It’s Time to Embrace Critical Classical Reception
Disciplinary Action
The month of May for many academics is sort of what December is to the normal world: a time to reflect on the highs and lows of the year that’s about to end. The past twelve months, starting with last June’s Breferendum, have been a slow-moving train wreck. If you’re a classicist, you’ve also probably noticed the surprising, even bewildering, presence of ancient Greece and Rome on the rails.
A couple of weeks after the presidential election, Donna Zuckerberg pulled back the curtain on the twisted world of the Alt-Right’s Grecoromania. Countless think pieces have compared the current era in the US or Britain to the last days of the Roman Republic or Empire (whatever your opinion of those comparisons, Neville Morley is right that “we do seem to be having a Roman moment”). The Elgin Marbles have made cameos in the lead-up to Brexit, while the ghost of ancient Greece continued to hang, tritely and idiotically, over media coverage of the ongoing Greek debt crisis (a March Politico article named Zeus number one on its list of twelve people and things that have ruined the European Union).
The question of the Greco-Roman inheritance has also held its grip in public debates about the nature (and very existence) of the West. On the dismal morning of November 9th, the Guardian published an essay by Kwame Anthony Appiah: “There is no such thing as western civilisation.” Appiah spent much of it critiquing the standard narrative of Greece and Rome’s vast, enduring, and unique influence on the West. That narrative, he argued, has cast the classical legacy as a kind of fairytale magical object:
So from the late middle ages until now, people have thought of the best in the culture of Greece and Rome as a civilisational inheritance, passed on like a precious golden nugget, dug out of the earth by the Greeks, transferred, when the Roman empire conquered them, to Rome.
In short, public intellectuals chose to expend a great deal of energy this past year shadowboxing with phantasms of Greece and Rome. Yet where, in the midst of all the airplay antiquity is getting, does the academic field of Classics come in? Under what banner can professional classicists make interventions (or decide it’s better to stay out of the way) in public debates about the ancient past, and its use and value today?
Classicists who want to reach a non-academic public are caught in a catch-22. On the one hand, to attract an audience and hold its attention you have to convince people that you’re saying something interesting and important. Even today, outreach campaigns still push the idea that students should study Classics because “our” civilization sits atop Greco-Roman pillars (it doesn’t, really, as Appiah points out in his piece). Take the mission statement of the National Junior Classical League, an organization that promotes the study of Classics in American high schools:
Our purpose is to encourage an interest in and an appreciation of the language, literature, and culture of ancient Greece and Rome and to impart an understanding of the debt of our own culture to that of Classical antiquity.
This justification for the study of Classics is pretty standard, yet I would argue that “our own culture” is moving — positively — away from a framework that automatically assigns exceptional importance to what the ancient Greeks and Romans thought, did, and valued.
Now would be a risky, even tasteless, time for us to write more books on how grateful we should be to the ancient Greeks and Romans. Some have been published fairly recently — Charlotte Higgins’ It’s All Greek to Me: From Homer to the Hippocratic Oath, How Ancient Greece Has Shaped Our World and Carl J. Richard’s Why We’re All Romans: The Roman Contribution to the Western World both came out at the start of this decade. Audiences today would not, and should not, be so tolerant of this trade-book genre of light Western triumphalism.
Yet for classicists who want to excite general interest in antiquity (or gain good marks for their research’s “impact”), it can be easy to over-egg the pudding with desperate insistence on the genius, exceptionalism, and “miracles” of ancient Greece and Rome.
We need, then, a different way of pitching our material to a public audience. Thankfully signs that we’re finding that way have already started to appear. I’ll put my cards on the table: I’m a fan of Eidolon. I was an early adopter because the publication seemed to create and offer a space for a more critical—encompassing both critique and actual criticism — engagement with Classics and classical traditions. But it wasn’t until this fall, when it was my week to teach our department’s graduate proseminar, that I realized why I liked it so much.
Since 2010, I’ve taught our proseminar’s week on classical reception. Each year I’ve tried to do due diligence by assigning potted histories of the Konstanz School, manifestos by Charles Martindale, a few helpful handbook chapters (including this one by Miriam Leonard), and Nietzsche’s We Philologists for a little provocation and spice. This year, for the first time, I also asked the students to read a couple of my favorite early Eidolon articles: Helen Morales’ Fat Classics and Dan-el Padilla Peralta’s “From Damocles to Socrates: The Classics in/of Hip-Hop.”
Those short articles stole the show. We were excited that experts in our field were using classical material to shed real light on topics as modern and familiar as diet book rhetoric and the poetics of hip-hop. These scholars weren’t only analyzing how classical texts have been “received”; they were employing strong authorial voices in open acts of calling out. Morales called out the diet industry, for invoking the authority of Hippocrates “to scare us all into starving, purging, and doing strange things with maple syrup and cayenne pepper,” while Padilla called out his fellow classicists for not paying enough attention to “hip-hop’s classical receptions.”
We read these pieces as part of a week on reception, but they didn’t seem to quite fit a traditional reception template (“X author/artist’s use of Y ancient text/idea/motif). There was something different in the approach. This new work seemed more concerned with how the ancient past is visibly interwoven in the fabric of the present moment. It bore a slight family resemblance to “reception” as we’d come to think of it, but somehow also seemed different, like reception with more bite and urgency: Reception 2.0.
Perhaps the difference is that classicists, especially ones engaged in public scholarship, have now started to bring tenets of other new areas of “critical” study — Critical Race Studies, Critical Ethnic Studies, Critical Gender Studies — into their work on antiquity. Taking its cues from these other areas, even Classics seems on the threshold of an exciting and vital new direction.
So something novel is rumbling beneath the surface of our discipline. Could we call that something Critical Classical Reception Studies?
The work I see as already happening in this area has three main characteristics that tie it to other areas of critical studies:
- It has an open activist agenda
- It uses a strong personal voice and engages in storytelling (see Donna Zuckerberg’s piece “The Authorial Lie” on classical scholars’ pretended objectivity)
- It acknowledges, even if implicitly, that Greek and Roman antiquity have played a major role in constructing and authorizing racism, colonialism, nationalism, patriarchy, Western-centrism, body normativity, and other entrenched, violent societal structures.
This kind of work has already penetrated closer to Classics than most people might think. Earlier this decade, Heritage Studies sprouted the branch of Critical Heritage Studies. The preliminary manifesto of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies makes an observation that could equally apply to the “old way of looking at” classical antiquity:
The old way of looking at heritage — the Authorised Heritage Discourse — privileges old, grand, prestigious, expert approved sites, buildings and artefacts that sustain Western narratives of nation, class and science.
The activist agenda here is clear. At University College London, the description for a course called “Critical Perspectives on Cultural Heritage” openly announces that:
A central objective here is to align with a wider scholarship committed to disrupting the ‘Eurocentrism’ which continues to dominate cultural heritage theory/practice and also with a contemporary ‘politics of recognition’ which is bound up in articulating new, alternative or ‘parallel’ characterisations of heritage value.
Certain classicists, of course, are already working to disrupt, interrogate, and critique the Eurocentrism of the authorized narratives of Greco-Roman antiquity and its tradition. It’s what scholars who work on ancient connectivity and cosmopolitanism, and on non-canonical classical periods, authors, and texts, have been doing for years.
It’s also what Donna Zuckerberg did when she published “How to be a Good Classicist under a Bad Emperor.” And it’s what Dan-el Padilla Peralta has done in all of his Eidolon pieces on Classics and immigration, ancient and modern. Over at Forbes, Sarah Bond and Kristina Killgrove have been writing about classical material with a much more sensitive political eye than we’re used to seeing in writing about Greece and Rome that is aimed at a general audience. Yet it would also mark a strong step forward to see this kind of work gain acceptance in academic fora (in journals, at conferences, and so on).
For models of what that might look like, we don’t have to look very far. This year, Brown’s Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World has been co-running a search for a postdoc in Critical Heritage Studies. Should a dedicated fellowship in Critical Classical Reception Studies be so far behind? Colleagues in Modern Greek have also long offered excellent examples of politically conscious scholarship on antiquity’s legacy. In an excellent handbook chapter, “Reception Studies: Future Prospects,” James I. Porter rightly stresses how much scholars of Modern Greek Studies have contributed to the study of classical reception, even if their work has yet to be “explicitly allied to this larger project.”
Work by leaders in classical reception — Pierre Briant, Page duBois, Barbara Goff, Emily Greenwood, Edith Hall, Andrew Laird, Miriam Leonard, Patrice Rankine, and Phiroze Vasunia, to name just a few — has also paved the way for a turn from theoretical criticism to open critique. And just this year, the volumes Liquid Antiquity (an outcome of the Postclassicisms project) and Deep Classics have invited us to rethink how we think about and approach reception. Many scholars have already done an incalculable amount to make the discipline more “critical,” and to unsettle it for the better.
By acknowledging and following other disciplines’ critical models, we can push Classics even further. “Critical Classical Reception Studies” could crystallize as a sort of textual complement to the largely (but not exclusively) materially-oriented field of Critical Heritage. By giving this work a name that acknowledges the debt to other critical fields — and aspires to alliance with them — we can more fully embrace reception work’s potential to let classicists be activist scholars, too.
My favorite internet personality, Geoffrey Chaucer, noted in a March interview that scholars “have no singular purchase on the past.” This is a version of a refrain that we’ve all heard many times before, but leave it to Chaucer not to leave it there. Scholars might not have exclusive rights to the past,
but thei also knowe wel of the special craftes for bringinge the various beautiful and terrible pasts of different places to us. Thei are the park rangers of the pasts, to speke yn a figure.
I love this image because being a park ranger isn’t just about admiring the beauty of parks — even if that beauty is what attracts most rangers to the profession. Their work involves a lot of fire safety education, and sometimes it means fining Vanessa Hudgens from carving her name into fragile rock formations. Park rangers are there to help keep everyone safe; they’re also first responders trained to handle the inevitable emergencies.
Our field only stands to gain if classicists shoulder similar responsibilities more seriously: if rather than, say, preach about how resonant and relevant Greek tragedies still are today, we take a more honest look at the cultural forces that assigned so much prestige to this sliver of creative production.
Of course we’re not always going to get it right. We’ll make missteps and gaffes because classicists aren’t really trained to call out, to write against Eurocentrism, or to intervene in the discourses of inclusion and recognition — at least not yet. Historically, Classics has been a standard bearer for elitism and a source of authorization for what the Association of Critical Heritage Studies calls “Western narratives of nation, class and science.” We know that those narratives are not inherent to the material we study, but it will take much effort and care to undo centuries of suggestions that they are.
Today, with this past academic year nearly in the rear-view mirror, our field’s biggest challenge is not to prove the enduring significance of Greece and Rome. Instead, the hard and rewarding work lies in figuring out how to keep doing what we do — studying antiquity and its legacy — while at the same time acknowledging, and further exposing, the damage done by the old hard line on Classics and “Western civilization.” This is a daunting project, but at least we can make a start by becoming critics as much as classicists when we do reception.
This article is part of a bimonthly column, Disciplinary Action, in which Johanna Hanink addresses the politics of the Classics field.
Johanna Hanink is Associate Professor of Classics at Brown University. Her new book, The Classical Debt: Greek Antiquity in an Era of Austerity, has just come out with Harvard University Press. She’ll be speaking about it at Brown on May 10 and (with Mary Beard) at Heffers in Cambridge (UK) on May 24.
Thanks to Yung In Chae, Dan-el Padilla Peralta, and Donna Zuckerberg.
