with others like Frank Snowden argued against proto-racism in antiquity. Thus treating others as inferior, strictly on the basis of race, was non-existent. Furthermore, as Frank Snowden claims, “The Greeks and Romans attached no special stigma to color, regarding yellow hair or blue eyes a mere geographical accident, and developed no special racial theory about the inferiority of darker peoples” (Snowden 1970, 176). Ultimately, Africans in this period lived without the mark of racial inferiority: “The Ethiopian was no rarity among classical peoples. Whether he came as slave, prisoner of war, ambassador, or adventurer, he experienced no exclusion because of his color” (217). Snowden’s assertion of racial equality plays out in the novel with Zuleika’s father, Animala, a former slave. Animala chooses to migrate to Londinium as his destination because he has heard Rome was “too congested” with “many Ethiops,” and in Londinium “a man could make millions” (Evaristo 2002, 26)—and indeed he becomes independently wealthy. Since race is not a determining factor of one’s position in society, Zuleika is liberated from the stigma of racial inferiority that drives the plot line for so many Bildungsromans about black women, such as Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970), Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions (1988), and Andrea Levy’s Fruit of the Lemon (1999). All of these novels feature young black women who suffer from mental breakdowns due to their inability to cope with fractured subjectivities caused by racial insecurity. However, like many children of immigrants, Zuleika falls prey to the shame of otherness brought on by the politics of her hybridized identity as an African in Roman London. As Gendusa (2010, 480) writes, “If it is true that she is not openly marginalized for being a black woman, it is equally undeniable that, because she does not belong to the

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dominant ethnic group, she is denied the right to lay claim to Roman citizenship.” At one point, Zuleika is told by her sister-in-law Antistia that she cannot claim a Roman identity because, “[a] real Roman is born and bred, | I don’t care what anyone says, | and that goes for the emperor too, | jumped-up Leebyan. Felix will never | take you to Rome, Little Miss Nooobia, | he has his career to think of” (Evaristo 2002, 53). Notably, Antistia’s attack is about national identity, not racial origin. Reflecting on Antistia’s comment, Zuleika admits her family is not fully acculturated: “my father spoke pidgin-Latin, | we ate off our laps in the doorway, | splattered with mud”; “I was Roman too. | Civis Romana sum. It was all I had” (Evaristo 2002, 54). While she recognizes aspects of her Sudanese language and culture tie her to her African ancestry, she still defines herself as a Roman. Later Zuleika responds to this identity politics with her poem “Identity Crisis: Who is She?” (2002, 201) and addresses the complexity of trying to define self in a multicultural society: “Identity Crisis: Who is She?” I am the original Nubian princess from Mother Africa? Does the Nile run through my blood In this materfutuo urban jungle Called Londinium? Do I feel a sense of lack Because I am swarthy? Or am I just a groovy chick Living in the lap of luxury? Am I a slave or a slave-owner? Am I Londinio or a Nubian? Will my children be Roman or Nubinettes? Were my parents vassals or pharaohs? And who gives a damn!

Like Evaristo, the poet/writer who ruminates on her own identity politics in Lara, Zuleika tries to pin down how to position herself in Roman society. Zuleika chooses neither race nor nationality as indicators of her identity. As Gilroy explains, in Britain “the politics of ‘race’ . . . is fired by conceptions of national belonging and homogeneity which not only blur the distinction between ‘race’ and nation, but rely on that ambiguity for their effect” (1987, 44). In Zuleika’s case, all of her identities are fluid; claiming her Africanness is as important as celebrating her nationality,

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place of residence, class status, and all the identities that shape her identity. Essentially, she deconstructs the notion that identity has to be determinate and chooses to define herself in her own terms. Zuleika’s multiple identities are what draw her to Severus. Like her, he is a hybrid, both African and Roman. According to Anthony Birley (1988), Lucius Septimius Severus was born in Tripolitania (Libya), a Roman colony. As a young man he held a number of political offices, including governor, consul, and eventually emperor. Septimius was a powerful military leader who is often credited with strengthening Hadrian’s Wall to prevent British invasion. Scholars differ in opinion about how to define Severus’ ancestry. Birley labels him as African, but Leftkowitz and others would disagree. Evaristo, however, characterizes Septimius as African: Severus’ character is based on the Libyan Roman Emperor Severus (2002, 41–2): They spoke of the great Septimius Severus, who had gone from African boy to Roman emperor, had spent many years travelling the empire from Germania to Syria, back to his hometown in Libya, who would surely one day visit Britannia, this far-flung northern outpost of empire, defeat the fucking scots, Pict and Saxon bastards who made a steady onslaught on our cities and towns, spear every last man of them, burn their villages, castrate their infant sons, occupy their women, colonize their terra firma, make them speak our lingo, impose taxes, yay! and thus bring Pax Romana to this our blessed island. Vivat Emperor Sevva! Vivat Emperor Sevva!

Evaristo includes this truncated story in the narrative as a way to document his life and make it readily available to a general audience. As a result, she brings attention to Septimius’ legacy, which is far less known than those of other great African military figures like Hannibal or Shaka Zulu. In comparison to these figures who fought against the Europeans, Severus fights on behalf of the British (Romans) and thus becomes part of British military history. This version of Severus’ life presents him as a mythical character, a figure—he readily admits—he

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does not know. He tells Zuleika: “who I really am is lost” (Evaristo 2002, 140). Like Zuleika, he questions his own identity, and in doing so recounts the story of his life for a second time. This retelling of his own story humanizes him and breathes new life into his personhood. History books can only list general facts about his life; they cannot capture his emotions, his inner desires, his love for poetry, his disappointments with marriage and divorce, and his experience being ridiculed for his “thick African accent” (2002, 144). Additionally, because the historians memorialized his life in the history books, he had lost control of his story. By sharing his story with Zuleika, however, Severus writes himself into being. He controls his own history and succeeds in allowing himself (as the subaltern) to speak, much in the same way that Zuleika speaks. Severus’ story coupled with Zuleika’s creates a new version of ancient British history recorded by a contemporary writer who (like her protagonist) just wanted “to read | and hear . . . stuff about us . . . | about Nubians in Londinium” (Evaristo 2002, 85). There are few other fictionalized narratives by black British authors on the experiences of Africans in Roman Britain, and Evaristo’s book will hopefully pique the curiosity of readers and skeptics who dare to engage in their own excavation of the archives to learn about the black Britons long forgotten from the national imaginary.

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9 Myth and the Fantastic in the Work of Junot Díaz Justine McConnell

They say it came first from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved [ . . . ] a high-level fukú, the local version of House Atreus. —Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2008, 1 and 152)

It is around the elusive fukú that Junot Díaz’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) pivots. Encapsulating prominent features not just of the novel but of Díaz’s corpus of work as a whole, the fukú (whose nature and connection with the myth of the Atreidae will be explored shortly) sheds light on Díaz’s literary project in a way which commands attention for the history of slavery and oppression, for speculative fiction, and for the classical literature of ancient Greece. The speculative and the classical ultimately work toward the same end in the novel: in their rather different ways, both provide a temporary escape from, and an imagined salve for, the wound of slavery. This chapter explores the syncretization of the speculative and the classical in Díaz’s work. Focusing first on The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, where this syncretization has particular prominence, not least in the entity of the fukú, I will then turn to Díaz’s earlier work, Drown, a collection of short stories published in 1996 that also engages intricately with ancient Greek myth, but unlike Oscar Wao does not foreground the fantastical elements. As Díaz has remarked, his original intention was to be a “switch-hitter,” one year writing a book like Drown, Justine McConnell, Myth and the Fantastic in the Work of Junot Díaz. In: Classicisms in the Black Atlantic. Edited by: Ian Moyer, Adam Lecznar, and Heidi Morse, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198814122.003.0010

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the next writing a science-fiction novel.¹ Despite saying this after the publication of Oscar Wao (and after the publication of his second shortstory collection, This is How You Lose Her, too), and suggesting that it is an ambition he has yet to achieve, I would contend that Díaz has—to a certain extent—already combined the two in Oscar Wao. The turn to other worlds—whether those found in ancient Greek myth, in J. R. R. Tolkien,² in manga, or in Marvel and DC Comics (all of which are prominently referenced in the novel)—offers a pathway to realms not affected by transatlantic slavery, by racism, or by modern dictatorship and diaspora. Yet none of these fantastical realms are free of those afflictions: slavery, discrimination, oppression, and enforced migration are still present in these worlds.³ Indeed, it is the simultaneous closeness and distance between the fantastical and the everyday in Oscar Wao which makes these tales of speculative and mythical fiction so integrally interwoven in the novel. This interaction between the fantastical and the political has a long literary history in the spheres of both mythology and magical realism, cementing a place for the fantastical in postcolonial literature. In Modern Epic, Franco Moretti has observed that “myth (understood in its broadest sense) is the sign and instrument of a symbolic resistance to Western penetration.”⁴ Moretti’s exploration of modern epic (“from Goethe to García Márquez,” as the book’s subtitle announces) redefines epic far beyond the scope made familiar by the works of Homer, Virgil, and Ovid, for example,⁵ and his reference to “myth” is also tied firmly to modernity. Yet despite the prominent presence of Moretti’s resistant

¹ As he explains in his interview for the podcast Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (2012), one of the appeals of science fiction for Díaz was the way that it often meditates on questions of power, which he did not feel he was seeing in “mainstream, literary, realistic fiction.” ² On Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings as a primary intertext for Díaz’s magical realism, see Lanzendörfer 2013. ³ See, for example, the moment when Oscar, an avid Tolkien fan, turns to The Lord of the Rings for consolation, only to be confronted with racial discrimination there, too: “Got through almost the whole trilogy, but then the line ‘and out of Far Harad black men like half-trolls’ and he had to stop, his head and heart hurting too much” (Díaz 2008, 307). ⁴ Moretti 1996, 247–8; emphasis in original. ⁵ Moretti 1996, 2: “a single field that I shall term ‘modern epic’. ‘Epic’, because of the many structural similarities binding it to a distant past . . . But ‘modern’ epic, because there are certainly quite a few discontinuities: important enough, indeed, in one case—the supranational dimension of the represented space—to dictate the cognitive metaphor of the ‘world text.’ ”

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myth in Junot Díaz’s writing, it would not be wrong to see Díaz’s work as part of a wider epic tradition, too, one which derives directly from classical epic, particularly in terms of its oral origins, as this chapter will argue. In keeping with Moretti, Theo D’haen observes that “magic realism is a literature of resistance.”⁶ Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris likewise remark upon this, noting the “subversive” nature of magical realist texts by which “their in-betweenness, their all-at-onceness encourages resistance to monologic political and cultural structures,”⁷ while Homi Bhabha has gone so far as to describe magical realism as “the literary language of the emergent post-colonial world.”⁸ The traces of classical epic traditions and medieval romances have long been acknowledged in magical realist fiction,⁹ but when the “myth” takes the form not of tales from antiquity (whether that be the antiquity of Europe, Africa, Asia, or the Americas) but from the contemporary world, from comic books and literature usually segregated as “genre fiction,” it has often been neglected.¹⁰ It is no coincidence that Moretti’s analysis is offered in the wake of his exploration of magical realism, a genre most closely associated with Latin America, and in particular with Gabriel García Márquez and Alejo Carpentier.¹¹ D’haen has discussed the distinction between “Eurocentric magical realism” and Carpentier’s lo real maravilloso,¹² but in Díaz’s novel this becomes more subjective as both the predominant narrator Yunior and protagonist Oscar are constantly torn between belief in the existence of this fantastical alternative reality (often exemplified by the fukú) and skepticism, as if in illustration of their own movements back and forth between Santo Domingo and New Jersey. As Yunior explains,

⁶ D’haen 1997, 289. ⁷ Zamora and Faris 1995, 6. ⁸ Bhabha 1990, 7. See Warnes 2014, 1–17, for a doxography of magical realism, including arguments which, contra Bhabha, see magical realism as exoticizing. ⁹ See, e.g. Zamora and Faris 1995, 2, 519–20, with the latter reference drawing on Northrop Frye’s The Anatomy of Criticism (1957). ¹⁰ Similarly neglected until relatively recently are the connections that have been forged between genre fiction and classical literature, on which see Kovacs and Marshall 2011; Rogers and Stevens 2015 and 2018. ¹¹ Although most frequently associated with Latin America, the concept of magical realism can be traced back to the German poet and philosopher Novalis at the close of the eighteenth century. See Warnes 2014, 20–3. ¹² D’haen 1997, 286–7.

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the kind of story he is going to tell, “used to be more popular in the old days, bigger, so to speak, in Macondo than McOndo.”¹³ Díaz’s fiction, therefore, affirms him as an inheritor of that Latin American tradition, but in his work it is integrally entwined with an aesthetic more directly derived from the United States; Díaz exhibits what Paul Gilroy articulated as a fundamental facet of the black Atlantic: the “desire to transcend both the structures of the nation state and the constraints of ethnicity and national particularity” (Gilroy 1993a, 19). The frequent proximity of the fantastical and the realistic in literature is attested in the designation of “the uncanny,” which Tzvetan Todorov set alongside “the marvellous” as the two poles between which his formulation of “the fantastic” as a literary genre resides.¹⁴ Sigmund Freud’s highly influential essay “Das Unheimliche” (1919) foregrounds the idea that “what is called heimlich becomes unheimlich” (Freud 2003, 132). Working from Freud’s articulation of the uncanny (unheimlich), it is impossible to forget that the etymology of the German word emphasizes notions of home, homeliness, and unhomeliness—themes which are key to Oscar Wao and to Díaz’s wider corpus, as I will discuss with particular reference to Drown. Yet while the quest for home is key to Díaz’s work, his use of fantastical elements is not “uncanny,” either for his readers or for his characters. They are instead a deliberate escape from the troubling reality of a contemporary world still beset by the wounds of slavery, colonialism, and contemporary oppression and discrimination. The deployment of these themes can be seen as part of Díaz’s postcolonial intervention: by reminding us that alternative histories have always been possible, the groundwork is laid for the contemplation that alternative futures could also exist. These alternative pasts and futures suggest an imagined route away from the shadow of slavery and colonialism and explain why Díaz makes use of a canny uncanniness (to capture Freud’s idea of the heimlich becoming unheimlich).¹⁵ ¹³ Díaz 2008, 7. The naming of Macondo is a direct allusion to García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967); on Díaz’s engagement with magical realism, see Hanna 2010, 509–13. ¹⁴ See Todorov 1975. ¹⁵ See Dash 1974 for the different but illuminating way in which earlier Caribbean writers such as Jacques Stephen Alexis, Alejo Carpentier, and Wilson Harris all deploy “marvellous realism” to suggest that a Caribbean history of brutality and colonialism nonetheless exhibits the survival of creativity. As Harris (1970, 12) termed it, “the imagination of the folk involved a crucial inner re-creative response to the violations of slavery and indenture and conquest” (quoted in Dash 1974, 66).

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Familiar enough not to unsettle in the way that Freud’s uncanniness is wont to do, the fantastical within Díaz is nonetheless unfamiliar enough to offer a glimpse of a different, less damaged world. The striking exceptions to this “canny uncanniness” in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao are found in the fukú and the magical realist appearances of two mysterious figures, a mongoose and a man with no face, who appear at crucial moments in the narrative. These are both, fittingly, “unheimlich” features in both the Freudian and the literal sense. The fukú, brought over from Africa with the enslaved people, reminds the characters of the novel that finding a sense of home is very hard to do. The Mongoose echoes this pattern of displacement and diaspora: The Mongoose, one of the great unstable particles of the Universe, and also one of its great travelers. Accompanied humanity out of Africa and after a long furlough in India jumped ship to the other India, a.k.a. the Caribbean. (Díaz 2008, 151 n. 18)

A history of displacement, such as that embodied by both the fukú and the Mongoose, as well as the ensuing search for home, are central themes of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which Díaz has described as being: A book that follows the quintessential american (in lowercase) narrative, which is the quest for home. (Okie 2008)

While exemplifying this dislocation, the Mongoose remains an uncanny figure in the unsettling sense, too: although it is adamantly on the side of freedom (having “proven itself to be an enemy of kingly chariots, chains, and hierarchies”), yet there is an ominous uncertainty to the assertion that the Mongoose is “believed to be an ally of Man” (Díaz 2008, 151 n. 18).¹⁶ The Mongoose’s appearance at moments of violent crisis within the novel underlines this uncertainty: usually appearing as a force of salvation,¹⁷ he is nonetheless finally glimpsed as the ally of the Man

¹⁶ On the Mongoose, see Mahler 2010, 128, 133, in which the Mongoose is both a “symbol of resistance” to colonial oppression and part of the “unresolved tension between good and evil.” ¹⁷ For example, it is the Mongoose who leads Oscar’s mother Belí out of the canefields after she is brutally attacked and left for dead (Díaz 2008, 149–50); likewise, the Mongoose appears to Oscar just before he attempts to kill himself, but refusing to believe his eyes, he still throws himself from the bridge (190).

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Without a Face.¹⁸ The latter, though often seeming to be a more threatening figure than the Mongoose, still has an elusive nature: whether his facelessness embodies the many victims of Rafael Trujillo’s bloody dictatorship who were often “disappeared,” or whether it stands for the henchmen who enacted the brutality from behind the mask of “following orders” is never resolved. Furthermore, at the end of the novel Yunior admits that Oscar sometimes appears in his dreams either masked or faceless.¹⁹ As well as the fukú, the Mongoose, and the Man Without a Face, there are other fantastical elements of the novel that owe little to magical realism and much to Marvel and DC Comics and science fiction. Within Díaz’s use of the fantastical one might include ancient Greek myth, figures from Tolkien and the Marvel and DC Comic books, as well as the manga series Akira, and the landscapes of Frank Herbert’s Dune and John Boorman’s Zardoz²⁰—that is, a fantastical past, a fantastical other world, and a fantastical future. The events of the novel are informed as much by the ancient fantastical, embodied in the persistent engagement with classical Greek literature, as they are by the fantastical of imagined worlds (found in Tolkien and the comic books) and the fantastical futures of Akira, Dune, and Zardoz. In other words, what the black Atlantic articulates in terms of space within modernity, Díaz also reflects in terms of time by his use of this three-pronged fantastical sphere. In his deployment of the fantastical, Díaz commits wholeheartedly to the vision that fellow Caribbean writers of the preceding generation have argued for: the displacement of time onto the same axis as space. As Derek Walcott and Wilson Harris have separately proposed, such a manoeuver works to undo the cultural oppression that has caused Caribbean literature to be designated as imitative and unoriginal, not

¹⁸ Díaz 2008, 320–1: in an echo both of the attack on his mother (see n. 17) and of an earlier assault on himself, Oscar is kidnapped and driven to the canefields to be beaten to death by the henchmen of a policeman whose girlfriend Oscar has fallen in love with. On the way, “they drove past a bus stop and for a second Oscar imagined he saw his whole family getting on a guagua, even his poor dead abuelo and his poor dead abuela, and who is driving the bus but the Mongoose, and who is the cobrador but the Man Without a Face.” ¹⁹ Díaz 2008, 325. The roots of this faceless character can be seen in Díaz’s earlier stories, “Ysrael” and “No Face” (Díaz 1996, 1–15, 117–23), discussed below and aligned with the Cyclops (pp. 259–261), who is likewise both victim and aggressor. ²⁰ On the latter two, see especially Díaz 2008, 256 n. 32.

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least by their Trinidadian compatriot V. S. Naipaul.²¹ At the same time, this resonates with Gilroy’s notion of a “syncopated temporality—a different rhythm of living and being,”²² in which “effaced stories are recovered, different futures imagined,” as James Clifford notes.²³ Far from entering the well-trodden terrain of the imperialistic motivations of many science-fiction narratives that depict humans venturing to new worlds,²⁴ Díaz uses speculative fiction and the fantastical to underpin his novel with a distinctly postcolonial argument.²⁵ Co-opting ancient Greek myth into his fantastical menagerie only strengthens the vehemence of Díaz’s anti-colonial drive:²⁶ recasting ancient Greece as an imagined alternative world dislocates classical Europe in both time and space, and therefore strips it of the tenets on which it historically based its proclamation of superiority over others—and thereby its right to dominate other nations and peoples. Simultaneously, by giving ancient Greek myth no more prominence than the myths of other times and places, and by refusing to expand overtly on their resonances within his narratives (even omitting some episodes at a late stage of composition, as we will see), Díaz subjects the classical material to a fragmentation and obscuration that reflects that which was enacted on African diasporic cultures as a result of the Middle Passage. Such an effacement and splintering was not suffered by the European discourse, whose proponents enacted the destruction; but in Díaz’s hands, Graeco-Roman classicisms are set on a par with all other cultural and artistic imaginaries.

The fukú They say it came first from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Tainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door

²¹ See Walcott 1974, 1998; Harris 1999; Naipaul 2011a, 2011b. ²² Gilroy 1993a, 202. ²³ Clifford 1994, 318. ²⁴ See Rieder 2008 for in-depth analysis of the connections between science fiction and discourses of colonialism. ²⁵ In this manner, his work can be aligned with that of Octavia Butler, Samuel Delaney, and Nalo Hopkinson, all of whom Díaz has expressed admiration for. ²⁶ From the moment of the novel’s epigraphs (one from the Fantastic Four, the other from Derek Walcott), the reader is alerted to the idea that Díaz is, as Monica Hanna has termed it, “creating a pastiche that attempts to capture the Caribbean diasporic experience” (2010, 500).

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that was cracked open in the Antilles. Fukú americanus, or more colloquially, fukú—generally a curse or a doom of some kind; specifically the Curse and the Doom of the New World [ . . . ]. No matter what its name or provenance, it is believed that the arrival of Europeans on Hispaniola unleashed the fukú on the world, and we’ve all been in the shit ever since. (Díaz 2008, 1)

What is this fukú, the “local version of House Atreus” (Díaz 2008, 152), which so neatly maps onto the triangle of influence that Paul Gilroy theorized in The Black Atlantic? It is the affliction which explains all the terrible events which befall the characters of the novel; it is the curse that lies behind the unfathomable violence and brutality of Trujillo’s dictatorial regime, when he ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 to 1961 (see Padilla Peralta’s essay in this volume, pp. 79–116); and it is the cause of the Dominican Diaspora, which is ominously capitalized with an upper-case “D” by the novel’s narrator Yunior. Like the curse on the House of Atreus, it follows a family through generations, but unlike the Greek myth, Díaz leaves us with no resolution to the curse: it will go on and on. Díaz scarcely pushes this analogy any further in overt terms: a one-to-one mapping of events from the myth of the Atreidae would prioritize the ancient Greek elements in a way that would undermine the syncretization that is at the heart both of theorizations of Caribbean culture and of Díaz’s novel itself. Nonetheless, long before that single direct mention of the House of Atreus, Díaz has planted an early hint of the Atreidan events that will lead to Oscar’s death: we learn that the girls to whom the young Oscar is unrequitedly attracted are “Oscar’s furies, his personal pantheon” (Díaz 2008, 27). The underpinnings of Greek myth are in place alongside other mythic and fantastical discourses throughout the novel, but as we will see of his work in Drown, Díaz is careful about how prominently he signposts these. In writing The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Díaz constructs a myth for the Dominican diaspora. The fukú is not his own invention, but alongside the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko (1985),²⁷ he was among the first to put it into writing. It is striking, therefore, that just as the way to ward off the power of the fukú curse is to say “zafa,” so Yunior suggests that his writing of the story functions as a similar zafa: “Even now as I write these words I wonder if this book ain’t a zafa of sorts. My very own counterspell” (Díaz 2008, 7). ²⁷ Translated into English in Yevtushenko 1986, 40–2, 51.

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The fukú is part of the Dominican oral mythic tradition. As a fantastical entity that articulates a historical trauma, its oral transmission points to its valence across generations and its incorporation within societal traditions. As the narrator tells us: Traditionally in Santo Domingo anytime you mentioned or overheard the Admiral’s name or anytime a fukú reared its many heads there was only one way to prevent disaster from coiling around you, only one surefire counterspell that would keep you and your family safe. Not surprisingly, it was a word. A simple word (followed usually by a vigorous crossing of index fingers). (Díaz 2008, 7)

Díaz gives it inscribed form in the writing of his novel, suggesting that the very writing of a fukú tale may help put an end to its powerful curse. Yunior’s story, then, is a concretized form of what had previously been an oral myth, with the ritualized crossing of fingers being analogous to the rituals that accompany many poetic performances, whether that be the invocation of the Muses in ancient Greece or the engagement of the audience via the “Krik? Krak?” of traditional Caribbean storytelling. This entwinement of the oral and the written is one of the indicators that a perspective informed by Homeric epic can illuminate Díaz’s novel. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is self-consciously aware of its own storytelling and can be seen as constructing a myth for the Dominican diaspora—an epic, if you will, intended to constitute not a national narrative but a transnational one. Yet as with all mythological tales, an element of belief comes into play. As Yunior notes of the protagonist Oscar (Díaz 2008, 6): I’m not entirely sure Oscar would have liked this designation. Fukú story. He was a hardcore sci-fi and fantasy man, believed that that was the kind of story we were all living in. He’d ask: What more sci-fi than the Santo Domingo? What more fantasy than the Antilles? But now that I know how it all turns out, I have to ask, in turn: What more fukú?

So the fukú, the sci-fi, the fantasy, and the Greek myth—they all have equal weight. This syncretization reflects one of the Caribbean’s distinctive traits, known variously as métissage, creolization, or hybridity.²⁸

²⁸ See, for example, Édouard Glissant (“métissage”); Kamau Brathwaite, as well as the creolists Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant (“creolization”); and Stuart Hall (“hybridity”).

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The novel is not, of course, intended to be a thoroughgoing engagement with the myth of the House of Atreus, or even with Greek mythology as a whole: Díaz picks and chooses from each, and in a democratizing move that quietly challenges the literary canon which has so often been imposed by European imperialists, he sets Greek literature on a par with science fiction and graphic novels—the one having been so often elevated to a lofty plane, and the latter so often denigrated as not being a “serious” or “literary” form. Each presents an alternative world that offers a decolonized response to the contemporary era. As Paul Jay terms it, Oscar Wao is “a sustained meditation on literary form, and on the role and power of storytelling to deal with historical and social injustice” (2010, 12). Exemplifying what Charles Martindale, following Hans Robert Jauss, has called the “chain of receptions” (1993, 7), Díaz foregrounds the interconnected, transnational network of his work by his intertextual engagement not only with genre fiction but with three literary predecessors who have engaged with Graeco-Roman literature for anti- or postcolonial reasons: Aimé Césaire, Ralph Ellison, and Derek Walcott.²⁹ Díaz’s transnational network is literary, personal, historical, and political; it is Gilroy’s concept of the Black Atlantic in action. The personal dimension is seen within Díaz’s novel in the lives of its characters, who cross back and forth between New Jersey and Santo Domingo, testifying to what Díaz has noted as: A new world . . . where people are back and forth all the time . . . constantly exchanging information and experiences both from home and carrying them from home to the United States, and back, people who jump back and forth kind of like the shuttles on a loom because they’re really strengthening and reinforcing connections between two places.³⁰

As Jay has observed, this movement back and forth structures The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and locates the reader in a space in which the Dominican Republic and New Jersey meld together.³¹ Such a space reflects Gilroy’s vision of the black Atlantic as “transcend[ing] both the structures of the nation state and the constraints of ethnicity and national particularity” (1993a, 19). This is notwithstanding the fact that, as has frequently been observed, Gilroy’s analysis of the black Atlantic in that monograph devotes no space to the Hispanic Caribbean

²⁹ On Díaz’s engagement with these three, see McConnell 2013, 1–2, 35–7. ³⁰ Lydon 2007; quoted in Jay 2010, 177. ³¹ See Jay 2010, 178.

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and Americas. As Gilroy himself noted in the preface, “there is nothing definitive here. Black Atlantic culture is so massive and its history so little known that I have done scarcely more than put down some preliminary markers for more detailed future investigations” (1993a, xi). One might quibble with the idea that this was merely “preliminary” work, but the future investigations it has prompted are not in doubt; The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao can be seen to be one of these, albeit in a fictionalized form. Díaz’s imagery of “shuttles on a loom” brings to mind the Homeric Penelope weaving and waiting, and from there, one might recall Carolyn Heilbrun’s renowned 1985 essay “What was Penelope Unweaving?” (2002, 103–11). Heilbrun argues that Penelope, weaving and unweaving Laertes’ shroud, is not only playing for time to avoid marrying one of the suitors but is also “trying out stories on her loom” (107). With no appealing female narrative to guide her (there had been only one, and that is one of passivity and silence), Penelope is working out how to weave a female epic, which is a story that had never before been told. Applying Heilbrun’s feminist argument to a postcolonial context has resonance: the dominance of imperialism and its literature is such that the stories of the victims of colonialism were for a long time written only by the oppressors—with effects as distorting as that which Heilbrun identifies in terms of gender. Díaz, not only as a postcolonial writer but as a writer of a diaspora that is multidirectional and ongoing (as he personifies in the “shuttles on the loom”), is also breaking new narrative ground. For Díaz, then, diaspora is not a one-way process; the sense of scattering that is innate within the word is also combined in this contemporary context with its opposite: a weaving together of people and places that can, as Díaz says, “strengthen and reinforce” the connections between the two. Contrary to the usually pernicious connotations of diaspora (with its implications of violent displacement), Díaz is enacting a wholehearted appropriation of the concept. By creating the positive out of the horrific, this strategy strips the present of its power to enlist history as its henchman, and instead creates something positive in the wake of destruction. What Díaz envisages takes for granted Clifford’s theory of “traveling cultures,”³² which itself influenced Gilroy’s formulation of the

³² See Clifford 1992.

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black Atlantic.³³ Díaz’s strategy echoes that of his predecessors mentioned earlier, for the action of appropriating something which had previously been used to oppress is exactly what Césaire, Ellison, Walcott, and others have done with classical literature (and indeed is what Césaire did when he coined the term “négritude” and thereby recuperated the previously derogatory word “nègre”). As Gilroy writes (1993a, 4), explaining his imagery of ships crisscrossing between Africa, America, Europe, and the Caribbean: Ships immediately focus attention on the middle passage, on the various projects for redemptive return to an African homeland, on the circulation of ideas and activists as well as the movement of key cultural and political artefacts.

Díaz’s transnational network is an embodiment of this “circulation of ideas” and the movement of cultural and political works, as seen in his engagement with Césaire, Ellison, and Walcott. In addition, there is the recent (mid-twentieth-century) history of the Dominican Republic and Trujillo’s dictatorial regime with which so many of Díaz’s footnotes are concerned. These footnotes play into the “imaginative appropriation of history,”³⁴ which Toni Morrison identified as being especially acute for those who have made their home in the United States: We live in a land where the past is always erased and America is the innocent future in which immigrants can come and start over, where the slate is clean. The past is absent or it’s romanticized. This culture doesn’t encourage dwelling on, let alone coming to terms with, the truth about the past.³⁵

Díaz’s footnotes give a space for the Dominican Republic’s traumatic past, which could be so easily erased by America’s desire for a clean slate. By adopting the personal angle on each of the tales he tells (most of the footnotes are concerned with Trujillo’s violent and rapacious behavior on the personal level), Díaz shows the way violence is not confined to one dimension of a person’s life but permeates it all, while also interweaving the aggression of the political regime with the violence that all the characters encounter. ³³ See Gilroy 1993a, 17. ³⁴ Gilroy 1993a, 222. ³⁵ Interview in Gilroy 1993b, 175–82, especially 179; also quoted in Gilroy 1993a, 222. In this same interview, Morrison self-identifies in a way that resonates with the black Atlantic rather than with an African American identity: “America has always meant something other to me—them. I was not fully participant in it and I have found more to share with Third World peoples in the diaspora; maybe it’s for political reasons. I feel very estranged from black Americans” (quoted in Gilroy 1993b, 180).

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Though unusual, footnotes are not unprecedented in a novel: one might think of David Foster Wallace, Jorge Luis Borges, or Patrick Chamoiseau.³⁶ Footnoting within a fictional work forces the reader to step outside the imaginative world in which they are becoming immersed: it draws attention away from the core story to something which we are expecting (in the nature of the primarily scholarly purpose of a footnote) to be closer to objective fact. Just as the movement of people back and forth between Hispaniola and the United States “strengthen[s] and reinforce[s] connections,” so this literary “shuttling” between the core story and the footnotes emphasizes that both are necessary. The narrator’s voice permeates the footnotes especially heavily in Oscar Wao.³⁷ In the nature of a footnote, too, the information there is relegated to something important but secondary; supplementary information without which the narrative can still continue, albeit diminished. To put the tales of Trujillo’s depravity into the footnotes could thus be seen as a politically powerful move: the dictatorial Trujillo relegated to a footnote rather than dominating the narrative. Yet despite this subsidiary position, Díaz—or Yunior—flags up from the very start why they are there and why they matter. The very first footnote begins like this: For those of you who missed your mandatory two seconds of Dominican history: Trujillo, one of the twentieth-century’s most infamous dictators, ruled the Dominican Republic between 1930 and 1961 with an implacable ruthless brutality. A portly, sadistic, pig-eyed mulato who bleached his skin, wore platform shoes, and had a fondness for Napoleon-era haberdashery, Trujillo (also known as El Jefe, the Failed Cattle Thief, and Fuckface) came to control nearly every aspect of the DR’s political, cultural, social, and economic life through a potent (and familiar) mixture of violence, intimidation, massacre, rape, co-optation, and terror; treated the country like it was a plantation and he was the master . . . . He

³⁶ Díaz cites the latter of the three as a particular inspiration, and it is interesting to note that Chamoiseau could well have been a subject of study for this book: in 1975 he wrote his own version of Antigone, reflecting contemporary Martiniquan politics and objecting to its French rule, as well as to the violent suppression of political demonstrations against it in the late 1960s and 1970s. A few years later in 1982, he went on to write Manman Dlo contre la fée Carabosse (Mami Wata Versus the Carabosse Fairy). While this play does not respond to a classical myth as such, it does engage with and reflect one of the most radical developments within classical studies during the twentieth century: the oral composition of the Homeric epics; on this, see McConnell 2020. ³⁷ For example, in discussing the fukú, the narrator addresses us: “Here’s one for you conspiracy-minded fools” before describing how the fukú may also have been responsible for the catalogue of tragedies that befell the Kennedy family; see Díaz 2008, 4.

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was our Sauron, our Arawn, our Darkseid, our Once and Future Dictator, a personaje so outlandish, so perverse, so dreadful that not even a sci-fi writer could have made his ass up. (Díaz 2008, 2)

Offering both a snippet of history and a self-consciously biased take on that history, the footnotes highlight the ways in which the lives of the characters of the novel have been irrevocably shaped by the history of their homeland. As that first footnote demonstrates, Junot Díaz engages in some modern mythography in this novel. Syncretizing the nation’s modern history with fantastical and mythical figures, Díaz creates a contemporary myth for the Dominican diaspora, born not so much from the island’s ancient past as from its very recent history.³⁸ By comparing Trujillo to the villains of The Lord of the Rings (Sauron), of Welsh mythology (Arawn),³⁹ and to Darkseid, a supervillain created by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee for the DC Comics books, he mythologizes Trujillo in a way that has not been unfamiliar throughout literature: one might think of the Trojan lineage Virgil traces for the emperor Augustus or Shakespeare’s history plays or fictionalized accounts of the likes of J.F.K. But Díaz’s greatest contribution to mythography is undoubtedly the fukú. The fukú is polyvalent, incorporating the historical atrocities of slavery, the violent abominations enacted by the dictator Trujillo, the smaller misfortunes that befall the characters, and the thinly veiled expletive “fuck you.” The eclectic mythopoesis of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao has its more tentative roots in Drown, Díaz’s first collection of short stories. As with Oscar Wao, the “quest for home” that Díaz spoke of in the interview with Matt Okie is central to Drown and was configured originally in specifically Odyssean terms:⁴⁰ Drown is a reverse Odyssey, always organized it that way. The story of a father’s absence told from Telemakos’ point of view.⁴¹

³⁸ See Torres-Saillant 2016 on the importance of Díaz’s identification with both the United States and the Dominican Republic. The mythical framework that he creates, derived heavily from American fantasy fiction, is one for the Dominican diaspora, then, rather than a national myth for the Dominican Republic itself. ³⁹ As the Arawn of Welsh mythology is not an evil character, Díaz is almost certainly thinking here of the character Arawn Death-Lord in Lloyd Alexander’s children’s fantasy novels The Chronicles of Prydain. ⁴⁰ See Okie 2008. ⁴¹ Junot Díaz, personal communication, March 15, 2009.

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The form of Díaz’s engagement with Homeric epic and his own ambivalent relationship with a work that has so frequently been a staple of imperial literature, not least in the Caribbean,⁴² is illuminating. In correspondence with me, Díaz said of Drown: “There were many more references in the first drafts (to Cyclops, to the cattle of the Sun) but they were so obvious I had to get rid of them”; and “There was an encounter the father has with a group of other immigrants who try to rob him . . . and they were called The Cyclops . . . but that scene got cut out . . . ”⁴³ This raises an intriguing question regarding Díaz’s engagement with antiquity and the distance he feels compelled to keep between it and his work. By the time he publishes The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (eleven years after Drown), classical antiquity takes a smaller place alongside other forms of speculative storytelling rather than being a fundamental, structuring device of Díaz’s work. The phrase “so obvious” is a telling one, pointing to the corrosive, detrimental impact that overt dialogue with classical antiquity could have on his work. By cutting out the overt references, Díaz puts the onus on the reader to spot these connections and to decide for themselves whether they are a conscious engagement on the part of the writer, or whether they are “subterranean” influences (to use Edith Hall and Fiona Macintosh’s term),⁴⁴ which either the writer or the reader is inserting into the text; at the same time, it reflects that effacement so familiar from the history of the black Atlantic. Of course, Díaz’s email to me confirms that this was a self-conscious act of intertextuality on his part, but he produces neither fanfare nor obscuration to welcome in his dialogue with classical literature. This may be why his engagement with Greek mythology and literature as of yet has not drawn the attention of classical reception scholars nor elicited much comment even from those literary scholars who have discussed the themes of Drown or the fukú of Oscar Wao.⁴⁵ Considering his work in this light is illuminating, but

⁴² See Greenwood 2010; McConnell 2013. ⁴³ Junot Díaz, personal communication, March 15 and 17, 2009; ellipses are Díaz’s own. ⁴⁴ Hall and Macintosh 2005. ⁴⁵ For example, Jay 2010, Mahler 2010, and Miller 2011 all discuss the fukú, but without considering its links with ancient Greek myth—though it is worth noting that Miller, perhaps taking his cue from Díaz’s comparison of Beli to Penelope, remarks that one dimension of Díaz’s engagement with genre fiction can be seen by considering that “Frank Herbert has become his Homer and Tolkien his Virgil” (2011, 94). Manzanas-Calvo 2016 is

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Díaz’s refusal to make the connection explicit cautions the reader not to commit a kind of imperialist appropriation of his text via a reading of these classical elements. One might recall the exasperated yet self-implicating exclamation of Derek Walcott’s Omeros: “Why not see Helen | as the sun saw her, with no Homeric shadow” (1990, 271). Drown may be a “reverse Odyssey,” but that is still only one part of the story. Nonetheless, keeping such cautions in mind, the remainder of this chapter will explore the Odyssean themes of three stories in Drown, before going on to argue that the very structure of the work as a shortstory cycle evokes epic and oral traditions of both an ancient Greek and a modern Caribbean kind. The quest for home permeates Díaz’s writing at a number of levels, as we have seen, and partly explains the appeal that the Odyssey holds for him. The rupture caused by the Middle Passage still casts its long shadow, problematizing the search for home for people of the African diaspora, as Díaz has frequently discussed.⁴⁶ Although Díaz sees the connections that are built as people make their way back and forth between their homeland and their new homes as a positive feature of the modern era, difficult questions of identity remain unavoidable. These are reflected in the use of languages, seen in Díaz’s frequent use of Spanish amidst his English narrative, and emphasized by the epigraph of the collection, taken from a poem by the Cuban-American writer and scholar Gustavo Pérez Firmat: The fact that I am writing to you in English already falsifies what I wanted to tell you. My subject: how to explain to you that I don’t belong to English though I belong nowhere else.⁴⁷

Even the very experience of being bilingual, so common to many people who have migrated, shakes the certainty of which place one might call

an exception: she discusses the Homeric and Ovidian intertexts of Díaz’s story “Aurora” (Díaz 1996, 37–52). ⁴⁶ See, e.g. Okie 2008. ⁴⁷ Díaz 1996, quoting “Dedication” from Pérez Firmat 1995.

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home. The linguistic correlative of the experience that leads to Walcott’s “either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation,” which is used as an epigraph for Oscar Wao, is inextricably tied into the question of identity and of national as well as personal history, as it has been throughout so much of the history of imperialism.⁴⁸ Keenly aware of this, Gilroy (1993a, 3) began his exploration of the black Atlantic by drawing attention to “stereophonic, bilingual, or bifocal cultural forms” of the very kind that we see in the works of Díaz and Walcott. Díaz’s assertion that Drown is “told from Telemakos’ point of view” is manifest throughout the collection, with most of the stories being focalized through the eyes of Yunior—the very same Yunior who will later narrate Oscar Wao.⁴⁹ The narrative journey of the collection is intricate, going back and forth between the Dominican Republic and the United States, and skipping forwards and backwards in time. The unexpected, nonlinear progression of the stories reflects, as Richard Larson has observed, the way in which Yunior’s father enters and exits his life repeatedly, without warning; the collection as a whole tracks the father’s movement through Yunior’s life.⁵⁰ Inverting the Odyssey’s paternal focus, Drown is only interested in the father’s travels when they impact on the son, much as the Homeric epic is only interested in Telemachus in relation to his father. This is notwithstanding the so-called Telemachy of the Odyssey (Books 1–4), the purpose of which revolves almost exclusively around the father: primarily undertaken to seek news of Odysseus, the Telemachy both shows the audience the impact on Ithaca of Odysseus’ absence and provides his son with the maturity to stand by Odysseus’ side when he returns home. Drown reverberates with the father’s unsettling presence and damaging absence, but the central protagonist is unquestionably Yunior, left behind in the Dominican Republic. Díaz does not deny the importance of the father, who is Odyssean in the ⁴⁸ On language as a site of postcolonial struggle, see, e.g. Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 2003, 283. ⁴⁹ In an interesting article that explores the way Yunior’s retelling of Oscar’s story is akin to dictatorship, Elena Machado Sáez (2011) notes that a further “Yunior” is mentioned in Drown (a child of the central Yunior’s father by another woman) and suggests that there is uncertainty over which Yunior is narrating Oscar Wao. Ultimately, this latter assertion is unconvincing, particularly given the continued presence of Yunior in Díaz’s third book, This is How You Lose Her (2012), which, however, had not yet been published at the time Machado Sáez was writing. ⁵⁰ See Larson 2014.

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triple features of his absence, his fatherhood, and his unfaithfulness to his wife, but he refuses him the central perspective. Only one story (“Negocios”) is entirely preoccupied with the father, and even that is still told “from Telemakos’ point of view,” as highlighted by the final paragraph: The first subway station on Bond would have taken him to the airport and I like to think that he grabbed that first train, instead of what was more likely true, that he had gone out to Chuito’s first, before flying south to get us. (Díaz 1996, 164)

This concluding sentence exemplifies Yunior’s appropriation even of his father’s narrative, via the emphasis on the subjective perspective which has been shaping the story (“instead of what was more likely true”) and the forthright conclusion of “us.” It is “us,” Yunior, his mother, and his siblings, all left behind in the Dominican Republic until this moment when his father finally returns, who have been the focus of Drown, and who will have the final word. In a neat structural echoing,⁵¹ this story is the final one in the collection: Homer’s Odyssey begins with a Telemachy that gives space to the son even if primarily in relation to the father; Díaz’s Drown ends with a tale of the father’s experiences, carefully controlled by the narrative voice of the son Yunior. The notion of a “reverse” Odyssey encompasses these inversions, while highlighting the fact that Díaz’s Odyssey is a quest for home, a theme underscored by his protagonist’s surname “de las Casas.”⁵² Yet Drown’s homeward journey is not a nostos: it comprises no return; instead it traces the search for a new place to serve as home—a “centrifugal” rather than a “centripetal” quest, as James Joyce ([1922] 1992, 943–4) described it. On the level of the individual stories, three are particularly striking in their engagement with the Odyssey. The most Telemachean of these is “Aguantando” (Díaz 1996, 53–69), which may evoke the patient

⁵¹ See Brown 2012: “I’m a person who’s really obsessed with the way structure works in short stories. I drive my people who study with me the short story, I drive them crazy by my ability to chart like the basic six or seven patterns of a traditional short story.” ⁵² Simultaneously, Yunior’s surname recalls Bartolomé de las Casas, who arrived in Hispaniola from Spain in 1502 as one of the first European settlers but a decade later came to oppose slavery and advocated for the rights of the indigenous population; de las Casas also features in a footnote of Oscar Wao (Díaz 2008, 244).

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Penelope in its very title, with “Aguantando” translating as “enduring” or “waiting.”⁵³ However, Díaz’s Penelope-figure appropriates only the quiet strength of Homer’s depiction and none of the passive weeping. She too is approached by suitors but is scornful of their efforts to woo her, which come nowhere close to the style with which her husband first charmed her. The story begins with the father’s absence: “I lived without a father for the first nine years of my life” (Díaz 1996, 53). Dominant, too, are Yunior’s martial memories of him, which again reverberate with the Odyssey: the first portion of Odysseus’ absence was caused by the Trojan War and Yunior likewise remembers his father as an army man: When I thought of Papi I thought of one shot specifically. Taken days before the U.S. invasion. 1965 . . . He was dressed in his Guardia uniform, his tan cap at an angle on his shaved head, an unlit Constitución squeezed between his lips. His dark unsmiling eyes were my own. (Díaz 1996, 53)

Disturbingly, the Guardia uniform indicates the father’s role within Trujillo’s National Guard: Díaz’s own father held a similar position in the subsequent regime of Balaguer, a fact which did nothing to lessen Díaz’s abhorrence at Trujillo’s bloody dictatorship.⁵⁴ It may not be too fanciful to observe that Yunior’s recollection here encapsulates some of the contradictory nature that the ancient Greeks saw embodied in Odysseus: his uniform marks him as a fighter, the U.S.’s invasion (which we soon learn left Yunior’s mother with physical scars all across her stomach and back) garners sympathy as a righteous combatant,⁵⁵ but the participation in the Guardia puts him firmly on the side of the tyrants ⁵³ In the British publication of Drown, a glossary is provided of a selection of the many Spanish words and slang incorporated within Díaz’s work. This goes directly against the wishes of Díaz, who has argued persuasively that it is incumbent upon the reader to know some Spanish and make an effort to understand: “I don’t explain cultural things, with italics or with exclamation or with side bars or asides. I was aggressive about that because I had so many negative models, so many Latinos and black writers who are writing to white audiences, who are not writing to their own people. If you’re not writing to your own people, I’m disturbed because of what that says about your relationship to the community you are in one way or another indebted to. You are only there to loot them of ideas, and words, and images so that you can coon them to the dominant group. That disturbs me tremendously” (Céspedes, Torres-Saillant, and Díaz 2000, 900). ⁵⁴ Danticat and Díaz 2007: “My father was a police soldier for Balaguer’s post-but-pro Trujillo regime so I was exposed to a lot of trujillista craziness through him.” ⁵⁵ The U.S.’s invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965 was prompted in part by their fear of another Communist state being established in the Caribbean so soon after Cuba.

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again. Likewise, Odysseus’ most distinctive trait is his wiliness, which is so often perceived ambivalently; for example, if his portrayal in Sophocles’ Ajax is largely positive, in Euripides’ Hecuba he is abhorrent. “Aguantando” incorporates the experiences of both a Penelope and a Telemachus. As in Homer’s epic, so in this tale, the recognition is prompted by scars; but they are the scars of the boy rather than the father. Waiting for his father to return, the young Yunior imagines the scene: I’d see him coming from my trees . . . He’d kiss Mami and Rafa and shake Abuelo’s reluctant hand and then he’d see me behind everyone else. What’s wrong with that one? he’d ask and Mami would say, He doesn’t know you. Squatting down so that his pale yellow dress socks showed, he’d trace the scars on my arms and on my head. Yunior, he’d finally say, his stubbled face in front of mine, his fingers holding. (Díaz 1996, 69)

The effect of this is to demonstrate that the father’s absence takes its toll on those at home rather than on the one who is away. It is the son’s scars, not the father’s, which must be recognized. As Díaz has explained, he removed many of the explicit allusions to the Odyssey in the process of redrafting. The thuggery of the gang calling themselves “The Cyclops,” who do not feature in the published version, indicates the tenor of Díaz’s engagement with that episode of the epic. His Cyclops seems to have retained the violence that is often associated with the Homeric Polyphemus, while the father-figure retains his Odyssean identity as victim of the Cyclops. On the other hand, Díaz makes the Cyclopean group into the thieves, whereas in Homer it is Odysseus who helps himself to Polyphemus’ food and hopes to be given more gifts if he awaits the giant’s return. Rather than depicting them as culturally different to Odysseus/the father in some way (a facet which is so central to the Homeric discussion of the Cyclopean way of life, Od. 9.112–15) or physically different (the element which has featured prominently in the reception of the Cyclops episode), Díaz aligned the Cyclops and the father with each other, all as “immigrants,” all as outsiders in this new American land. How else this played out, and how Helios’ cattle featured, cannot be known without reading the earlier drafts (which are not available to the public). However, there may still be glimpses of the Homeric Cyclops narrative remaining in the tales of the boy Ysrael, who features in two of the stories

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in Drown.⁵⁶ Ysrael’s face had been badly damaged when he was attacked by a pig as a baby; subsequently, he wears a mask and dreams of going to the United States, where he is promised that doctors will be able to help fix his wounds. In the opening story of the collection, Yunior and his older brother Rafa are intrigued by Ysrael, as so many of the local children are, bullying him and imploring him to show them his face. As with the Homeric Cyclops, Ysrael’s physical “otherness” dominates people’s perception of him, and as with the Cyclops, this is not confined to his face but extends to his great size: He was about a foot bigger than either of us and looked like he’d been fattened on that supergrain the farmers around Ocoa were giving their stock. (Díaz 1996, 11)

When Rafa attacks Ysrael, wanting to see the face beneath the mask, he smashes a bottle over his head and rolls him onto his back to look more closely at his face. It may be a Coca-Cola bottle and not the contents of a wine sack that fells Ysrael, but nonetheless, the description of the bottle’s base breaking off and “spinning away like a crazed eyeglass” (Díaz 1996, 14), with the incapacitated boy lying helpless on his back, evokes the Cyclops under attack by Odysseus and his men (Od. 9.371–94). The episode clearly depicts Ysrael as victim of an unwarranted attack, and if seen with these Cyclopean resonances, Díaz’s literary network of influence again proves illuminating for it was Aimé Césaire in his Cahier d’un retour au pays natal who cast the Cyclops as a victim of colonial oppression, as Sylvia Wynter observed when she labelled that passage of the poem “Encounter with the Cyclops on a Paris Tram.”⁵⁷ Not dissimilarly, Ysrael’s disfigured face has often been read as symbolizing the poverty imposed by colonial oppression,⁵⁸ making the attack with a Coca-Cola bottle all the more resonant,⁵⁹ as one of the foremost icons of

⁵⁶ “Ysrael” and “No Face”: Díaz 1996, 1–15, 117–23, respectively. ⁵⁷ Wynter 2002, 154–9; see also McConnell 2013, 46–52. ⁵⁸ See, e.g. Connor 2002. ⁵⁹ The Coca-Cola bottle may also be in homage to Ellison’s Invisible Man, in which—in a distinctly Cyclopean episode—the unnamed protagonist relates that, “A pair of eyes peered down through lenses as thick as the bottom of a Coca-cola bottle” (Ellison [1952] 2002, 179). On Ralph Ellison’s engagement with classical literature, including the Cyclopean motif of Invisible Man, see Rankine 2006, 121–89; McConnell 2013, 71–105.

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the United States and its capitalism is seen to bring down the helpless boy, whose face had already been ravaged by a—capitalist?—pig.⁶⁰ When Díaz returns us to Ysrael’s story much later in the cycle, he renews the connection by entitling the story “No Face” but indicates that the Homeric roles have now switched. If “No Face” echoes Odysseus’ famous pseudonym “No Man,” this impression of heroics is reinforced by Ysrael’s own imaginative recasting of himself as a sci-fi hero with the powers of flight, strength, and invisibility. The latter owes something to the literary genealogy discussed earlier, evoking as it does Ralph Ellison’s Odyssean novel, Invisible Man, but even more prominently, the title “No Face” references Rorschach from the DC Comics series Watchmen, which will feature in Oscar Wao, too.⁶¹ Despite the dialogue with the Odyssey remaining somewhat covert, the final words of the story convince me that this reading is not pure speculation: as the story closes and Ysrael runs toward town, the narrator reflects, “Nobody’s faster” (Díaz 1996, 123): Ysrael has become an Odyssean hero, complete with famous Homeric pseudonym. It is clear, then, that the syncretization of myth and science fiction that is so prominent throughout Oscar Wao is also a feature of Drown, albeit in embryonic form. Turning finally to the form of Drown and the evocation of epic and oral traditions mentioned earlier. At first glance, Drown does not evoke classical epic: it is neither long nor in verse, nor does its subject matter appear to be the heroic deeds of larger-than-life protagonists. Yet it undoubtedly engages with the Homeric Odyssey on a number of levels—and not solely those of the narrative instances already discussed. Bakhtin may have set epic and the novel in contradistinction to each other, but the reception of classical epic into the genre of the novel can be seen as far back as the ancient Greek romances of the first to third centuries CE. Or if we prefer to follow Ian Watt’s notion of the birth of the novel as occurring in the early eighteenth century,⁶² then Henry

⁶⁰ The “supergrain” the farmers are feeding their stock (Díaz 1996, 11, quoted above) is also part of this neo-colonial capitalist dynamic, as the United States dumped excess grain in the Dominican Republic. On this and its broader economic context, see Janvry 1981; with thanks to Dan-el Padilla Peralta for drawing my attention to this. ⁶¹ Mahler 2010, 123, including mention of Watchmen’s famous line “Who watches the Watchmen?” This, of course, is another instance of classical reception, offering as it does a translation of Juvenal’s line Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodies? (6.29–32). ⁶² See Watt 1957.

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Fielding may be seen as one of the first novelists of this reborn genre to richly engage with ancient epic.⁶³ Drown can be read as a short-story cycle: the interconnections between the tales are strong, the same central characters populating each, and, as Forrest Ingram defined the genre, “the reader’s experience of each one is modified by his experience of the others” (1971, 13). The collection’s form also reflects some of the dispersal and fragmentation that underlies Díaz’s subject matter and its inextricable ties to the nature of Caribbean modernity, while simultaneously recalling the Odyssean trait of episodic storytelling. Ingram observed that the short-story cycle has a connection with “mythic consciousness” with themes and motifs echoing throughout the cycle. Ingram’s exposition calls to mind the tales which Odysseus narrates in Books 9–12 of the Odyssey and his various “Cretan Tales” (Od. 13.256–86, 14.191–359, 19.165–342), as well as the Epic Cycle of antiquity. Much as in the Odyssey, in which the themes of xenia and female fidelity, for example, recur in different contexts throughout the epic, each contributing to the poem’s final climax, so too an equivalent structure is glimpsed over the course of Drown; likewise, the themes of homecoming and fatherhood that are central to the Homeric epic also play a crucial role in Díaz’s collection. The affinities between short-story cycles and epic traditions have been noted since Ingram traced the roots of the genre back to works like Homer’s Odyssey, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Boccaccio’s Decameron, and the Arabian A Thousand and One Nights.⁶⁴ Oral storytelling is central in each of these just as it often is in short-story cycles. The storyteller features as a character within the story composed by the author in a form of mise en abyme. This is seen in Homeric epic in the figures of Phemius and Demodocus and most especially in Odysseus’ narrative of his adventures performed before the Phaeacians (Books 9–12).⁶⁵ Edwidge Danticat, who is much admired by Díaz, announces a similar technique in the title of her first short-story cycle: Krik? Krak! (1996) is the traditional call-and-response beginning to oral storytelling in the francophone Caribbean. The storyteller grabs the audience’s attention by calling “Krik?” and waits for their response—“Krak!”—before plunging

⁶³ See Power 2015. ⁶⁴ See Ingram 1971, 13, 17. ⁶⁵ See, e.g. Pucci 1998, 131–77.

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into the tale. As well as his admiration for Danticat, Díaz shares certain very broad biographical experiences with her in as much as they both moved from their Caribbean childhood home to the U.S.; both grew up under, or in the wake of, dictatorial regimes whose horrors still cast long shadows;⁶⁶ and both share a home island of Hispaniola, though not a home nation: Danticat being from Haiti and Díaz from the Dominican Republic. Exploring these kinds of experiences is central to the writing of both Díaz and Danticat. The migrations that each depicts naturally entail interaction with new people and places; meanwhile, a not dissimilar interaction between genres can be seen reflected in their choice of the short-story cycle. As a genre it is both liminal and boundary-defying, pointing to its particular appeal for writers exploring conditions of liminal identity of any kind.⁶⁷ Rocío Davis argues that the way the short-story cycle has been appropriated “as a metaphor for the fragmentation and multiplicity of ethnic lives is itself an articulation of the between-culture position and the complex process towards selfidentification” (1997, 22). This argument has potency, although both the terminology and the delimiting involved in the category “ethnic fiction” are unfortunate. James Nagel, who also foregrounds ethnicity, nevertheless makes clear that a focus on the works themselves reveals that the short-story cycle offers “a vital technique for the exploration and depiction of the complex interactions of gender, ethnicity, and individual identity” (2001, 10). It is these “complex interactions” which are particularly well suited to the short-story cycle as a result of its own “hybrid” identity and its roots in the oral tradition. In Drown, the short-story cycle retains epic’s interest in storytelling and orality, but by fragmenting the often imperialistic epic into smaller tales—which could be seen as a literary reflection of slavery and colonialism’s rupturing of the lives and identities of so many in the African diaspora—and then reuniting it into the new, cohesive form of the shortstory cycle, Díaz appropriates the epic form for his own purposes, ⁶⁶ See Danticat and Díaz 2007 for discussion of dictatorship in Haiti (François “Papa Doc” Duvalier) and the Dominican Republic (Rafael Trujillo). ⁶⁷ See R. G. Davis 1997, 3–4, for the hypothesis that the short-story cycle is particularly prominent in “ethnic fiction” because it is a genre that in the hybridity of its form embodies the common themes of identity, community, and conflict explored by many migrant writers.

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reflecting the way Caribbean peoples have rebuilt their sense of identity and nationhood in the wake of historical horrors. Once again, we are reminded that if Drown is to be seen as an instance of classical reception, we must remember that that is only one element of its nature. The collection is primarily concerned with modernity yet simultaneously illuminates antiquity and classical epic by its engagement with the Odyssey. This chapter has focused only on Junot Díaz’s first two major works, but I will end by observing a prominent feature that inextricably links these two with his third volume, This is How You Lose Her: the figure of Yunior. The biographical similarities between Yunior and his author are impossible to miss: both born in the Dominican Republic, moving to the United States as young children; fathers who leave for America several years before the rest of the family are able to join them; not to mention his name, Yunior, which is the very name that Díaz’s friends and family call him.⁶⁸ Díaz has discussed the similarities, as well as the differences, between himself and his fictional creation: I furnish Yunior with a lot of my stuff so I don’t have to buy anything new and while friends of mine can see small elements of me in him, I’ve spun him a little sharper to stand out more starkly. I don’t go to his extremes of cruelty and nor do I have his Byronesque sensibilities. There is a lot of scepticism today as to whether memoir is real. But when fiction is done at a certain level there is scepticism as to whether it is really fiction.⁶⁹

Díaz’s acknowledgment of the autobiographical elements of his work, combined with his identification of the modern reader’s vain desire to pinpoint and separate truth and fiction, brings us back to the question at the very heart of Oscar Wao: the nature of the fukú, of myth, of speculative fiction. The porous, uncertain distinction between fiction and memoir, between the fantastical and the real, is deliberately left unresolvable in Díaz’s work, exemplifying the mystery at the heart of magical realism, and at the heart of Yunior’s fukú tale.

⁶⁸ See Kachka 2012 for the assertion of Yunior as Díaz’s own nickname. ⁶⁹ Quoted in Wroe 2012.

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10 Classics for All? Liberal Education and the Matter of Black Lives Patrice D. Rankine

On March 23, 2012, President Barack Obama stood before a microphone in front of the White House to respond to the tragic death of Trayvon Martin, the seventeen-year-old boy who was gunned down in Stanford, Florida.¹ Trayvon was one of a frightening array of black teenage boys and young men whose lives have been cut short far too soon, founts of untapped potential and lost talent. Characteristically sober in responding to national tragedies, Obama made an urgent and symbolic plea that law enforcement “get to the bottom” of what happened. The nation eventually glimpsed into Florida’s Stand-Your-Ground Law and the murky details of how George Zimmerman murdered Trayvon. Still startling in their jarring juxtaposition of an American president, leader of the free world, and a black teenage boy, long characterized in American imagery and lore as derelict and good-for-nothing,² were Obama’s comments binding himself—and his high office—to Trayvon and his dark legacy. Himself the father of two black girls (teenage at the time), the President concluded his press conference with what for any other president might have been a throwaway comment: “You know, if I had a son, he’d ¹ See “Trayvon Martin Case – President Obama Weighs In: ‘If I Had a Son, He’d Look Like Trayvon’ ” 2012. ² Note, for example, the need for biological justification of racial stratification documented in Isenberg 2016. Patrice D. Rankine, Classics for All? Liberal Education and the Matter of Black Lives. In: Classicisms in the Black Atlantic. Edited by: Ian Moyer, Adam Lecznar, and Heidi Morse, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198814122.003.0011

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look like Trayvon.” That one sentence encapsulated the ethical, conceptual, and symbolic significance, to history and to posterity, of Obama’s presidency. I begin with this vignette because Obama’s move, as a black man embodying America’s highest office, encapsulates the paradox in the idea of classics for all. In this essay, I will examine the contradiction of classics for all, evident in but not exclusive to the not-for-profit enterprise by the same name (Classics for All) that seeks to promote the Greek and Latin classics in schools across the United Kingdom. Any number of issues might be found in the idea of Classics for All, in itself. For example, it could signify a widespread colonization of the mind, a signal of the primacy of European letters and their continuing legacy. As a classicist who recognizes the liberating power of any knowledge, I am not arguing in this direction. Rather, the contradictions that interest me have more to do with class, race, and access, and for these the Obama parallel is useful, in the United States and beyond—and even in the U.K. Obama shows how embodying a form can mean not slavish mastery but an improvisational artistry that alters the form—in his case, the American presidency—so that it bends to one’s will. It should not be forgotten that Obama is a constitutional scholar, a student of America’s foundational classical (and sacred) text. The symbolism of a man whose father was born in Kenya and who began school in Indonesia, where he lived with his stepfather, occupying the presidency, would be too much for some, as the birther movement and more recent comments on “shithole” countries reveal. And yet, the very symbolism of these associations meant that unless Obama suppressed his own identity (his outside influences), the formal structures of the presidency would function differently in his hands. Ideologically the president would embody the values and ethics carried out by his heroes, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the greatest American president of myth and legend, Abraham Lincoln. The idea of classics for all has the same potentiality: that in the hands of different practitioners, the classics might respond to different social concerns. Although by classics in this essay I mean Greek and Roman classics, more broadly classical forms such as the U.S. Constitution or the American presidency give us a sense of the interplay between traditional and originality that classics for all could signal, under the right improvisational touch, as well as the barriers to that technique. Obama’s

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performance of the presidency, to which I will return throughout this essay, at times in juxtaposition to his successor, parallels the ethical, conceptual, and symbolic potentiality in what the classics, as an academic discipline, has meant—and could continue to mean—in the hands of expert, gifted Black Atlantic descendants. The suffocation of talent enacted in the murder of Trayvon Martin and so many youth like him is a crisis of our time that cannot be ignored, one that is jarring alongside the frame of classics for all.

Classics and an Ancient Blackness In order to frame a conversation of classics in the Black Atlantic, brief consideration of how the classics have worked in the black imagination more broadly would be useful; that is, before identifying whether there has been in the classics a distinctive African inflection, an adaptation of form similar to Obama’s embodiment of an African American presidency, one has to independently identify both the classics and what it means to be African—and even what “black” or “African” would mean in the ancient world. Recent conversations regarding the use of the classics as a foundation for white supremacy demonstrate both the arguments for that legacy, as well as attempts to dislodge the academic discipline from its past.³ Defining the classics, the study of Greece and Rome and their cultural artifacts (languages, history, art, and artifacts), would be a tautological act, if we impose racial categories to a past wherein they did not exist. That said, Africa has been a conceptual category from quite early in world history, and identifying the African—though “black” as a “race” did not exist in the ancient world—might enable the question of whether there was any ongoing distinctively African perspective on the classics. There are a number of possible approaches to the topic of an ancient African presence and perspectives. For example, a body of work is concerned with the African—and his or her descent—in the European imagination. As it pertains to the ancient world, Valentin Mudimbe’s The Idea of Africa (1994) laid important groundwork on how the Roman world conceptualized Africa. Though he was writing in a different vein ³ See Bond 2017; Timpf 2017.

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from Frank Snowden,⁴ it is reasonable that one might draw certain conclusions regarding European dispositions toward the African from these works. Snowden’s argument that there was no color prejudice in the ancient world, which said as much about an ideal vision of post–Civil Rights America as it could have of ancient Greece, is contested in such works as Benjamin Isaac’s The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (2004). Whatever their contributions, none of these studies centers on the perspectives of Africans in the world, ancient or modern;⁵ that is, whether unique African ethics, concepts, or symbols either drew from or had influence upon the classics, as we know it, has been difficult to ascertain. Certainly, this is the work that Martin Bernal endeavored when he declared that the Greek goddess Athena was a derivative of the Egyptian deity Neith. Bernal was playing in familiar territory to many black scholars before the 1980s.⁶ Though politically fraught, Bernal’s genealogy did begin to grapple with the question of what ethics, concepts, or symbols from outside of the “cradle of civilization” shaped the classics as we know it, as well as the world around it since antiquity. Outside of these briefly surveyed interventions, the absence of “the African” in conversations about the ancient world is perhaps expected, given the difficulty in arriving at epistemic agreement regarding our categories. Political controversies attend any moves that upset either conventions about what the classics are, or our contemporary, deeply held conceptions of race, as Bernal’s project showed.⁷ Would an author like Terence, for example, count as an African voice that might lead to later discourses, say, of “blackness,” despite the inappropriateness of that term for an ancient context, as Phillis Wheatley’s symbolic use of Terence suggests? What would the continuity be between Terence’s Africa and the imagined community that we conceptualize as Africa in the contemporary world?⁸ (Here Bernal’s “black” Athena was part of the problem of how we define Africa.) And are we able to find Terence’s ⁴ See Snowden 1970, 1983. ⁵ I include here McCoskey 2012, which nevertheless does attempt to center Egypt in the formation of Greek and Roman discourses. ⁶ See Orrells, Bhambra, and Roynon 2011. ⁷ See Berlinerblau 1999. ⁸ See Anderson’s (1991) Imagined Communities, which does not really factor in here because of its focus on the formation of nation later in history, but it puts Mudimbe into perspective to consider what “Africa” was in the ancient imagination, as much to the “African” as to the Greek and Roman.

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voice among the polyphony of perspectives present in his comedies? What would that voice be? The range of these questions and variety of methodologies it would take to unravel them are staggering. Locating perspectives arising from Africans in the ancient world, then, is fuzzy. African voices—and those of people of African descent—are present in the contemporary world, but the connection between these and any imagined ancient Africa is tenuous. The classics for all, therefore, as it pertains to blackness, is primarily a modern project.⁹

The African, Classics for All, and the Current State of Play In the contemporary world, the extent to which Africans or people of African descent explicitly concern themselves with the classics, strictly defined, is another matter. For the purposes of this essay, it is worth outlining how I am defining the Black Atlantic, comprised of people of African descent. Here again I am concerned not simply with a kind of representational diversity, for example, blacks who happen to be classicists; rather, I am interested in the extent to which Black Atlantic practitioners embody different ethical and epistemic concerns in their professional practice, similar to how Obama reframes the American presidency. Regarding the category of the Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (1993a) explored the triangular movement of modern Africans, from the continent, to North and South America, and to Europe. Africans in the Atlantic world, whether slave descendants brought to Europe or North and South America, or continental Africans in (post)colonial dialogue with Europe, are participants in forming a broader set of ideas, texts, traditions, and artifacts of contemporary society. Black Atlantic people share cultural practices and ideas with the majority population, sometimes with distinct inflections. Notwithstanding the truth that “the notion that Black people are human beings is a relatively new discovery in the modern west,”¹⁰ Black Atlantic peoples are—and have always been—fully human, independent of external ⁹ It is worth nothing the ongoing challenges to race and whiteness in the field of Medieval Studies in the United States and beyond, which is beyond the purview of this essay but not insignificant. See Bartlett 2019. ¹⁰ West (1982) 2002, 47.

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assaults upon our humanity. As Gilroy argues, African ethical, conceptual, and cultural influences are facts of modern and contemporary life. As such, if we take the classics as a subset of those broader cultural materials, Black Atlantic peoples would undeniably be part of this enterprise, as well. The question of how classics in the hands of Black Atlantic practitioners inflects differently is one of only recent interest within the field of classical reception studies. Helpful to what I am (in an undeservedly cursory fashion) talking about in terms of ethical, conceptual, and cultural, or symbolic material of the Black Atlantic in relation to the classics might be the distinctions made in recent studies between classical tradition and reception. A Black Atlantic resistance to ideas handed down as classical—that is, ideas framed as those from classical civilization, classical tradition, Western civilization, Western tradition, and so on—is understandable, given the relationship between Europe and the African since 1492. The quote from Cornel West, for example, echoes many denials of African humanity, so grafting oneself onto such a genealogy (the Renaissance, the Enlightenment), without problematizing it, would be foolish. Books such as Carter G. Woodson’s The Mis-Education of the Negro (1933) explicitly question the epistemic authority of an oppressor. Having been extracted from a rich culture, or colonized, and then enrobed in that of one’s persecutor, ritualistically and in real terms ensnared (Patterson 1982), it would be difficult for the African not to question the reliability or helpfulness of Europe, its traditions, or its ideologies. At the same time, wisdom and aids to survival can be drawn from any number of sources and adapted. The Black Atlantic reuses of Christianity are the most salient evidence that if we excavate what is beneath the surface, we find differences from mainstream practices. This is true in other areas that pertain to ethics, ideology, or culture and its attendant symbols.¹¹ The choice to take up classical knowledge, from Europe or any other source, is not necessarily a function of “mis-education.” The notion of classical receptions, as problematic as that rubric might be, helps to characterize what Barbara Goff, who wrote Crossroads in the Black Aegean with Michael Simpson (2007), elsewhere talks about as the “pull” of the classics for persons identified (-self or otherwise) as black ¹¹ As an example, see Barnard 2017, exploring black writers since Phillis Wheatley as interrogating American libertarian claims and its imperialism.

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in contemporary culture;¹² that is, black Atlantic authors, time and again, choose the classics as vernacular material to shape our own ethical concerns and ideas and responses to broader societal issues—and especially to reject European hegemony (Barnard 2017). In the original 2014 presentation from which this essay derives, I presented the activity around the classics in the Black Atlantic within the frame of “classics for all,” and I meant this tentatively, with some irony. I was pointing not only to the reception of classics among African American writers (primarily in the United States) but also to the broader, widespread appeal of reception studies. Regarding classical reception among black authors, I cited Ralph Ellison from the mid-twentieth century in America and playwrights such as August Wilson (1945– 2005) and the contemporary Suzan-Lori Parks. None of these Black Atlantic (black American, in these cases) writers were professional classicists, and yet each finds the Greco-Roman classics, in one way or another, fundamental to their projects. In Parks’s case, in a striking interview she has gone as far as referring to figures such as Abraham Lincoln as a kind of “subterranean thing” in the American imagination: “Lincoln is the closest thing we have to a mythic figure. In days of great Greek drama, they had Apollo and Medea and Oedipus—these largerthan-life figures that walked the earth and spoke—and they turned them into plays” (quoted in Rankine 2013, 201; see also Bosher, Macintosh, McConnell, and Rankine 2015, 9). But I have never been fully comfortable with the excavation of black authors for their display within classical reception studies.¹³ Through classics for all, I wanted to interrogate the interplay between black identity and the classics, as manifested in symbols like “Apollo and Medea and Oedipus.” Though I was questioning the evidence of a kind of classics for all, little did I know at the time that an organization in the United Kingdom had a few years earlier used the title Classics for All as their trademark in their effort to promote access to classical languages and learning in primary and secondary public schools. It is worth comparing notes with Classics for All for what it reveals about the contemporary moment. The objectives of Classics for All include, among others, “aid[ing] cultural literacy,” “teach[ing] the

¹² See Goff 2005.

¹³ See Rankine 2013.

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foundations of philosophy and history,” and “encourag[ing] cultural insight.”¹⁴ Consonant with my inquiry into what the classics continue to signify is the philanthropic organization’s sense of the cultural cache of the Greco-Roman Classics. Under the heading of “improv[ing] employment opportunities,” the organization’s website has the following: Evidence suggests that employers have respect for potential employees who have studied classical subjects at school or university. Many classics graduates have made a name for themselves in various fields, including JK Rowling, Boris Johnson and Mark Zuckerburg. This is because, among other things, the study of classics encourages clarity of thought, attention to detail, and the ability to argue a case. (“Why Classics?” 2018)

Before the notion of the instrumentality of classics to encourage “clarity of thought, attention to detail, and the ability to argue a case,” which any number of academic disciplines might claim, comes the stature of this particular discipline, as the who’s who of membership includes a writer of stratospheric fame, a U.K. Prime Minister (at the time of writing), and the billionaire founder of Facebook. Though none of the big three mentioned is of African descent, the message pertains to all U.K. youth, black, white, Indian, and so on: study your lessons, especially in classics, and become like these, not simply employable, but legendary. As I have stated, one of the aims of this essay is to examine the promise and pitfalls of the classics for all—not necessarily the organization, but more broadly the notion as I had it in 2014—particularly as it pertains to the Black Atlantic. Whereas one would have to be theoretically nimble to frame a question regarding the African voice in the context of Europe before 1492, the fact that many Black Atlantic writers are squarely within the framework of classical receptions in modern and contemporary worlds is clear. Although the question of Black Atlantic uses of the classics might not have been of much broad interest until recently, an industry has arisen that is expressly concerned with the classics and the Black Atlantic. The most salient examples should suffice. Framing a discussion of “Classica Africana” as an offspring of Meyer Reinhold’s Classica Americana (1984), Michele Valerie Ronnick toured an exhibit initially called Twelve Black Classicists (expanded from time to time since its beginning, with additional classicists), which featured photographic

¹⁴ See “Why Classics?” 2018.

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portraits of such figures as William Sanders Scarborough, a man born into slavery in Georgia who goes on to be educated at Oberlin College, becomes a classics professor, and later serves as President of Wilberforce College.¹⁵ During the same period of Ronnick’s exhibit (the early decades of the twenty-first century), a number of authors arose, similarly interested in recuperating African voices. I published Ulysses in Black in 2006. Tracey Walters published African American Literature and the Classicist Tradition in 2007. I have already mentioned Goff and Simpson’s 2007 work on Classics and the Black Atlantic, where the trope of the “Black Aegean” flows from a number of important concepts into Gilroy’s chronotope. Emily Greenwood’s Afro-Greeks and William W. Cook and James Tatum’s African American Writers and Classical Tradition then came in 2010. And these works are only the most salient of an ongoing field of inquiry, including the seminal Black Odysseys of Justine McConnell (2013).¹⁶ Outside of the professional academic field of classics, one might be able to trace the move toward classics for all, as I have stated, in the work of such eminent African American writers as August Wilson and Suzan Lori-Parks. Classics for All, the correlated nonprofit, builds on the idea that the classics are not elite subject matter but are somehow in the atmosphere. In the case of Ellison, Wilson, and Parks, the fact that these intellectuals were not directly trained in the classics and yet demonstrate classical knowledge and deploy classical tropes makes the point. These authors have other interests outside of the preservation of Greek and Latin texts and ideas for posterity. Nevertheless, they deploy the GrecoRoman classics to other ends, even to serve their particular ideological and epistemic agendas. By reclaiming the classics, they affirm its value even while altering what it is, performing an Obamaesque modification of classical form. One problem with Classics for All, then, is the idea of unidirectional mastery, namely that the recipients benefit from the discipline and leave it as pristine as they found it. Greek and Roman ethics, ideas, and symbols have been affected by the modern idea of whiteness, and so it should be expected that blackness would also alter how we perceive ¹⁵ See Ronnick 2004, 2005. ¹⁶ Since my original presentation in 2014, a number of additional books have been published in this area, including but not limited to Malamud 2016 and Barnard 2017.

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them—and, in fact, their very essence.¹⁷ Bypassing an exploration of this bidirectional interplay, negative consequences of classics for all include the appropriation of black authors to a project—the classics, as a pristine phenomenon—of which they had no explicit intention of being a part, other than as a means of accessing tools for survival and creativity that they find in the texts and cultural artifacts—or even dismantling those tools. Classics for all threatens to shift focus from particular projects— such as white supremacy or Black Atlantic and other reclamations— toward an innocuous classics that never really existed.¹⁸ Those who appropriate classical receptions as proof of a certain diversity do not necessarily always keep these projects—racism, antiracism—in mind, if they are foreign to (or even at a distance from) their own immediate concerns. While there is an equity-minded move in classics for all, the possibilities of appropriation, decontextualization, and depoliticization are also rife. While we should not dismiss positive developments within the current state of play, such as the reality of expanded educational opportunities, or the valorization of Black Atlantic authors and their perspectives, there are also negative aspects to the premise of classics for all. One consequence, as I am pointing out, is the loss of particularity. For the sake of argument, consider #BlackLivesMatter (B.L.M.). A valorization of the Black Atlantic, B.L.M. makes evident the absence of the value of those perspectives (Cornel West’s quote) prior to the contemporary period.¹⁹ Classics for all, similar to #AllLivesMatter, casually sweeps away the consequences of centuries of inequity. More on B.L.M. specifically in a moment. Equally concerning as an abstracted reality that bypasses history is that the claims of Classics for All expose new obstacles, as education ostensibly becomes more and more democratized. The barriers to access that were formerly in place, such as the separate-but-equal laws of segregation in the U.S., are no longer present. The new gatekeeping tends to be economic. The neoliberal perspective evident in Classics for All—that all it takes is free access to material, and all will

¹⁷ An exhaustive genealogy of whiteness is beyond the scope of this essay, but here again, see Isenberg 2016. ¹⁸ See comments on this in Greenwood 2010; Rankine 2013. ¹⁹ See Yancy and Butler 2015.

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be well—extends the laissez-faire approach to selves and markets in a way that further marginalizes many groups. As it pertains to this neoliberalism, Jean and John Comaroff, who are helpful in understanding the current state of play in broader, anthropological terms, argue that “the labile relation of labor to capital may have intensified existing structures of inequality.”²⁰ Contemporary realities are “also eroding the conditions that give rise to class opposition as an idiom of identity and/or interest” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000, 302). Within this framework of intensified inequalities and eroding social conditions, Classics for All could be read as a neoliberal project. The designers, as benefactors in this system, seem generous in their offer to extend a good or service—in this case, the classics—to a broader audience. As if magic (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000), however, this instrument is presented as a means of uplift for many youth in the U.K. Classics for All will not address the failure of society—whether government, school systems, or other structures—that led to these inequities in the first place.²¹ We might also see evidence of the broader, neoliberal state of play in the dismantling of what some call the deep state,²² the notion that government has unfavorably crept into every crevice of our lives and needs to be rolled back. Neoliberalism is the new laissez-faire of markets and other actors. Alongside the neoliberal framework, a latent positivism operates in social discourse. I will define positivism more broadly momentarily, and for this W. E. B. Du Bois, who also proported a kind of classics for all, will be helpful. For now, suffice it to cite the myth—the magic—that scientific rationalism has allowed for progress, such that individuals living in the twenty-first century should be richer, smarter, and better equipped to master the world around them than ever before.²³ The neoliberal framework belies the deficiencies of a project like Classics for All to people of African descent by and large. Although individuals are born equal, the collective plight of Africans, if we take just ²⁰ See Comaroff and Comaroff 2000, 302. ²¹ For a recent, sensible analysis of the emergence of a system of education in the United States, and its challenges, see Allen 2016. ²² See Grandin 2017. ²³ Winant’s (2001) The World is a Ghetto wages a counterargument regarding the persistence of inequality and racism globally.

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the American situation, begins with slavery in 1619 and extends to sharecropping by the end of the nineteenth century and finally segregation and second-class citizenship during the twentieth century. The continental realities would include colonialism, while in the U.K., the plight of Caribbean migrants and other Black Atlantic people has been recently exposed.²⁴ In the U.S., housing, education, and health are all sectors in which the starting points differ for Black Atlantic people, so that if there is a race toward progress, we can never triumph. Over centuries, opportunities to build wealth have been stymied, such that it becomes an obsession among such nouveau riche as the rapper Jay-Z. Within this context, Classics for all is somewhat of a sadistic joke, and here John Calhoun and Booker T. Washington speak the same language, as a corrective: whereas the former legendarily doubted the African’s ability to learn ancient Greek,²⁵ the latter questioned whether such learning was at all helpful to a collective better helped by making more immediate economic strides than seemingly luxurious ones.²⁶ The reservations I express here are not absolute. As the examples of Ellison, Wilson, Parks, and others make clear, debates about efficacy do not prevent people of African descent from engaging constructively and creatively with the classics to make sense of the world in which we live. Classics for all is helpful to the expansion of perspectives necessary to bring full talent to the problems we face. Just as Obama inhabited the presidency in ways that reclaimed the moral, ethical, and symbolic authority of Black Atlantic concerns, so classical forms more broadly, present in the ideas and challenges that forebears faced in antiquity (democracy, the role of the state, how to manage conflict), have been helpful to many Black Atlantic persons. If there were any doubt that different bodies embody form differently, the symbolic counterweight of a less-than-inclusive Donald Trump presidency is instructive. Obama might well be akin to Lincoln as symbol for a more expansive America. It is no coincidence, however, that at least two Black Atlantic writers have compared Trump to Julius Caesar, a symbolic and tyrannical last blow to a teetering Republic. Anyone could compare—and many have compared—Trump to Caesar, but the analogy seems especially poignant in the hands of the descendants ²⁴ On the Windrush controversy, see Pérez-Peña 2018. ²⁵ See Ronnick 2005. ²⁶ See Washington 1901.

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of historically oppressed people. The uproar over a staging of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in 2017 revealed the ever-presence of a certain set of classical ideas and cultural artifacts in popular discourse. The Trump presidency, by August 2017, only eight months in, was already contentious. Trump’s campaign to “Make America Great Again,” which echoes the isolationism of American anti-Semites from a previous generation, Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford,²⁷ seemed to have given permission to a resurgent racism, anti-Semitism, and neo-Nazism.²⁸ In such an atmosphere, black intellectuals would weigh in, in one instance, regarding the relationship between Trump and Julius Caesar. The controversial staging in N.Y.C. of Public Theater’s play, in which the character of Caesar was dressed up like American President, Donald Trump, extra-long necktie and all, punctuated the potential for the ancient figure to cause civil unrest, 2,061 years after his assassination. This Caesar was not that of Cicero but rather from Shakespeare’s 1599 interpretation of the Roman figure. (Shakespeare’s representation is still classical, owing in great part to the influence of authors such as Plutarch in later antiquity.) In the year leading up to the election of Donald Trump, at least two classicists, who, notably for our purposes here, happened to be black, had already drawn similar parallels between Caesar and Trump to that of the Public Theatre. In an address to returning faculty at the University of Richmond, as Dean of the School of Arts & Sciences and Professor of Classics, I drew a comparison to Caesar from Trump’s Republican National Convention Address, in which the nominee’s “I alone can fix it” struck me as an echo of Julius Caesar’s move, as he crossed the Rubicon during a time of civil unrest.²⁹ Even if intended simply as a bold statement of confidence, the idea of a single agent saving a collective, and doing so by circumventing institutions, is a classic Caesarian conundrum. The significance of Trump’s statement—and subsequent behavior—has only deepened. Perhaps my reading of Trump, at that ²⁷ The relevance to the Trump presidency of Philip Roth’s novel The Plot Against America, which has Charles Lindbergh winning a presidential election in the late 1930s on an isolationist platform, thus the United States not entering World War II because of anti-Semitism, has been noted in a number of articles. See, e.g. McGrath 2018; see also Williams 2017. ²⁸ Ta-Nehisi Coates (2017) argues that the Trump presidency has little to do with class and is in fact a triumph of whiteness, as white Americans from every socioeconomic background and each gender voted in droves for Trump. ²⁹ See Rankine 2016.

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time, was piqued by how antithetical this had been to Obama’s style, which was his own inflection of black cool from Martin Luther King, Jr. to Malcolm X. After Trump had won the election, Danielle Allen, a Harvard Professor of Classics and Political Science, who also happens to be of African descent, made a similar comparison between Trump and late Republican Rome. In praise of Cicero’s On Duties, Allen bemoaned the fall of stable political institutions, noting that Cicero’s work was written six months after Caesar’s assassination. Stable governments rely on institutions, which meteoric individuals can disrupt: “Donald Trump’s scattershot fire-setting serves a political purpose. It sets those who would hold him accountable constantly chasing after another potential crisis, unable to set their own agenda.”³⁰ Here again Allen suggests that the proper deployment of the presidential form is the symbolic presence of order, within the framework of laws and governance structures. Contrary to the deference to the office that Obama demonstrated, over time Trump has gained the sustained criticism of behaving like a dictator. In one particular critique, he was compared to Kim Jong-un, with whom he would hold the first American summit with North Korea.³¹ This is not the place to pursue further critique of the Trump presidency. Suffice it for the purpose here to affirm the relevance of material from the classics to contemporary social and political use. Black Atlantic authors, moreover, often have particular investments in material relevant to the broader culture. For at least two Black Atlantic writers, Caesar proved to be a useful counterpoint for thinking through the meaning of a Trump presidency. Allen and I study the form of the American presidency, through its classical prism, to arrive at a particular set of ethical, civic, and symbolic concerns. One might argue that others who are not of African descent have also criticized the Trump presidency, but the commitment of writers of African descent to challenging American imperial authority has been a persistent strain of American letters.³²

³⁰ See D. Allen 2017a. ³¹ As Matthew Bell’s article has it, both men live in the shadow of a larger-than-life father, both younger sons overcoming the birthright of an older brother. See Bell 2017. ³² See Barnard 2017.

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W. E. B. Du Bois: The Veil and the Talented Tenth One prominent black Atlantic writer to grapple with European ideas was W. E. B. Du Bois, who is relevant to the questions I am raising. Du Bois was an early proponent of a kind of classics for all. He is relevant to arguments regarding classics for all, especially concerning access for black Americans to the ideas in classical texts. His significance to—and later critique of—what might be read as a kind of neoliberal agenda (a notion of free, individual agents in free markets) in his notion of the “Talented Tenth” pertains here, as we will see. I have already discussed the relevance of neoliberalism and the disappearance of apparatuses of help—the State, the notion of rights of individuals over the critique of entitlements—to such organizations as Classics for All. This neoliberal agenda appears in Du Bois’s work in terms of a kind of positivism, as I have begun to intimate.³³ Du Bois believed that the advancement of knowledge in all its branches would lead to social progress, and he tethered this belief to the early- or pseudo-scientific premises about progress, such as the idea that distinct races of people have particular contributions to make to the advancement of human societies (as opposed to race being simply a social construct).³⁴ One might read the contemporary moment as a kind of removal of Du Bois’s “Veil” from history, through the advent of a kind of egalitarian diversity; once the Veil is removed, we come to a revelation of a multiplicity of perspectives of contemporary voices. Given the orientation of Du Bois’s concept of the Veil toward simultaneous currents of German humanism and a black spiritual science, the Veil is an apt metaphor in an essay in which I am arguing for specific cultural inflections of received material. A historical and social Veil had obscured the contribution of the Negro to history. If the denial of black humanity had heretofore obscured the African contribution, the lifting of the Veil would open a path toward positive progress. ³³ See, e.g. Appiah 2014 on Du Bois’s connection to Wilhelm Dilthey. Nineteenthcentury European writers were increasingly wedded to notions of science and the progress it could bring. Appiah argues that Dilthey’s distinction between Natureswissenschaft (“natural sciences”) and Geisteswissenschaft (spiritual sciences) finds its way into Du Bois’s 1903 Souls of Black Folk, “soul” here as der Geist (of the spiritual sciences). ³⁴ See Appiah 2014.

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Du Bois’s model, and even his description of the “twoness” of American society, depends on the metaphor of the Veil: Today the ferment of his [the Negro’s] striving toward self-realization is to the strife of the white world like a wheel within a wheel: beyond the Veil are smaller but like problems of ideals, of leaders and the led, of serfdom, of poverty, of order and subordination, and through all, the Veil of race. (Du Bois 1903, 79)

The metaphor of the Veil is used throughout Souls of Black Folk. In this passage, Du Bois takes the distant gaze of the “white world,” beyond which one sees Negro strife as the biblical “wheel within a wheel” (Ezekiel 1:16). Behind the Veil, white America during Du Bois’s time would be shocked to imagine, for example, that African Americans engaged with the classics (and here again is Calhoun), because these are “like problems of ideas, of leader and the led” and so on. Forefathers like Thomas Jefferson rejected the idea that blacks had the intellectual prowess to grapple with complex ideas.³⁵ Du Bois sees the problem as a historical one, however, not one of ability. For the African in North America, ideas were themselves contraband, as laws and social practice kept black slaves on the darker side of education—“through all, the Veil of race.” On the other side of the Veil, sharecropping and second-class citizenship overdetermined the lives of African Americans, after slavery.³⁶ But access to classical material also meant that these same sharecroppers might be reading Shakespeare, to everyone’s benefit.³⁷ Du Bois’s idea of the Veil and interest in removing it would be built on his classical humanism. In Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois argued that texts such as Cicero’s Pro Archia could edify the most impoverished of persons.³⁸ The Washingtonian image of a poor son of a sharecropper combing over French grammar, notwithstanding his untidy surroundings, was certainly aimed to point up a kind of absurdity inherent in arguments for black humanism, such as that contained in Du Bois’s evaluation of classical education for the Negro.³⁹ Nevertheless, Du Bois

³⁵ See Cook and Tatum 2010. ³⁶ See Coates 2014. ³⁷ As I have argued elsewhere, Du Bois was likely indebted to such writers as Alexander von Humboldt for his hope in humanism. ³⁸ See Cook and Tatum 2010; a volume of the International Journal of the Classical Tradition (2018) has also taken up the topic. See also Appiah 2014. ³⁹ See Washington 1901. See also Rankine 2019.

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persisted, at least early on. Along with his sense that classical humanism would be helpful to blacks, Du Bois of course advanced the notion of the Talented Tenth, the idea that the success of a few simultaneously would open the path for many and in racial terms would belie the Negro problem, the sense that the black subject was a difficulty to be resolved.⁴⁰ The Talented Tenth would serve as the example of the potential for all people in the Black Atlantic. Du Bois’s Talented Tenth could pass into respectable society on the other side of the Veil, even with the persistent stigma of race. Later Du Bois, who had tried to teach Cicero’s Pro Archia to rural Southern children early in his life, recognized the limits of his arguments in favor of liberal education, particularly as it pertained to a Talented Tenth: My faith hitherto has been in what I once denominated the “Talented Tenth.” I now realize that the ability within a people does not automatically work for its highest salvation. On the contrary, in an era like this, and in the United States, many of the educated and gifted young black folks will be as selfish and immoral as the whites who surround them and to whom Negroes have been taught to look as ideals. (Du Bois 1952, 76)

Du Bois’s late critique of the notion of the Talented Tenth owed to what he saw as an individual crisis, wherein the movement of democracy, progress, and a sense of the public good to the interior space of the self fails. Pure neoliberalism relies on “selfish and immoral” people to perform racial uplift, and they will not. Where individuals and their interests abound, there is little common good. People require collective appeals to our better angels. What would prompt the Talented Tenth toward a common cause? The leap from rural isolation to the heights of liberal education required especially fit people, and those people would have to see themselves as somehow joined, sharers of a common fate. In Ellisonian terms, the Negro’s labyrinthine journey from the South, to him almost medieval in its progress, to city centers like New York City resulted in psychosis and psychopathy.⁴¹ Though Ellison made this argument in the twentieth century, the mindless violence in urban centers, itself linked to systemic ⁴⁰ Du Bois points to the increasing number of Negro graduates from colleges from the late 1800s to 1903, an astounding, almost threefold increase in just a bit over a decade. See Du Bois 1903, 105. ⁴¹ See Ellison 1964.

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problems, is unfortunate evidence that the conditions he recounted in the Harlem of the 1960s can be applied across America in the early twenty-first century. How can pure liberalism help these conditions? Just as Du Bois’s optimism waned in the face of difficult progress, so the neoliberal story of classics for all must face the realities of a steep climb. Access remains a systemic problem, for which philanthropic efforts serve as little more than a patch. Classics is not widely accessible to the average student, and this field of study is only emblematic of broad discrepancies in access to resources in some of the most important fields, such as STEM.⁴² Access to classical materials—training in languages, learning to read texts and images—still takes time and apprenticeship. The entry point into the world not only of classical learning but even more broadly of liberal education still comes at a price. The positivistic gait threatens to obscure the real divides that remain.⁴³ These divides are economic, but they are also racial. In contrast to Du Bois’s efforts to remove the Veil, in the 1960s–80s Ralph Ellison would write that Americans had historically continuously tried to “get shut” of the Negro.⁴⁴ The contemporary scene reifies the divide and expands it beyond blacks internally, most notably with Trump’s border wall. Elsewhere in the Black Atlantic (e.g. Brazil), public policies (deliberate whitening, such as evident in Trump’s rhetoric) were to be the means by which unity, economic prosperity, and national identity would be achieved. The twentieth-century (e.g. Brazil again) backlash against such policies as racial quotas reveals deeper sentiments.⁴⁵ And these are only cursory examples of the contemporary state of play for Black Atlantic persons.

#BlackLivesMatter: The Persistence of the Veil, the Problem of the Talented Tenth Moving from Du Bois back to the twenty-first century, in the United States the election of a black president who served two terms between ⁴² See Wladawsky 2016. ⁴³ Regarding these divides, see, e.g. the 2017 report from equalityofopportunity.org, printed in the January 18, 2017 edition of The New York Times, which charted colleges in the United States that have more students from the top 1% than from the bottom 60% of American society. ⁴⁴ See Ellison 1986. ⁴⁵ For whitening in the context of Brazil in the early twentieth century, see Butler 1998; see also Andrews 2004. On affirmative action in Brazil, see “H. J.” 2013.

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2008 and 2016 caused some to declare the advent of a post-racial era. The marriage of high and low culture was emblematized in the friendship between President Obama and Jay-Z, black American rap artist turned mogul. The bond was clear on the one hand in former President Barack Obama’s recorded message for Jay-Z’s inauguration to the Songwriters’ Hall of Fame⁴⁶ and on the other in Jay-Z’s shout-out to Obama in his 2017 track “Open Letter” from 4:44.⁴⁷ It was as if the bond between these two men affirmed the American Dream for everyone in America, in this case two black men raised by single mothers, one a Harvard graduate, lawyer turned president, the other a dropout, drug-dealer turned entrepreneur. This moment in itself overturned history—and in a remarkably short amount of time. It was a revolution. In the early 1990s, the rapper Tupac would declare, “Although it seems heaven-sent, we ain’t ready to see a black president.”⁴⁸ Some twenty-five years later, black President Emeritus Obama would be arm in arm with Jay-Z and Beyoncé. These moves ostensibly affirm what would be the model of uplift from Du Bois’s project, that the progress of a few would benefit the many. As far apart as their worlds might seem, Obama and Jay-Z might seem to be the fulfillment of Du Bois’s Talented Tenth. The problem is that upon further examination, these two men are the exception, not the norm. Their symbolic triumph belies a system wherein others like them are shut out, incarcerated, or slain: “You know, if I had a son, he would look like Trayvon.”⁴⁹ Underneath the symbolism and notwithstanding Obama’s ethics, civics, and mastery of symbolic value, as well as his improvisation on the presidential form, the period of Obama’s presidency occurred over eight years in which unceasing violence in American cities like Chicago, Illinois, would reach an unprecedented pitch. It would be a timeframe within which America saw the rise of B.L.M. in response to this violence. The B.L.M. movement began in 2013, after the acquittal of George Zimmerman, who took Trayvon’s life.⁵⁰ By 2014, everyday citizens had

⁴⁶ See Andrews 2017. ⁴⁷ “Obama said, ‘Chill, you gonna get me impeached.’ But you didn’t need this shit anyway, chill with me on the beach.” ⁴⁸ Tupac, “Changes,” from Greatest Hits (1998). ⁴⁹ Also telling in the proximity between success and failure for blacks in the United States is the book about Danielle Allen’s jailed, HIV+, slain cousin (2017b). ⁵⁰ For a comprehensive summary of the events leading to the B.L.M. movement, see Chang 2016 and Khan-Cullors and bandele 2018.

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come to witness the incessant hunting of young black men across the country. In Ferguson, Missouri, a police officer shot and killed an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, and would later be acquitted, as was Zimmerman. That same year, Eric Garner’s plea, “I can’t breathe,” would come to be a national mantra of the suffocating grip that law enforcement held over black lives. Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi led a movement that harnessed the outrage over these acts—and their blatant disregard of black lives. Here again the notion of the African as a full human being, given our erasure from history, would be radical. Within the context of an erasure of black lives from the category of “the human,” the movement was one of dire—though perhaps unexpected—urgency. In the popular American culture, broadly speaking, the #BLM movement would be met with a heightened, racialized backlash. Whether or not one takes the election of Donald Trump to the presidency as a sign of this countervailing reality,⁵¹ there have been sufficient signs within the culture, beyond the election, of the rejection of a broad, democratic, multicultural movement toward American wholeness. Politically, it has been argued that the failure of the resistance, the Democratic National Convention, to rally around issues over identity itself led to the election loss. Those more eager, moreover, to link Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign with white supremacist pressures need not return to the 1930s—the source of this notion of American greatness—to find corroborating evidence. The glee of such forces as the Alt(ernative) Right leader Richard Spencer at Trump’s election is one sign of the place of Trump’s ascent in the imagination of a sizeable percentage of the American population, certainly enough to secure Trump’s presidency.⁵² It is no coincidence that by 2017 America would witness a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in cities such as Charlottesville, Virginia. The removal of Confederate monuments would lead to outrage among white supremacists. Charlottesville was not alone, isolated, or all that new. Emblematized by Dylann Roof ’s June 17, 2015 shooting of twelve parishioners at Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charlotte, South

⁵¹ See Coates 2017. ⁵² We have already seen the uses of the Classics as a stand-in for a white supremacist agenda. See also Davis 2017.

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Carolina, white supremacy had been in ascent by the end of the second decade of the twentieth century. The link between this national political scene and the educational landscape, of which the classics is a part, is easy to identify.⁵³ Rather than a loose correlation, the ties between B.L.M. and campus climate issues are tight. In the aftermath of the deaths of Trayvon and others, black students and their allies on campuses across the country led protests that took on the historical legacies of white supremacy.⁵⁴ At Yale University, protestors successfully brought about a change in the appellation of Calhoun College, named for the Confederate statesman who was known for his claim that blacks could not learn Ancient Greek because of our inferior intelligence. In 2015, Yale was 10 percent black. This campus minority was heard in its efforts to change the landscape,⁵⁵ the broadening of access, and discussion at the elite university, so that it corresponded with what was happening in the public domain across the country. Yale is emblematic of the changing landscape in higher education, especially at elite institutions, places where, by no coincidence, Greek and Latin had long been the pinnacle of educational achievement. Progress does not come without struggle. A report in 2017 of a study on economic disparities at elite institutions showed that “38 colleges had more students from the top 1 percent than the bottom 60 percent.”⁵⁶ At Yale, almost 19% of the student body for the class of 2013 came from the top 1% of earners, families that made $630,000 or more. This number corresponded with 16% coming from the bottom 60%, families that earned less than $65,000 for the year. While these extremes certainly elide the realities in the middle, they help in part to explain how cultural tensions might come into play when students from such disparate backgrounds, where race is always implicated, are forced into the same space.

Classics for All? It is not surprising that classics, as an enterprise that was once the coin of the realm in higher education, would have some currency, though the payoff to their study for the neoliberal subject is limited. As we have seen, ⁵³ See Berlinerblau 1999. ⁵⁴ On the link between B.L.M. and issues of “campus climate,” see Chang 2016. ⁵⁵ See Remnick 2017. ⁵⁶ See n. 43.

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as early as 1903, Du Bois had turned to the classics as a meeting place for poor, rural blacks in the South and the most exalted towers of education. Du Bois himself “sits with Shakespeare, and he winces not” (1903, 9). Cicero’s Pro Archia was emblematic of what the classics had to offer, namely, a place to work out the grand questions that still at that time were encapsulated in the term “liberal arts” and models of excellence. Du Bois’s approach to the classics, the idea that they were at the core of liberal education, and that liberal education would bridge divides, tear a Veil in two, and help to create a hybrid, multi-ethnic nation, encouraged classical curricula at the core of many historically black colleges and universities for a time (O’Connor and Goings 2010). The debate continues in many ways into the twenty-first century, when the high price tag of higher education in the United States— upwards of $60,000 a year at many private colleges, and fast approaching $70,000—forces those few students who make it in to focus on their return on investment.⁵⁷ Classics, or its affiliated Liberal Arts fields, in which category I include history, philosophy, English, foreign languages, and fine arts, would not be the top choice for students looking for a quick payoff after graduation. At some liberal arts colleges, anywhere from 20 to 40 percent of majors are in business, with a sizable portion flocking to technical fields, applied sciences (computer science, engineering), and premedical fields.⁵⁸ As classics, and higher education more broadly, have become more democratically accessible, they have also lost a bit of their prestige. Even if this is the case, the classics and many other fields remain perceptibly inaccessible for those concerned with their own immediate economic and social progress. The ubiquity of a good, moreover, is meaningless, if obstacles to accessing it are insurmountable. First-generation students and those from other underrepresented backgrounds are extremely vulnerable.⁵⁹ Young people interested in launching into the middle class are more likely to study business or another pre-professional field than they are to pursue the classics. The circumstances at the beginning of the twentyfirst century echo the old debate regarding the efficacy of a classical education for many students. Here again, historically and broadly, the ⁵⁷ See O’Shaughnessy 2017. ⁵⁸ See National Center for Educational Statistics 2018. ⁵⁹ See Ishitani 2006.

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African in America has gone from slavery to sharecropping, Jim Crow and segregation, and integration in just over 100 years.⁶⁰ The movement of Africans in America to northern cities is one that August Wilson would come to lament, given the desperate conditions in which we found ourselves: economically segregated northern cities, substandard housing and discrimination, and the narrowing of opportunities for upward mobility.⁶¹ I have already referred to Ellison’s notion that the profound leap from rural South to urban centers led to an equally profound emotional and psychological trauma, psychosis, and psychopathy. Similarly, the leap to college education for many whose parents did not attend college is enough to cause substantial hardship, even without the study of a field noted for its perceived elitism and racial exclusiveness. And yet on the other side of this great divide is the ubiquity of the classics as both atmospheric and archival material for democratic discourse. In the hands of Black Atlantic authors, the classics undergo ethical, conceptual, and symbolic shifts that engage the state of play for Black Atlantic citizens and others, much like Obama’s improvisation on the American presidential form or Du Bois’s grappling with “the Negro problem” through the classics. Symbolic embodiments of ethical and moral conundrums echo from Oedipus, to Shakespeare, to Abraham Lincoln. We now see them in Obama and Trump. And all of these forms speak to Black Atlantic writers in ways that we need to hear, for the sake of our civics. Classics for all is a paradox well worth contemplating in the context of the Black Atlantic.

⁶⁰ See Ellison 1964; Coates 2014.

⁶¹ See Bryer and Hartig 2006.

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Index abolitionism 74, 83, 136, 138, 143–4 Acevedo, Octavio 86 Aeneas 49–52, 129, 131, 224 Aeschylus 210–11, 216 Aesop 127 Africa: ancient civilizations 1–2, 5, 16, 203 classics in 6, 11 colonization of 141, 226, 232 cultural legacies in the diaspora 114, 121, 131, 200, 233 impact on Greco-Roman antiquity, 6–8, 146, 148, 162, 164, 172n. 12, 226–7, 229, 270–1; see also Afrocentrism languages of 40, 44–5, 60, 73, 237 return to 114, 252, 256 transatlantic slave trade and 35–6, 39, 49 visual cultures / legacies of 1–2, 16, 17, 21, 162, 165, 180–1 see also Egypt; Ethiopia; Libya; Nubia; Sudan African Americans: classicists 128, 137, 139, 147, 166, 274–5, 279–80 discrimination / violence against 23, 136, 180, 277–8, 282, 285–7, 289 popular engagement with classics 137–8, 156–7, 273, 275–6 women 134, 142 Africana: classical, see Classica Africana “Masked and Unmasked” 17, 165, 177, 180–2, 189, 190 Africans: cultural practices of 7, 11, 37, 180, 230, 271–2 diaspora 6, 9, 11, 43–5, 114–15, 121, 131–2, 189, 226–7, 228, 235, 264–5 enslavement of 14, 31, 36, 39–48, 53, 59–60, 66, 188; see also slavery Greco-Roman perceptions of 17, 138, 166, 171, 236, 269–70; see also race; racism

European perceptions of 36, 54, 65, 182n. 20, 229, 272; see also race; racism Roman Africans, fictional and historical 18, 230, 233–5, 236–9, 270–1 Afrocentrism 2, 8, 162, 229–30 Aidoo, Ama Ata 199 Ajax 260 Akan-Twi, see language, Akan-Twi Alexander the Great 99, 170 Allen, Danielle 277n. 21, 280, 285n. 49 America, United States of classics in 6, 127–8, 137–8, 155–8, 273, 275 immigrant experience in 250, 252, 260 military actions of 89, 98, 101–2, 103, 107–8 presidents of 19, 267–9, 271, 278–80, 284–6, 289 race and 134, 136, 148, 159, 212, 276, 282–7 Amin, Idi 213 Anchises 122 Andromeda: Andromeda, Nanny, Cetus and Medusa 16, 185–9 constellation 169, 190 literary representations of 166–70, 171–2 racial identity of 21, 164, 165–8, 170–7, 185–8, 190 receptions in popular culture 165, 173 receptions in visual art, general 16–17, 165, 170–7 The Rescue of Andromeda (painting) 17, 20, 189–91 The Rescue of Andromeda (sculpture) 17, 174, 175–80, 181–5, 186, 188–90; see also Fehr, Henry Antigone 10–11, 34, 80, 253n. 36 antislavery movements, see abolitionism Apollo 273, see also Nietzsche, Dionysus and Apollo

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Aratus 169 archives 14, 22, 29, 78, 234, 239, 289 Aries 169 art, see visual art Athena 166, 270 African Athena 6, 8–9, 11, 26 Black Athena 6–9, 12, 164, 229; see also Bernal, Martin Athenaeus 170 Athens: “Athens of the New World” 14–15, 80–1, 86–7, 92–8, 105, 106, 116; see also Santo Domingo classical 107, 215, 224 Atlas 13n. 30, 174, 190 Atreus, House of 241, 248, 250 Augustus, see Octavian Baldwin, James 209–10, 213–14 Balaguer, Joaquín 87, 89, 99, 104–5, 108, 115, 259 Basich, Castellanos 82, 110 Beard, Mary 24, 224 Bernal, Martin 6–9, 11, 17, 164, 229–30, 270 Bhabha, Homi 10, 243 Bible 63, 75–6, 130, 148, 149, 162, 217–18, 282 Black Aegean 11, 12, 31, 199, 272, 275 Black Atlantic: 2–6, 13–19, 26, 29–31, 81, 91, 115, 120, 132, 148n. 21, 162, 225–6, 229, 244, 251–2, 255, 271–2, 289 adaptations of, see Black Aegean The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, see Gilroy, Paul, The Black Atlantic gender in 20–1, 136, 142–4, 160–2 literature of, in general 32–3, 212, 272–3 multilingual 19–20, 198, 234, 250–1, 257 temporality of 21–2, 197–9, 221–2, 246–7 Black Art movement (Britain) 164, 181 black classicism 11–12, 116, 132, see also Classica Africana Black Lives Matter 19, 23, 276, 284–7 blackness 15, 81, 91, 94, 99, 103, 114, 134, 151, 156–7, 165–6, 175, 186, 269–71 black / white dichotomy 8, 11, 90–1, 93–4, 107, 163–4, 182, 200–2, 275–6

in classical antiquity, see Africans, Greco-Roman perceptions of classical / neoclassical sculptures and 24, 138, 144, 147, 172n. 11, 182–3, 186 history of 32–3, 56, 202 see also race; racism bones, as literary trope 14, 31, 32–7, 42 Breton, André 206 Brexit 23, 223, 225 Britain, see United Kingdom Brooks, Gwendolyn 231 Burne-Jones, Edward Coley 165, 174, 175, 181 Caesar, Julius 23, 99, 278–80 Canada 4, 125–6 canon 33–4, 39, 48, 51n. 54, 90 art history and 165, 173 classics and 5, 10, 250, 272 Caribbean: classics in 6, 9, 14, 20, 22, 30, 38–9, 80, 199, 255–6 colonization of 88, 121, 185, 227 diaspora and 4, 16, 20, 22, 126, 134, 200, 223–4, 225, 227, 245, 250–1, 264, 278 education in 93, 124, 163 languages of 34–5, 38–9, 43–5, 55–6, 131, 256 literary trends in 32–3, 36–9, 41n. 28, 51n. 54, 53, 54, 108, 206n. 13, 244n. 15, 246–7, 249 parallels with ancient Greece 87, 96, 185–6 transatlantic slave trade and 22, 45, 61, 88, 121, 227 see also Dominican Republic; Haiti; Jamaica; Martinique; St. Lucia; Trinidad Carpentier, Alejo 243, 244n. 15 Cassiopeia 166, 169, 175 Castro, Fidel 104 Césaire, Aimé 17–18, 52–3, 90n. 27, 197–200, 221–2, 250, 252, 261 And the Dogs Went Silent . . . : Tragedy 210–12 Notebook of a Return to My Native Land / Cahier d’un retour au pays natal 18, 200–5, 207, 212, 213, 261 The Tragedy of King Christopher/ Le tragédie du roi Christophe 18, 22, 199, 200, 212–21

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 Charon 129 Chesnutt, Charles W. 14, 74–6 Cepheus 166–9 Cetus 16, 170, 174, 176, 179, 183–8, 189–90 Christianity 128–30, 131, 218, 272 African Methodist Episcopal (AME) 125–6, 128, 286 Anglican 122, 123–4, 129, 130 British Methodist Episcopal (BME) 125, 128 Roman Catholicism 51, 82, 84–5, 97 Christophe, Henri 18, 22, 199, 200, 212–21 Cicero 127, 279, 280, 282–3, 288 Circe 51 Citadelle Laferrière 220–1 Clarke, George Elliot 126, 132 Classica Africana 274, see also black classicism classical reception studies 81, 221–2, 250, 255, 265, 272–6 francophone 19–20, 199 hispanophone 19–20, 79–80, 109 history of field 3–12, 25–6, 30–1, 274–5 new directions 17, 21–3, 26, 137–8 classics, as discipline 3, 6, 19, 24–5, 268–9, 273–7, 281, 284, 287–9; see also classical reception studies Classics For All (UK) 268, 273–4, 275, 276–7, 281 Cleopatra: Cleopatra (sculpture) 138, 149, 157, see also Story, William Wetmore The Death of Cleopatra (sculpture) 16, 137–9, 146–7, 149–59, 161, 162, see also Lewis, Edmonia literary representations of 139, 151, 153–6, 157, 158 racial identity of 21, 138, 148, 156–7 receptions in visual art, general 157–8 Clifford, James 247, 251 Collier, Thomas S. 139, 151, 153–6 colonialism: in Africa 232, 271 in the Caribbean 33, 38–9, 44, 54, 88–9, 91–2, 96–8, 113, 186, 211 classics and 10, 38n. 19, 86, 91–2, 93–9, 109 see also postcolonial theory

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comic books 242, 243, 246, 254, 262 Cooper, Anna Julia 136, 139, 140, 141–3, 144, 145, 146, 147n. 18, 157 Creole/patois, see language, Creole/patois creolity, see hybridity critical race studies 21, 24n. 36, 32 Cyclops 246n. 19, 255, 260–1 Damas, Léon-Gontran 198, 200, 213n. 23 Danae 169 Danticat, Edwidge 259n. 54, 263–4 Delany, Martin 20, 136, 138, 142, 146 Del Monte, Félix María 89–92, 93–4 Detournément 181 diaspora 8–9, 10, 221–2, 225, 242, 245, 248–9, 251–2 African 11, 17, 80, 133n. 1, 134, 139, 148n. 21, 161, 189, 198, 226–8, 247, 256, 264 Caribbean 22, 248–9, 254 Díaz, Junot 18, 22, 116, 203, 241–5, 265 The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao 18, 241–54, 265 Drown 18, 241, 244, 254–65 Dido 49–52 Diop, Cheikh Anta 8, 17, 164 Dionysus, see Nietzsche, Dionysus and Apollo Dominican Republic 22, 81, 82, 84–5, 109–16, 201, 248–50, 252–4, 264, 265, see also Santo Domingo relationship with Haiti 86–7, 89–92, 94–5, 97, 99, 102–7, 114 “Sparta of the New World” 14–15, 81, 86, 102–7, 115–16 Döring, Tobias 29, 48, 53 double consciousness, see Du Bois, W. E. B. Douglas, Aaron 1–2, 21 Douglass, Frederick 13n. 31, 144n. 14, 159, 161–2 Dove, Rita 199, 231 Du Bois, W. E. B. 19, 20, 75n. 42, 136, 137, 165, 277, 281–4, 285, 288, 289 double consciousness 2, 5, 15 Souls of Black Folk 282–3 Talented Tenth 142, 281, 283 veil, metaphor of the 281–2, 284

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education, classical: in the Caribbean 6, 35, 68, 92 in North America 19, 75n. 42, 128, 137, 142, 143n. 13, 275, 282–4, 287–9 in the United Kingdom 67, 273–4 in West Africa 6 education, higher: in North America 24, 128, 130, 131, 142, 143n. 13, 275, 283n. 40, 287–9 in the Caribbean 35, 93–5, 99, 113 in the United Kingdom 225–6 Egypt: ancient civilization 1, 5, 8, 138, 148, 156–7, 161–2, 169, 229, 270 as metaphor for slavery 148, 149 Roman Empire and 138–9, 141, 145–9, 156, 157–9, 161–2, 166n. 3 visual cultures / legacies of 1, 16, 137, 139, 141, 144, 145–50, 153, 158–9, 170–1 Ellison, Ralph 9, 250, 252, 261n. 59, 262, 273, 275, 278, 283–4, 289 empire 36, 37, 38, 53, 56, 79, 96, 109, 141, 153, 157, 159, 186 Roman 38, 136, 141, 147–8, 149, 226, 233, 238 translatio studii et imperii 45, 52 English, see language, English epic: Black Atlantic journeys and 21, 22, 29, 50–4, 250–2 Caribbean 14, 18, 22, 34–7, 55, 91–2, 93, 185, 200, 249–50, 261–2 Homeric 34–5, 38, 51, 55, 249, 251, 253n. 36, 254–63 related genres 171, 210n. 17, 230, 231–2, 242–3, 249–50, 254–6, 262–5 Ethiopia: ancient civilization 5, 17, 159, 162, 165–6, 189, 236 Greco-Roman depictions of 166–72, 175–6, 181 modern 141 etymology 14, 20, 33, 34–5, 36, 45–7, 54, 244, see also philology Eurocentrism 6, 25, 43, 87, 225, 228–9, 243 Europe: Africa and, modern relations between 21, 65, 81, 158, 226, 232, 271–3

Black Europe 16, 21, 133–6, 189, 225–30 classics and 3, 5, 6, 8, 10, 11, 37–9, 60, 62, 72–4, 81, 93, 158 cultural constructions of 7n. 18, 8, 15, 43, 80, 158, 171n. 9, 247 intellectual traditions of 113–14, 210, 281 tourism in 96, 124, 142–4, 146, 147–9, 152, 160–2 see also France; Italy; Spain; United Kingdom Evaristo, Bernardine 18, 20, 189, 223, 226–31 The Emperor’s Babe 18, 20, 189, 223, 227–9, 230–9 Lara 228, 230, 237 Exodus 148n. 21, 149, 162 Fanon, Frantz 17, 163–4, 174, 180, 190–2, 206n. 13 fantastic, see science fiction; speculative fiction fascism 101, 102, 134, 140–1, 159, see also white supremacy Fehr, Henry 17, 174, 175–80, 181–5, 186, 188–90 feminism 227–8 black feminism 16, 20–1, 38, 135, 139, 142, 157, 229–31 classical studies and 168, 251 figures, grammatical and poetic 32, 48–9, 54–5, 91, 232 allegory 58, 179, 212, 215 allusion 2, 17, 34, 46, 49, 51, 67, 68, 71, 78, 207, 218, 224, 232, 244n. 13, 260 anagrams 14, 20, 40–1, 47n. 46, 53, 54–6, see also names and naming analogy 22, 23, 36, 49, 55, 72, 107, 181, 185, 186, 198, 248, 249, 278–80 homophony 35, 52 metaphor 12–13, 29, 32, 41n. 28, 43n. 35, 44–5, 55, 110, 149, 172n. 11, 186, 202, 207, 214, 217–20, 242n. 5, 264, 281–2 metathesis 55 metonymy 35, 69 see also philology, radical France 136, 161, 192, 200, 204 literature of 127, 199, 206 military actions of 88–9, 190n. 23, 202

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 politics in 113, 199, 208, 210, 225 race and 228 relationship with Caribbean colonies 88–9, 107, 121, 201–2, 216, 253n. 36 French, see language, French Freud, Sigmund 183, 244–5 Fryer, Peter 226–7, 229 fukú 241, 243, 245–6, 247–9, 253n. 37, 254, 255, 265 Furies 91, 248 García-Peña, Lorgia 89, 90n. 26, 91n. 29, 103n. 67, 115n. 90 Garnet, Henry Highland 138, 162 gender 4, 24, 39, 43, 91, 134–6, 144, 176n. 17, 227–8, 230–2, 264 in antiquity 170, 235–8 classical receptions and 18, 20–1, 62, 138, 156–8, 168, 186, 188–9, 251, 263 masculinity 168, 183 see also feminism; women genocide 15, 103, 106 Gilroy, Paul: The Black Atlantic 1–6, 7, 8, 12–13, 15, 19, 26, 30, 81, 108, 136, 139, 148n. 21, 198, 225–6, 229, 234, 237, 244, 247, 248, 250–2, 257, 271–2 classical reception scholarship in conversation with 9–11, 19–21, 31, 275 Goff, Barbara 6, 10–11, 31, 79n. 1, 80n. 4, 199, 272–3, 275, see also Black Aegean Gorgon, see Medusa Greece, ancient: cultural legacies of 2, 5, 6–8, 10–11, 15, 62, 64, 72, 80–1, 85–7, 91–2, 97–109, 122–3, 131, 148, 159, 162, 166n. 3, 224–5, 229, 236, 247, 269, 270, 274 literary legacies of 17, 29–31, 34–7, 38n. 13, 54–6, 63, 80, 91, 116, 127, 164, 169, 211, 241–2, 246–50, 255–63, 268, 273, 275 visual cultures / legacies of 1–2, 136–7, 167, 170–1, 172n. 11, 182 Greek, see language, Greek, ancient; language, Greek, modern

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Greenwood, Emily 9, 12n. 29, 116n. 97 Afro-Greeks 6, 10n. 25, 38nn. 18–19, 79n. 1, 87n. 20, 255n. 42, 275, 276n. 18 Gregson v. Gilbert 40, 50, 52, 55 griots 36, 230, see also oral storytelling Hades, see Pluto Haiti 22, 80n. 3, 88–9, 206, 207, 212–21, 264 Dominican Republic and 15, 81, 85, 86–97, 99, 103–7, 114–16 Haitian Revolution 18, 88, 198–9, 201–2, 203, 212–13 Haley, Shelley 142n. 10, 156–7 Hall, Stuart 181, 249n. 28 Harris, Wilson 38, 244n. 15, 246, 247n. 21 Hartley, Henry Alexander Saturnin 15–16, 22, 119–32 Classical Translations 16, 126–7 Ta Tou Pragma Emou Biou 122–3, 128–30 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 145, 148–9 Hector 52 Hecuba 63n. 19, 128, 260 Helen 87, 256 Heliodorus 167, 171 Helios 260 Henríquez Ureña, Pedro 90n. 28, 92–3, 96, 99, 100 Heracles 169–70 historiography 7n. 18, 88n. 23, 95, 103, 167n. 4, 229; see also history history: ancient 7–8, 24, 61–2, 102n. 64, 134, 139, 141, 147–8, 156–7, 159–60, 161–2, 164, 167n. 5, 229, 238–9, 269–71 art history 15, 16–17, 21, 135, 136–7, 151, 173, 177 Atlantic, modern 8, 13, 14, 17–18, 22, 26, 29–33, 36n. 13, 37, 40, 54, 84, 88–9, 105, 110–2, 202–3, 212, 216, 226–7, 244n. 15, 245, 251–5, 286 European, modern 10, 133–4, 139, 141, 144, 146, 162, 223–8 myth / mythmaking and 7n. 17, 17–18, 20, 30, 54, 89–90, 92, 167–8, 197, 199–200, 202–3, 211, 213–15, 221, 230, 232, 238, 242, 249–50, 254 revisionist 20, 137, 208–10, 225–31, 239, 252, 281 see also historiography

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homecoming 22, 46, 96, 200, 224, 231, 238, 252, 254, 256–8, 260, 263 immigrant experience and 161, 244–5, 250, 256–8 Homer 34–5, 55, 242, 249, 253n. 36 Iliad 185–6, 256 Odyssey 10, 39, 51, 251, 254–63, 265 Horace 55, 127, 158n. 32 Hosmer, Harriet 143, 144n. 14, 150–1, 157, 158 humanism 4, 14, 31, 281, 282–3 hybridity 2, 4, 7, 19, 21, 110, 249, 264, 288 cultural 26, 29n. 2, 112, 233, 236, 238 linguistic 20, 44n. 39, see also language, Creole/patois immigrants / immigration: in America 252, 255, 260 anti-immigration policies 23, 80, 85, 114 in Britain 20, 24, 134, 177, 223–5, 227, 228–9, 230, 233, 234–7 imperialism 10, 45, 52, 56, 80, 95, 98, 156, 199, 232, 247, 250, 251, 255–7, 264 American 261–2, 272n. 11, 280 British 18, 62n. 17, 134 Italian 134, 141, 158–9 Roman, ancient 16, 97, 134, 138, 141, 147n. 19, 151, 156, 158–9, 226 Spanish 84n. 9, 87–8, 103 see also empire Isaac, Benjamin 8n. 22, 236, 270 Italy: art and architecture in 134–5, 136–7, 139, 140–1, 144, 149–52, 159–62 fascism and 134, 140–1, 159 literature of 90 race and 133–4, 136–7, 161–2, 224 tourism in 142–3, 148–9, 150, 152, 160–2 see also Rome, ancient Jamaica 39, 58–64, 67–9, 73, 121, 127, 165, 175, 185, 228 James, C. L. R. 22, 116n. 97, 132, 198 James, George 8, 229 Jason 127 Jay-Z 19, 278, 285 Ketos, see Cetus King, Martin Luther, Jr. 268, 280

language 35–6, 38–45, 48, 53–6, 60, 70–3, 75, 78, 113, 127–8, 129, 131, 190, 225, 233, 237, 243, 269 Akan-Twi 40n. 27, 60, 63n. 20, 73, 78 Creole/patois 14, 20, 34–5, 40n. 27, 43–4, 72–3, 75, 78, 114, 131, 234, 249 education 67–8, 273–4, 284, 288–9 English 20, 36, 38–9, 43–5, 47, 54, 67, 127, 234, 256–7 French 35, 40n. 27, 41n. 28, 128, 143n. 13, 282 Greek, ancient 16, 20, 40n. 27, 46, 49, 54, 128, 131, 132, 137, 143n. 13, 147, 164, 236, 268, 269, 278, 287 Greek, modern 34–5 Latin 14, 20, 31–3, 35, 37, 40n. 27, 42, 43, 45–8, 51–2, 54, 67–8, 75, 110–11, 122, 127, 128, 129, 132, 137, 142n. 10, 143n. 13, 147, 164, 217, 218, 234, 236, 237, 268, 287 multilingualism 14, 19, 20, 40, 234 postcolonialism and 36, 43–5, 48, 54–6, 73, 256–7 Sudanese 233, 234, 237 Yoruba 22, 40, 42n. 31, 45n. 43 see also philology; etymology; hybridity, linguistic Las Casas, Bartolomé de 82–4, 95–6, 112–3 Latin, see language, Latin Latin America classics in 4, 15, 80, 93–4, 98, 100 leaders of literature of 243, 244 race and Latino, Juan 9, 110–1 Lefkowitz, Mary 7n. 16, 229 Leighton, Frederic 173, 175, 176–7, 181, 182n. 20, 183 Lewis, Edmonia 135–9, 142–7, 149–53, 157–62 The Death of Cleopatra (pamphlet) 139, 153–6 The Death of Cleopatra (sculpture) 16, 137–9, 146–7, 149–59, 161, 162 Frederick Douglass and 144n. 14, 159, 161–2 American audiences and 136, 147, 152–3, 159, 160–2 Levy, Andrea 226, 236 Libya 18, 49, 50, 162, 172n. 11, 190n. 23, 238

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 Lincoln, Abraham 268, 273, 278, 289 Louverture, Toussaint 88, 198, 201–2, 206, 207–8, 211, 213 Lucretia 90 Lumumba, Patrice 212 magical realism 18, 242–4, 246, 265 Mandela, Nelson 268 manga 242, 246 Manilius 172 maroons, see slavery, fugitive slaves / maroons Martindale, Charles 6, 31, 175, 250 Martin, Trayvon 267–9 Martinique 121, 122, 123, 164, 200, 206, 208 McConnell, Justine 9, 232, 234, 253n. 36, 273 Black Odysseys 6, 10, 204n. 8, 250n. 29, 255n. 42, 261nn. 56 and 59, 275 McGrath, Elizabeth 165–7, 171–2, 190 Medea 127, 273 Medusa 16, 168, 170, 172n. 11, 174, 183, 185, 186–8 memory 30, 36–7, 55, 66, 71, 127, 204, 205, 216, 231 collective memory 32n. 8, 33, 93, 96, 180–1, 201–3, 228, 239 re-membering 31–3, 37, 42 Mediterranean, ancient 6, 8, 13n. 31, 16, 17, 23, 31, 134, 137, 148, 156, 161–2, 172n. 11, 189 Meriño, Fernando Arturo de 94–5, 96 Middle Passage 2, 4, 7, 12, 13, 15, 31, 32, 39, 56, 247, 253 literary / artistic representations of 21, 29–30, 35–6, 48, 53 see also slavery, transatlantic slave trade Mir, Pedro 108–9 modernity 7, 12n. 31, 13n. 33, 20, 26, 80, 84, 99, 137, 139, 198, 242, 263 antiquity and 1–3, 24, 148n. 20, 265 counter-cultures of 2–3, 6, 30, 225–6, 246, see also Gilroy, Paul, The Black Atlantic Montesinos, Fray Antón de 82–5, 95–6, 109, 110, 112–13 monuments 109, 112–13, 146, 149, 158, 166n. 3, 177, 179–80, 220, 286, see also obelisks

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Morrison, Toni 32, 46n. 44, 231, 236, 252 Moten, Fred 32–3, 56n. 63 Mudimbe, Valentin 269–9 Muses 122–3, 249 museums 21, 110, 113n. 86, 144, 165, 170–1, 174–5, 177, 179, 181–4, 227 music 21, 144, 174n. 16, 205, 231, 234 Mussolini, Benito 134, 140–1, 159 mythology, Greco-Roman 45, 90, 122–3, 127–9, 131, 174, 224, 251, 270 history and, see history, myth / mythmaking and literary adaptations of 18, 20, 39, 49–53, 65, 80, 91, 164, 166–70, 171–2, 205–6, 208–9, 210–1, 213–4, 216, 221, 231–4, 242, 246, 249–250, 254, 257–63 names inspired by 12, 14, 61–6, 68–9, 87 visual art, depicted in 15, 16–17, 20–1, 137, 146, 150, 153, 162, 165, 170–92 names and naming 14, 22–3, 46, 55, 57–78, 214–5, 234, 244, 258, 265, 287 in “A Deep Sleeper” 75–6, 78 African 42n. 31, 60–1, 73 anagrammatic 41 classical 34–5, 49–51, 61–9, 72, 75, 77–8, 80–1, 86–7, 92–8, 101–7, 115–16 neologisms 20, 35 of slaves 49, 57–78 in Zong! 42n. 31, 49–50 Nanny of the Maroons 16, 185–8 Napoleon 99, 137, 158, 253 nationalism 13, 15, 79–116, 225 American 225, 284 black 198, 200 British 179, 223–6, 235 Dominican / dominicanidad 15, 79–116 Italian / romanitá 141, 159 postnationalism 225, 244, 249–50, 254 négritude 198, 200, 203–10, 213n. 23, 220, 221, 252 neoclassical sculpture, see visual art, sculpture, classical / neoclassical neoliberalism 275–6, 281, 283–4, 287 Nereids 168, 174 Nietzsche, Friedrich 13n. 31, 185, 199, 211 Dionysus and Apollo 205–6, 208, 221–2

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Northup, Solomon 57–8, 60, 61n. 13 Nubia 16, 141, 159, 237, 239 Núñez, Manuel 113–15 Obama, Barack 23, 267–9, 271, 275, 278, 280, 285, 289 obelisks 16, 139, 141, 145–6, 148–9, 158–9, 162 Octavian 141, 146, 155–9, 166n. 3 Odysseus 51, 53n. 56, 127, 257, 259–62 Oedipus 10–11, 273, 289 Olusoga, David 224, 235 oral storytelling 248, 256, 263, see also griots Ovid 17, 67, 127, 169, 170, 174, 175, 182, 186, 192, 242, 256n. 45 Heroides 167–8, 172 Metamorphoses 39, 166–7, 173n. 13, 263 Padilla Peralta, Dan-el 25, 80n. 4, 87n. 19, 278n. 60 Parks, Suzan-Lori 23, 273, 275, 278 Patterson, Orlando 58, 272 Pegasus 190 Peix, Pedro 100–2 Penelope 251, 255n. 45, 258–60 Pérez Firmat, Gustavo 256 Persephone 230–3 Perseus: myth of 166–70, 172n. 11, 189, 192 representations in visual art 170, 173n. 13, 174, 176–7, 179, 183, 184–5, 188, 190 Pétion, Alexandre Sabès 214–15 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition 137, 152–3, 161 Philip, Marlene NourbeSe 31–3, 36, 38–9 Looking For Livingstone 39, 41 She Tries Her Tongue 38n. 21, 39, 41n. 28, 42, 43–5, 48, 54 Zong! 14, 20, 22, 32–3, 38, 39–43, 45–56 Phillips, Caryl 226 philology: classical 6, 20, 31, 35, 38, 46, 92, 128 radical 14, 20, 22, 31, 38, 40–3, 45–8, 54–6 Philomela 39, 45 philosophy 164, 182n. 20, 199, 205–6, 211–12, 222, 229, 243n. 11, 274, 288

Phineus 168, 172n. 11, 173n. 13, 174 Plutarch 16, 138, 139, 151, 153–6, 158, 279 Pluto 232 Polyphemus, see Cyclops Poseidon 168, 174 positivism 8, 277, 281, 284 postcolonial theory 17, 52, 198, 200, 227–8, 244, 251, 261–2 classics and 10, 20, 79–80, 199, 247, 272–3, 541 Powell, Enoch 223–5 Powers, Hiram 157, 158 Prometheus 12n. 30, 18, 182n. 20, 210, 213–14, 216 Proserpina, see Persephone pseudo-Apollodorus 17, 168 Ptolemy, Claudius 169–70 Pyramid of Cestius 141, 158–60, 162 race 4, 6, 12, 21, 52, 65, 114–15, 130, 138, 142, 146–7, 151, 156, 165, 185, 197–200, 204, 205, 207, 222, 227, 268, 282–2, 287 in antiquity 24, 26, 138, 167–8, 170–2, 176, 235–8, 270, see also Africans, Greco-Roman perceptions of miscegenation / mestizaje 40, 49–50, 93–4 modern constructs of 22, 24, 137, 182, 270–1, 281 nationalism and 15, 87n. 21, 107, 109 see also racism racism 4, 7–8, 16, 23–6, 50, 115, 131, 134, 136, 143, 156, 223–5, 229, 242, 279 antiquity and color prejudice, see Africans, Greco-Roman perceptions of classics and 3, 24–6, 182, 276 see also race Rankine, Patrice 9, 273, 279n. 29, 282n. 39 Aristotle and Black Drama 6, 10n. 25, 273, 276n. 18 Ulysses in Black 6, 10n. 25, 261n. 59 rape / sexual violence 49, 85, 89–91, 101, 253 in mythology 45, 90, 231, 232 slavery and 45, 49–51, 67, 73, 188 reception studies, see classical reception studies

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 Remond, Sarah 136, 144, 161 revolutions 90, 97, 198, 285 Haitian 18, 198–9, 202n. 6, 207–8, 213 rhetoric 78, 127, 142n. 8 politics and 95–108, 114, 159, 210, 224–5, 234, 284 Rome, ancient 43, 61, 65, 90, 97, 134, 136, 139, 162, 224, 226, 236, 280 Egypt and 138–9, 141, 145–9, 155–6, 157–9, 161–2, 166n. 3 founding of 48–9, 52, 90 Roman Britain 18, 20, 24, 38, 226–7, 229, 230, 232–9 visual cultures / legacies of 1, 101n. 59, 137, 138, 141, 146, 149, 150, 159, 172 Rosario Pérez, Ángel del 105–7, 115 Rotimi, Ola 11, 199 Said, Edward 10 Santo Domingo 14, 82, 84–6, 88–95, 109–13, 243, 249–50 “Athens of the New World” 14–15, 80–1, 86–7, 92–8, 105, 106, 116 see also Dominican Republic Sappho 167 Saturnin, Louis 123, 130 Scarborough, William Sanders 16, 75n. 42, 128n. 5, 137, 147, 275 science fiction 18, 165n. 2, 242, 246–7, 250, 262 Scott, David 198–9 sculpture, see visual art, sculpture, classical / neoclassical Senghor, Léopold Sédar 198, 200 Severus, Lucius Septimius 18, 227, 230, 233, 238–9 sexuality 20–1, 144n. 14, 148, 202–3, 231–4; see also rape / sexual violence Shakespeare 63, 64, 254, 279, 282, 288, 289 Antony and Cleopatra 156, 157 The Tempest 51n. 54, 212 Sharpe, Christina 13n. 32, 29n. 1, 30, 32, 42n. 32, 56n. 63 short stories 102, 241, 254–6, 258n. 51 Sibyl 224 Simpson, Michael 6n. 14, 10–11, 31, 79n. 1, 80n. 4, 199, 272–3, 275, see also Black Aegean

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Sirens 51, 113 slavery 12–14, 21, 23, 32–4, 41, 43, 50, 52–3, 156, 180–1, 202, 226, 229, 241–2, 244–5, 247, 254, 264 in America 10, 57, 61, 74, 138, 148, 275, 278, 282, 289 in the Caribbean 18, 34, 58–74, 82, 84, 121, 186, 217, 220, 258n. 52 in classical antiquity 148–9, 234–7 fugitive slaves / maroons 61, 70n. 36, 88n. 23, 112, 180–1, 185, 188 naming practices and 22, 49, 57–78 rape / sexual violence and 45, 49–51, 67, 73, 188 slave rebellions 88, 201, 211, see also Haiti, Haitian Revolution transatlantic slave trade 12, 13, 17, 40, 45–7, 49, 50, 53, 70, 88, 121, 220, 225, 227, see also Middle Passage Smith, Zadie 226 Snowden, Frank M. Jr. 8n. 22, 17, 166, 236, 270 Sophocles 11, 80, 167, 169, 170, 199 Soyinka, Wole 199 Spain 87, 89, 94–5, 97, 113n. 86, 190, 258n. 52 Sparta 102–3, 107 “Sparta of the New World” 14–15, 81, 86, 102–7, 115–16; see also Dominican Republic speculative fiction 228–9, 241–2, 247, 255, 265 sphinx 1, 146, 150, 153, 162 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 10, 53, 227–8 St. Clair, Thomas Staunton 14, 65–72, 74–6, 78 St. Lucia 34, 35, 55, 87, 121, 132 Story, William Wetmore 138, 149, 151, 152, 153, 157 Sudan 18, 20, 166n. 3, 232, 233–5, 237 Sudanese, see language, Sudanese Tate Britain 165, 174–5, 177, 179, 181–2 Tejera, Emiliano 95–7 Telemachus 257–8, 260 temporality 22, 198, 205, 212–13, 215, 247 Terence 270 Tereus 45 Thieme, John 9, 10n. 28

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 2/12/2019, SPi

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Thistlewood, Thomas 59, 63, 67–8, 73, 188 Tolkien, J. R. R. 242, 246, 255n. 45 tragedy 11, 17–18, 22, 123, 197–9, 205–6, 210–12, 222 transatlantic slave trade, see slavery, transatlantic slave trade translation 30, 31, 44–5, 48, 176, 259, 262n. 61 of Greek and Latin 16, 34–5, 39, 67–8, 126–7, 155, 166, 217 translatio studii et imperii 45, 52 transnationalism 2, 4, 18, 21, 86, 124, 225, 232, 249–50, 252 trees as metaphor 204–5, 207, 215–6, 218–20, 224 Trinidad 15, 22, 121–5, 126, 128–9, 131–2, 247 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph 4n. 10, 30, 79, 83n. 9, 109 Trujillo, Rafael Leónidas 15, 81, 87, 89, 99–108, 246, 248, 252–4, 259, 264n. 66 Trump, Donald 23, 225, 278–80, 284, 286, 289 Ulysses, see Odysseus United Kingdom: art and architecture in 15, 16–17, 21, 164–5, 174–7, 179, 181, 183, 186 classical receptions in 24, 38n. 19, 174–7, 223–5 classics in 268, 273–4, 277 immigrant experience in 18, 20, 134, 189, 227, 228, 234–5, 278 military actions of 190n. 23 politics in 23–4, 223–5, 274 see also Brexit race and 174–7, 182n. 20, 225–6, 237 relationship with Caribbean colonies 38n. 19, 39–40, 62n. 17, 121, 185–6 Roman Britain 18, 20, 24, 38, 226–7, 229, 230, 232–9 United States, see America, United States of Vestals 91 Virgil 38, 67, 242, 254 Aeneid 38–9, 46, 48–54, 129, 131, 224

visual art 1–2, 15, 16–17, 20–1, 24, 77–8, 82–3, 112–13, 133–62, 164–8, 170–93 painting 1–2, 16–17, 164–5, 167, 172–7, 180–1, 185, 187–8, 190–3 photography 16, 20, 133–6, 138–41, 144–6, 159–60, 162 sculpture, classical / neoclassical 17, 24, 101, 137–9, 144, 149–50, 152–3, 156–9, 174, 176–9, 182–6, 188 vase painting 167, 170–1, 175 see also history, art history Walcott, Derek 14, 31–3, 38, 54–6, 132, 203, 246–7, 250, 252, 257 Omeros 20, 33–7, 87, 185–6, 256 Walker, Alice 135, 139, 157 Walters, Tracey 6, 9–10, 275 Weems, Carrie Mae 133–6, 138–41, 144–6, 151, 157, 159–60, 162 Wesołowski, Józef 85–6, 110 West, Cornel 272, 276 whiteness 13, 112, 115, 151, 159, 162, 170, 172, 175, 271 n. 9, 279n. 28 black / white dichotomy 8, 11, 90–1, 93–4, 107, 163–4, 182, 200–2, 275–6 classical / neoclassical sculpture and 24, 100, 147, 172n. 11 see also race; racism; white supremacy white supremacy 14, 24–6, 98n. 48, 105–8, 115, 236, 269, 276, 286–7 Whitney, Anne 144, 148, 150n. 23 Wilberforce, William 218–20 Wilson, August 23, 273, 275, 278, 289 Windrush generation 227, 278n 24; see also immigrants / immigration women 10, 16, 20–1, 24 classical education of 122–3, 142, 143n. 13 representation in myth 39, 49–50, 90–1, 189, 203, 231–3 Woodson, Carter G. 272 Xenophon 122 Yoruba, see language, Yoruba Zeus 169–70, 174, 184, 189