Western Imperialism in the Classics Classroom
First Generation Classics Special
This article is part of our First Generation Classics special, an exploration of ancient and modern first-gen classicists, broadly defined. Generously funded by a grant from the SCS Classics Everywhere Initiative.
As two individuals from opposite sides of the American Empire, we call upon the field of classics to be more mindful of the histories and lived experiences it is trying to bring in when calling for diversity. Since such calls try to address the discipline’s contributions to imperialism and colonization, accountability for classics’ history doesn’t just include nitpicking rhetoric. It will mean understanding and making space for students to address their personal relationships with actual events of history.
In what follows, the two of us share instances in which our classmates’ ignorance of America’s imperialist history affected our experiences in the classics classroom. These individual accounts do not demonstrate the full extent of how pervasive these experiences can be for marginalized students. We hope our readers consider our narratives and histories when envisioning their ideal classroom environments, as both educators and students.
Ashley is interested in ancient philosophy, specifically connecting historical context to philosophical works. She is also a tribal member of the Wiyot tribe, having grown up on her tribe’s reservation located on ancestral territories. As a first-generation classicist, Ashley struggles with the legacy of Classics as a colonial force.
Kiran is also interested in ancient philosophy. He discusses his experience as a first-generation classicist with ties to the Mindanao region of the Philippines, who had to suddenly negotiate personal connections to the field he did not predict possible.
While both of us are Platonists and descended from peoples with a colonial relationship to the United States, our approaches to classics are notably distinct. Even with these disparate experiences, we both feel a sense of isolation in the field as first-generation classicists. This is because we both carry knowledge of histories deeply ingrained in us but not shared by our peers. Even though the field is beginning to acknowledge its historical role in imperialism, its current push to diversify should include sharing and teaching about the legacies of imperialist powers.
In both of these narratives, we struggled with our positions in classics on our own. While we found different ways to reconcile our cultures with what we study, it was not until we shared these experiences with each other that we began to feel less isolated in the field. To that end, we hope that sharing our narratives will help others grappling with their own histories of imperialism and settler-colonialism, and their relationship to classics. We encourage first-generation students, especially those from historically marginalized groups, to reach out, share their experiences with each other, and create community.
Ashley
Before I get personal about what being in Classics is like for me, I want to make sure that everyone reading this understands the extent and magnitude of what has happened to native people, and specifically how well that history has worked to keep us out of higher education. I am not supposed to be here, in the most literal sense (please see this Wikipedia page on “California Genocide”).
Even in the present, I am not supposed to be here — as in, here in higher education. Native students have one of the lowest rates of college enrollment (17% compared to 60% of the US average) and completion rates are half those of white students. Add to that a suicide rate that is 3.5 times higher than groups with the lowest rate, and it’s not a far stretch to say that, for many native students, suicide is more inevitable than college. There are no statistics to back up this comparison that I know of, but I am willing to bet (and my tribe has a casino) that more Americans know about Classics than about Natives existing.
Even though I am primarily interested in ancient philosophy, I feel that a physical and personal connection to history is important. During my junior year of undergrad, I decided to sign up for a dig to get that connection and context. On the first night of my first dig, all the volunteers shared our first meal in the dig house together. As an icebreaker, we were asked to say our names and what event we would travel back in time to witness. Predictably for a group of classicists and archeologists, everyone said their favorite ancient event — the fire of 64 in Rome! A naumachia! Pericles’ Funeral Oration! It came to me and I responded that I would go back to the year 1860, at Woodley Island, California (my people call it Duluwat). That year, the settlers massacred my people on our sacred world renewal ceremony. That night was part of a broader strategy to eliminate native people in California, which almost succeeded.
The trauma my tribe experienced that day is always in the back of my mind, and sometimes it can influence how I look at sources. Reading the Melian dialogue doesn’t feel like reading an old account; it feels like my ancestors talking back, negotiating, and rebelling against settlers in California. In the end, I feel the complete devastation of the Athenians taking over the island. Killing every Melian man, enslaving the women and the children. Those sentences come so swiftly and make up only two lines, but they are so heavy.
I think that for most students, when they encounter that dialogue for the first time, they might think the Melians were being too stubborn in their stance against the Athenians. They might think that the Melians deserved what happened to them. The Athenians gave a very clear warning about what would happen if they refused to join them.
These nuances in my classmates’ understanding of the text unfold during discussions. Each excuse they make for the Athenians makes me wince. I think about all the arguments used to justify killing my people and our continued subjugation. That we deserve to live on reservations still, not to be seen, because the state of California warned us. I think about how it took until 2019 for the city to give my tribe our island back, and how they justified keeping it for so long because it was technically legally bought by private owners after we were “removed.” More recently, I think about the justifications various state governors have used to undermine and prevent tribes from protecting their people from Covid-19. From providing body bags instead of testing kits to the South Dakota Governor threatening tribal sovereignty by attempting to remove roadblocks put in place to protect reservations. I also think about the fact that the Navajo Nation is experiencing the most cases per capita in the country, after New York. Every failure the federal and state governments have made in response to this crisis is a culmination of policies that see us as undeserving of care. When I hear my classmates justifying Athens’ response against the Melians, Classics begins to feel less like an opportunity to learn about other ways of life and more like a field designed to train students to justify western imperialism.
Engaging with my classmates makes me feel isolated, but engaging with the classical past does not. I fell in love with the ancient world because of all the beauty I could imagine. I took a class on the bronze age and in the first few weeks we were looking at early Helladic pottery. The pottery is characterized by geometric markings around the vessel. My professor mentioned that the markings likely mimicked the designs on woven baskets. For the rest of the class, I could only think about these ancient people weaving baskets. I wondered if they used the same techniques my aunties use. If the children dragged their feet when they were asked to go collect grass for baskets, like I did, while secretly rejoicing in the fact that you were given permission to wander the woods for hours. These types of connections where I can vividly imagine what life was like in the ancient world make me feel closer to not only the Greeks, but my own people.
My cousin is a leader in the revitalization of the Yurok language and he has a beautiful answer when he’s asked about the importance of saving even small languages. Every language and every culture is a part of humanity. I think it is a really beautiful sentiment and something I try to keep in mind, even when Classics can feel so small and so dominated by white voices. Rather than focusing on the parallels between the ancient sources and the trauma that the U.S. has inflicted on me and my people, I try and focus on the parallels between our traditions. In that way, I find a sense of comfort and connectedness to the ancient world that I do not feel towards the field of Classics.
Kiran
The incident that made the nature of my relationship to this field most transparent took place in a Thucydides seminar during my first semester of graduate school. It was a cross-listed course, and that year the number of Political Science and International Relations enrollees far surpassed that of Classics. This meant that the class was, thankfully, taught in translation, but also that Athens and Sparta during the Peloponnesian War would be frequently compared to Cold War-era America and USSR in secondary literature.
Inevitably, someone did a presentation on this topic. They made the expected comparisons between the U.S. and Athens, i.e. the U.S. and Athens were both democratic and expected their allies to have similar political systems. One claim this person made, however, was that unlike Athens, the United States did not financially exploit its own allies during the Cold War.
What was as shocking as the statement itself was the fact that no one seemed to dispute it. Implicit in this claim and my white classmates’ uncritical acceptance of it was an assumption of who counted as an American ally, and what was considered exploitation. I refuse to pass judgement on anyone in that room, academic or moral. I, however, feel obligated to name the awkwardness of knowing that my classmates and I share a history they were never expected to be aware of. Unprepared, I did nothing particularly admirable. I did not assert the relevance of my own history, nor did I inform my class of their collective blind spot.
I quietly approached the presenter after class, and informed them about the Bell Trade Act and the Laurel-Langley Agreement. These essentially allowed the U.S. unimpeded interference in Philippine economy until the mid 1970s. I debated whether it was appropriate to mention the human exploitation that occurred during the Cold War. The Nixon Administration supported a Martial Law dictatorship led by Ferdinand Marcos. I later learned that this was in exchange for a campaign donation of at least $250,000, most likely from Filipino taxpayers’ dollars. The dictatorship was especially horrific in my parents’ home region, Mindanao. The number of human rights abuses in Mindanao surpassed those of every other region in the Philippines combined, so much so that the island became known as “The Bleeding Land”. The CIA even started a whisper campaign amongst the Communist New People’s Army (NPA) in the name of protecting “democracy.” As confirmed by the CIA’s own documents, this led to the NPA purging around 400 suspected American agents from their ranks, as well as an unrecorded number of civilians in my parents’ hometown. Through sharing this history in diaspora, I learned that even Filipinos from other regions remain willfully ignorant to the extent of this violence.
I was in this class to learn more about the Peloponnesian War and its influence on the Platonic dialogues. My interest in Plato is primarily philological and historical: I try to contextualize a tradition that is as far away from Mindanao as I can manage. Unlike Ashley, I drifted away from doing work to which I could feel a material or personal connection. Both the Indian and Filipino sides of my family ended up in Mindanao through a combination of refugeehood, internal displacement, and economic migration. While we are not “from” the island, it is there that my family was able to rebuild their lives. Filipino literature accessible to the diaspora, however, reinforces the cultural hegemony of the capital, Manila. Thus, any inquiry I made into Filipino reception of classics erased my own Filipino identity.
Part of what I found attractive about Classical Greece was the mirage of distance from the proximate history of the Marcos Era and regional power dynamics. Focusing on Greece provided me the opportunity to produce scholarship that only had to prove my own worth, rather than that of a particular region. I was not a classics major, and until graduate school only made brief contact with Thucydides in the context of the Platonic dialogues. I did not foresee this claim as one that could even be presented in the classics classroom. After this class, I realized if one comparison could be made between Classical Athens and Cold War-era America, it is that both have a history of violence and plunder consistently sugar-coated and under-taught by those desperate to preserve their legacies. I am grateful that my professor was openly critical of Athens’ actions during the Peloponnesian War.
Later, I became more aware of how the field is situated in the history of Western imperialism, and that comparisons between ancient and modern empires are being made elsewhere in the discipline. The realization that conversations about colonization and empire in classics could be connected to me personally made me feel more isolated in the field than ever. No longer was I an outsider with a comfortably drawn boundary. Instead, I am now a reluctant insider with one-sided knowledge of a shared past. If classicists wish to reexamine the discipline’s involvement in Western imperialism, they should also be willing to confront the actual atrocities their countries committed. Many scholars we bring in to “diversify” the discipline still live with the legacies of these events. Part of respecting their presence in our classrooms is being open to learning their histories.
Ashley Lance is a tribal member of the Blue Lake Rancheria. She will be an MPhil student at Cambridge in Classics in the upcoming academic year. You can find her on twitter @ashleyelance.
Kiran Pizarro Mansukhani is a first-year PhD student in Classics at The Graduate Center, CUNY. You can find him on twitter @timaeusphaedo.
Other articles in this series:
The First African to Have Attended a European University
First Generation Classics Special
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