Gettin’ bodied by Classics: the joys and challenges of public scholarship

(prepared for Eidolon’s roundtable at SCS)

When Donna Zuckerberg and Jason Pedicone first approached me about writing for Eidolon, I was a few days away from splicing a classical allusion into my wedding vows. At the time I was also prepping a new course soon to be offered to formerly incarcerated adults under Columbia’s newly launched Justice-in-Education Initiative. Leading off with Homer and Sophocles, the course was intended to provide the students enrolling through the initiative with critical tools for approaching and reading classical texts. Another and no less important aim was to show that ancient texts can respond to the (ethical/political/institutional) structures shaping our collective and individual presents.

With a few years of classroom teaching under my belt, I perked up at the offer of writing for Eidolon because I was feeling the itch of modeling for a new audience how antiquity might be “patient of interpretation” (to borrow Kermode’s borrowing of Alfred Whitehead). My sense of responsibility to the classics — sharpened over several days of exposure to lively conversation at a January Postclassicisms Workshop — was nudging me in the direction of writing for a popular readership, with the Internet as a second classroom. In conversations with classicist and non-classicist friends, I’d been given to deflecting anxieties about the demise of the field with the rejoinder that I saw classics (still) ruling everything around me; all we had to do was knuckle up unorthodox and look in different places. Writing about those sites of contemporary cultural contestation where I detected the pulse of Greco-Roman antiquity seemed to me the best way of translating talk into deed.

One consideration did give me brief pause. Since I’m a postdoctoral fellow about to transition to a tenure-track job, not a day goes by without my fretting about the need to keep producing the traditional scholarly writing upon which one day my case for tenure will rest. To put to rest the inner voice grumbling that time spent working on an Eidolon piece was time that could be spent on something else (such as my monograph…), I told myself that giving some ideas a work-out on a nontraditional platform would be good for my scholarship — by lining me up to receive feedback that could push me in new directions, by helping me become more comfortable with a different genre of writing, and by teaching me not to lose sight of the forest for the trees.

Having silenced the voice, I sat down to write: about hip-hop and Classics, about ancient immigrants and Trump, and again about ancient immigrants and Trump. Feedback (from Donna and the editorial team at Eidolon, from the friendly classicist and non-classicist audiences for which I’ve trial-ballooned parts of my pieces, and from the journal’s swelling readership) has been one of the great joys of the past few months: responses to the pieces have ranged from bibliographic recommendations to suggestions for new paths of inquiry, some of which I’ll enumerate in a moment.

Honored as I was to see the Trump pieces get picked up by Newsweek, nothing quite beat the experience of having sentences from one of my pieces quoted back to me (with accompanying critique!) by a high school student on my visit to the Rocky Hill School in November. It’s so energizing to experience the thrill of a young person’s discovery of Classics; the thrill doubles when you’ve had a part, however small, to play in that discovery.

So one of the advantages of writing for Eidolon has been this special opportunity to serve as representative/steward/messenger for my discipline. Naturally some risks — not necessarily specific to my current place on the conveyor belt of academe — are involved in writing for a public-facing Classics publication. For one, there is the worry of being dismissed by some as a pandering popularizer, though at this stage in the game I can’t say that this concern keeps me up at night. More pressing and pretty much always on my mind is the challenge of striking a responsible balance between pizzazz and depth, between a fetchingly presentist riff on classical antiquity on the one hand and the imperative to respect the past on its own terms on the other. But if you are of the opinion (as I am) that “respecting the past on its own terms” is inextricably tangled up with the obsessions of the present — wherever and however that present is located or constituted — then the challenge doesn’t seem that insurmountable. In any case, the challenge is generative: I find that striving for that responsible balance has made me into a more responsible (and responsive) classicist.

For allowing me to practice and refine my sense of responsibility, I’m forever grateful to Donna Zuckerberg and Eidolon.

In 2016, what’s the move? First, to continue thinking about migratory discourses ancient and modern, this time with a more concentrated focus on citizenship past and present. Kostas Vlassopoulos’ provocation to “unthink” the Greek polis is never far from my mind, and the more I reflect on David Scott FitzGerald and David Cook-Martín’s Culling the masses — a masterpiece of comparative research — the stronger grows my conviction that any history of citizenship that doesn’t attend to the evolving practices of exclusion and oppression through which citizen bodies are made is an impoverished one. One hope for the New Year is to contribute a classicist’s perspective on the longue durée of citizenship and exclusion to the conversations taking place in our post-Ferguson moment.

Also near the top of the agenda is to intervene in the dialogues about race, history, and memory under way on several college campuses in the United States and Europe — a contest to which several classicists have already subscribed. For the reasons laid out by New Yorker contributor Jelani Cobb in an excellent November write-up, I’m underwhelmed whenever “free speech” is invoked as justification for what seems to me to be racialized provocation plain and simple. I’m equally underwhelmed by the sabre-rattling over “political correctness” and the insistence that if only we could speak without regard to “identity politics” (= if only we were at liberty to utter whatever racist/sexist/homo- or transphobic thought leaps to the mouth) we would realize something approaching true parrhesia. Although Stanley Fish wrote this song a long time ago, “There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech” needs to be brought back into the discussion (h/t Tim Whitmarsh for the Tweetminder). Nor do I have much patience for the generalizations about millennials’ complex of “victimhood” that have gained traction among some critics of the campus protests. To denigrate the student protesters as fragile or weak, or to insist on their grievances as expressions of fragility or weakness, flies in the face of their real exhibition of strength — collective action ain’t easy, folks — and is suspiciously redolent of that old Nestorian plaint of generational decline: yesterday’s man could lift a stone that today it takes two men to lift…

Where I think Classics is particularly well poised to strike is in the disputes over the (monumental) legacies of Woodrow Wilson at Princeton and Cecil Rhodes at Oxford. A thought about commemoration: practitioners of a discipline so marvelously attuned to the potency of statues and monuments — to the grammars of honor they enshrine, the relationships of domination and expropriation they embody, the passions for remembrance and forgetting they inflame — can and should tap into the deep history of recoding, displacing, and revoicing the monumental in their contributions to the debate. The claim bruited in some circles (and reiterated by Professor Mary Beard on her blog) that the student protesters want to erase/purify/cleanse history of its unsavory bits seems to me a gross misrepresentation of what the students are trying to do: to remember. To remember the injustices perpetrated and/or set in motion by Wilson and Rhodes, yes; but also to position as a new κτῆμα ἐς αἰεί their critique of existing hierarchies of value precisely through monumental removal or re-naming. In trying to do something about statues and monuments, the student protesters have shown themselves to be far more sophisticated about the material dimensions of the past’s dialectic with the present than their critics give them credit for. I couldn’t disagree more with Professor Beard’s comment that the statue business is a red herring.

Last in this batting order, but possibly first to the plate in 2016: the hip-hop and you don’t stop. Inspired by the responses to “From Damocles to Socrates,” I want to spend more time thinking and writing about hip-hop’s play with the classical tradition. Pharrell Williams’ drop of a Hermes Trismegistus reference in the new Missy Elliot song will do quite nicely as a point of departure for investigating the Hermetic/Masonic commitments of several high-profile hip-hop artists. And the time has come to get serious about Drake’s love of the Athenian owl. Why does he Hotline-bling with an owl-decorated sweater?

Ab ovo to OVO: Eidolon has afforded me the ludic space to toggle between topics that at first glance seem to occupy opposite ends of the spectrum — and to cultivate through these explorations a sensibility equally comfortable with sober rigor and with playful levity. No other kind of writing has brought me nearly as much joy.

Trained as a Roman historian at Princeton (A.B.), Oxford (M.Phil.), and Stanford (Ph.D), DAN-EL PADILLA PERALTA is a Mellon Research Fellow in the Society of Fellows and Lecturer in Classics at Columbia University. In the fall of 2016 he will begin a tenure-track appointment in Classics at Princeton. Undocumented, his memoir of growing up without legal immigrant status in New York City, was published in July by Penguin Press. His monograph on Roman Republican religion is under contract with Princeton University Press.

Thanks to Federica Carugati and Matthew Loar for thinking with me. And special thanks to Melissa the honey-bee, lover of Drake.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the views of the Paideia Institute.