Read more
Classicisms in the Black Atlantic explores how black authors and artists in the Atlantic world have shaped and reshaped the cultural legacies of classical antiquity from the aftermath of slavery up to the present day to represent black voices and experiences, often revealing in the process effaced black presences in classical antiquity.
List of contents
- Frontmatter
- List of Figures
- List of Contributors
- 0: Ian Moyer, Adam Lecznar, and Heidi Morse: Introduction
- Part I: Wakes
- 1: Emily Greenwood: Middle Passages: Mediating Classics and Radical Philology in Marlene NourbeSe Philip and Derek Walcott
- 2: Margaret Williamson: "Nero, the mustard!" The Ironies of Classical Slave Names in the British Caribbean
- 3: Dan-el Padilla Peralta: Athens and Sparta of the New World: The Classical Passions of Santo Domingo
- Part II: Journeys
- 4: Michele Valerie Ronnick: In Search of Henry Alexander Saturnin Hartley, Black Classicist, Clergyman, and Physician
- 5: Heidi Morse: Roman Studios: The Black Woman Artist in the Eternal City, from Edmonia Lewis to Carrie Mae Weems
- 6: Kimathi Donkor: Africana Andromeda: Contemporary Painting and the Classical Black Figure
- Part III: Tales
- 7: Adam Lecznar: The Tragedy of Aimé Césaire
- 8: Tracey L. Walters: Bernardine Evaristo's The Emperor's Babe: An Account of Roman London from the Black British Perspective
- 9: Justine McConnell: Myth and the Fantastic in the Work of Junot Díaz
- 10: Patrice D. Rankine: Classics for All? Liberal Education and the Matter of Black Lives
- Endmatter
- Works Cited
- Index
About the author
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 (CUP, 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.
Adam Lecznar is currently an Honorary Research Fellow in UCL's Department of Greek and Latin. His research interests range 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 entitled Dionysus after Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy in Twentieth-Century Literature and Thought.
Heidi Morse is a Lecturer at the University of Michigan, where she was a 2014-2016 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. She has also authored articles on American women's poetry, slave narratives, and African American print and visual culture which 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.
Summary
Classicisms in the Black Atlantic explores how black authors and artists in the Atlantic world have shaped and reshaped the cultural legacies of classical antiquity from the aftermath of slavery up to the present day to represent black voices and experiences, often revealing in the process effaced black presences in classical antiquity.
Additional text
This volume is an essential addition to teaching and learning about Black classicisms.