Pasts Imperfect (2.17.22)
Stripping Ancient Myth, Dark Academia, and More
This week, Vanessa Stovall discusses her new essay at Public Books, Ayelet Haimson Lushkov reviews two new novels focused on the academic world of Classics, new terra cotta warriors are discovered in China, and more.
On Dressing Down Myth (Vanessa Stovall)
My article for the new Public Books Antiquities series, “On Dressing Down Myth,” was deeply influenced by my experience at Columbia University. Getting my Master’s was the first time that I read Sappho in her original Aeolic; the first time I read Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia; the first time I encountered Saidiya Hartman’s “Venus in Two Acts.”
At the same time, as I began my studies in the fall of 2017, the The New York Times began publishing articles on William Harris’ decades of sexual misconduct within our classics department. My first year was full of professors telling me they couldn’t speak about it, elder graduate students making veiled remarks, and many of us first- and second-years banding together to figure out what was happening.
From that experience, I began attempting to trace the trans-classical fascination with breeding in terms of gender, sexuality, class, and race, as expressed through different metaphors of bondage, planting, and musical customs — from the ancient archive to contemporary deployments of the “classical.” My Public Books essay represents a point in my broader attempt to theorize this trans-historical belief system.
The “I” of it is something I would like to expand upon here, because this project would be nothing without the network of colleagues who’ve helped me develop this topic. First and foremost, the incomparable Forever Moon helped me connect ancient sexuality studies with Black sexuality studies, gifting me friendship and bibliographic foundations of thought that I’ve been operating on ever since.
I’m also deeply indebted to Black studies scholars I’ve encountered through the digital sphere: Zalika Ibaorimi’s Jawn Theory and (Ho)ly Ontology, Da’Shaun L. Harrison’s gutting of American aesthetics, Matthew D. Morrison’s Blacksound, Christina Sharpe’s monstrous intimacies and wake-work, Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s emergent echolocations, and Mark Anthony Neale’s forthcoming Black Ephemera: The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive.
Three scholars who’ve helped me think through the Beldam vase: Molly Allen, whose 2017 dissertation has been foundational for me in thinking through the materiality of lamentation in fifth-century tragedy; Marcus Folch, whose forthcoming book Bondage, Incarceration, and the Prison in Ancient Greece and Rome: A Cultural and Literary History will surely inform my further theorizing around myths/t/ripping in the same vein that its first two chapters redirected my Master’s thesis; and Najee S. Olya, for guiding my early encounters with this image through quotation of Frank Snowden.
Greek and Roman myths understood sexual violence as foundational to the power structures of society. They speak in so many ways to the reproductive horrors of white male heterosexual diversion and colorism in the midst of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Yet many feminist frameworks I was exposed to during my Master’s remain unable to consider what these myths of sexual violence were doing across time and space, and how these reproductive anxieties around breeding inherently reproduce themselves.
Through understanding these trans-classical anxieties, and remembering that accurate DNA paternity testing is less than a century old, we may be able to see many contemporary ideologies around gender, sexuality, race, class, and their intersections not as historically anomalous, but instead as natural conclusions after millennia of breeding anxieties reproduced archivally through elite male identity politics.
Public Scholarship on the Internet
Our latest Pasts Imperfect column is out at Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB). In it, Ayelet Haimson Lushkov looks at 'Dark Academia: Classics in Alex Michaelides’s “The Maidens” & Mark Prins’s “The Latinist.”' Why are classicists so often the villains within fictional works? Can we learn anything from seeing the depiction of Classics in popular media? Lots to ponder in her review in terms of how fiction reflects the reality of academic power abuse and how we can do better.
The new issue of The Haley Classical Journal is out. The peer-reviewed articles in the issue, written by undergraduates, focus on Roman spolia, grief in the Iliad, Thecla, Africana receptions, and much more. Check it out!
Hyperallergic reports on the installation of Xu Zhen’s sculpture “Hello” on Stanford University’s campus. The bronze, stainless steel, painted Corinthian column follows a common theme in the artist’s oeuvre, one that critiques the ubiquity of classical architecture and the focus on Western art.
In Xi'an, capital of northwest China's Shaanxi Province, 20 more painted terracotta warriors were recently unearthed. As CGTN notes, the polychromatic “Terracotta Army is a collection of terracotta sculptures depicting the armies of Qinshihuang (259-210 B.C.), the first Emperor of China, to protect him in afterlife.” The site was first discovered in 1974.
At The Conversation, Joel Christensen writes on COVID-19 and historical parallels in his essay, “The Ancient Greeks also lived through a plague, and they too blamed their leaders for their suffering.” As he notes, “Ancient Greek history and literature can help us understand the long-term social impacts of disease. They also show how fractious politics can undermine even heroic responses to public health challenges.”
Over at the SCS Blog, Tom Hendrickson reviews the Cambridge Greek Lexicon (CGL). There are many merits to this amazing undertaking, but Hendrickson locks onto two very important critiques: price and author exclusions.
Both price and size are at the upper limit of what students might be able to bear. The dictionary is 1,529 pages, spread over two volumes, and retails for $85 new — though the circulation of used copies will eventually make cheaper copies available. This is larger and more expensive than the Middle Liddell (910 pages, $60 new/$25 used) but smaller and cheaper than the Big Liddell (2,300 pages, $220 new/$150 used). Yet most students probably just use the free versions of these dictionaries on their phones through Logeion or the like. (And if they don’t, they should!) The CGL is not yet available in a digital format, but the decisions they make about price and platform will be tremendously consequential … The cutoff with Plutarch, which is somewhat arbitrary, also leaves out other commonly read authors from the second century, such as Lucian, Longus, Achilles Tatius, Galen, Pausanias, and Marcus Aurelius.
A new exhibition focused on the work of Afro-Cuban American artist Harmonia Rosales is now open at the Art, Design & Architecture Museum at the University of California at Santa Barbara until May 1, 2022. This week, Dan-el Padilla Peralta gave a lecture for the “Myth, Religion, and Race” series tied to the exhibition, on “The Greeks are Then, the Orishas are Now." Watch here:
Upcoming Lectures and Conferences
The Women’s Classical Caucus welcomes everyone to an exciting slate of upcoming events including a workshop on teaching ancient race and ethnicity (Feb 22), a roundtable for archaeologists of color (March 3), a workshop on letters of recommendation (March 10), and a March 17 session on healing from anti-Asian violence one year after the Atlanta shootings, co-hosted with the AAACC. Read more and register here!
The Brown Classics Department invites us to join them for The Laic Archaic, a Zoom discussion presented by author and “The Chatner” founder, Daniel Lavery. This event will take place Wednesday, March 9th, at 5:30 pm (EDT) via Zoom. Daniel Lavery is the author of Something That May Shock and Discredit You, The Merry Spinster, and Texts From Jane Eyre. He will be reading from some of his published writings, particularly on Sappho and Catullus, and then discussing with Prof. Johanna Hanink how his work has been informed by his “amateur enthusiasm for Classics.” Registration is required for this event.
New Online Journal Issues curated by @YaleClassicsLib
Classical World Vol. 115, No. 2 (2022) Viagens, expedições e itinerários no Mediterrâneo antigo
Romanitas: Revista de Estudos Grecolatinos No. 18 (2021) #openaccess
Peritia Vol. 32 (2021)
Akroterion Vol. 66 (2021) #openaccess NB: T. J. Leary “Symphosius, A North African Martial”
Philosophia Scientiæ Vol. 26, No. 3 (2021) #openaccess L’analyse dans les mathématiques grecques
European Journal of Archaeology Vol. 25, No. 1 (2022) NB:Ulla Moilanen, et al. “A Woman with a Sword? – Weapon Grave at Suontaka Vesitorninmäki, Finland”
Antichthon Vol. 55 (2021) Catullus in the 21st Century
Le Muséon Vol. 134, No. 3-4 (2021)
Ancient Philosophy Vol. 42, No. 1 (Spring 2022)
Pitches
The Public Books section "Antiquities" continues to take pitches for articles to be published in 2022. You can pitch to our “Pasts Imperfect” column at the LA Review of Books using this form and to the new JSTOR column here. Thanks for reading!
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