Justine McConnell: Graeco-Roman Shades and Colonial Shadows in the Caribbean

Justine McConnell (King’s College London)

Graeco-Roman Shades and Colonial Shadows in the Caribbean

Register here: https://ics.sas.ac.uk/events/graeco-roman-shades-and-colonial-shadows-caribbean

Out of the Shadows of Empire

 Recent scholarship has increasingly drawn attention to the discipline of classics’ historic entanglement with projects of empire and their legacies. Not only was classical education central to colonial curricula, but classical motifs were weaponised in the justification of acts of imperialism and white supremacy. ‘Out of the Shadows of Empire’ seeks to explore some of the diverse ways in which subaltern writers and creators subversively redeployed Graeco-Roman culture to critique these systems of empire and Euro-American cultural dominance and deconstruct the colonial apparatus.

This seminar will explore how classical receptions from the global south emerged from, in reaction to, and in spite of classics’ historic intimacy with the imperial project. Centred on the motif of shadows, we invite speculations on the spectrality and ephemerality of ‘shadowy receptions’ that are simultaneously intangible yet present. Shadowy receptions may reflect the covert or discrete ways in which writers reimagine, or in the words of Henry Louis Gates, signify Graeco-Roman material, that is the creative expression through detour, appropriation, translation, expropriation, and repetition with difference (Gates 2015). How can alternative receptions that have been kept in the shadows of canonical classics offer new ways of seeing and reshape perceptions of the ancient past? How have receptions from the global south developed not only under the umbra of colonialism, but emerge from, speak out against, and rise above it?

Taking ‘empire’ as a starting point, we invite considerations of related power imbalances including but not limited to colonialism, enslavement, apartheid, segregation, Westernisation, and racialisation. We aim to explore contexts both under and ‘after’ imperialism, with a focus on the redeployment of classics as a tool of resistance and reconciliation and as a process of rewriting the past.