OUT OF THE SHADOWS OF EMPIRE: Institute of Classical Studies’ Classical Reception Seminar Series

The Classical Reception Studies Network and Institute of Classical Studies (University of London) are excited to announce the commencement of this year’s summer term seminar series on 22 April 2024. This year’s theme is ‘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.

Programme

Seminars will take place on Mondays from 4.30-6.00pm UK time on Zoom (3.30-5pm GMT, 5.30-7pm SAST, 10:30am-12pm CDT), featuring the following guest speakers:

22 April – Patrice Rankine (University of Chicago)

The Bacchae and the postcolonial turn

29 April – Lesego Chauke (University of Cape Town)

Title TBC

13 May – Justine McConnell (King’s College London)

Graeco-Roman shades and colonial shadows in the Caribbean

20 May – Madhlozi Moyo (University of the Free State)

The obelisks of Matabeleland: Cecil John Rhodes, conquest, and the Classics

3 June – Daniela Potenza (Messina University), Yassaman Khajehi (Clermont Auvergne University), and Pauline Donizeau (Lumière University)

Greek Tragedy and the Middle East: chasing the myth

10 June – Michael Okyere Asante (University of Environment and Sustainable Development/Stellenbosch University)

Title TBC