In her 2017 essay published in Eidolon J. Hanink argues for the importance of what she calls critical classical reception: a subfield that crucially ‘acknowledges, even if implicitly, that Greek and Roman antiquity have played a major role in constructing and authorizing racism, colonialism, nationalism, patriarchy, Western-centrism, body normativity, and other entrenched, violent social structures’ (Hanink, Eidolon [2017]). In addition to this quality, critical classical reception has an overt activist agenda and often uses a personal voice.
Does this volume, helmed by editors Feile Tomes, Goldwyn and Duquès, meet the brief? At times, yes; at others, no. To be clear, the introduction of this book articulates its own aims carefully and then indisputably follows through. Critical classical reception is not one of its explicit objectives. Feile Tomes defines the volume as ‘a study of the arrival of, encounter with, and engagement of Greco-Roman culture in the lands of the western hemisphere during a period we are terming “early”’ (p. 7). The editors have privileged a ‘transhemispheric position’ – that is, the Caribbean and North, Central and South America – to illustrate the myriad differences and similarities of the Americas through the transatlantic transfer of the classical tradition (p. 11). It is a legitimate goal, especially for those of us who have read only Eurocentric scholarship despite fervent interest in literally anything else.
I am a historian of the early modern Americas. My education in Classics was what made me change tack to focus on Latin American history, a field that frequently acknowledges the influence of Graeco-Roman antiquity in its many subdisciplines. As the writers and editors of this volume may attest, a Classics-based background makes one particularly attuned to the long-reaching and ever-enduring impacts of imperialism across the epochs, impacts that Feile Tomes and several other authors in this book acknowledge. Now, as boundaries between academic fields and subfields begin to weaken and splinter, this volume makes me wonder what is on the horizon for the study of classical reception and what it seeks to gain from a critical perspective.
The topical foci of this volume run the gamut in space and time, a tribute to the editors’ skilful curation. Their shared commonalities are their general geography (the Americas), genre (literature, minus drama) and periodisation (roughly the early modern). Allow me to briefly summarise the essays based on geography, which is approximately how this volume is arranged. Foregrounded in South America are M. Brumbaugh's analysis of Jesuit José Manuel Peramás’ ethnography of the Guaraní; a close reading of an Ovidian pornographic poem by C. Bloomfield-Gadêlha; a case study of early modern Brazilian poetry by A. Costrino; and J. van der Woude's essay on the literary and material archive of a Peruvian book of poetry. Representing the early modern Caribbean are J.T. Gilmore's chapter on an eighteenth-century Barbadian celebration poem and D. Padilla Peralta's chapter on Lucian dialogues in Hispaniola. North and Central America feature in essays on indigenous schools in Mexico (A. Laird); diachronic colonial models in the Virginia Colony (D. Lupher); mock epics in the early United States (Goldwyn); conservative sociocultural agendas in New England inspired by antiquity (I. Schweitzer), a myth-based poem by Phillis Wheatley (N.A. Spigner); a eulogy of King Philip (Duquès); literary beavers in Canada (W.M. Barton and J.-N. Mailloux); and Virgilian parallels in Old Huronia (Z. Yuzwa). Though underscoring literature exclusively, some authors of these essays investigate the material realities of books and printing practices (see J. van der Woude's chapter on the Antarctic Parnassus) and make forays into environmental history (Barton and Mailloux).
My primary question about this volume – and, indeed, about the study of classical reception writ large – is what the study of Classics can offer the study of the Americas. Over the past decade scholarship in classical reception has blossomed in popularity, and deservedly so. Often, tying the pernicious legacies of ancient Greece and Rome to other fields of study with, shall we say, more politically polarising raisons d’être is an enticing way for undergraduate students to get involved in already-struggling Classics departments. Recent scholarship, too (for example K. Nguyen and S. Derbew), has blazed the trail for students and scholars who come after them. There are, however, ubiquitous and vociferous critics, many of whom insist that the Americas (or Black studies or postcolonial studies or diaspora studies or ethnic studies etc.) ought to prove themselves first as worthy of study for Classicists. How does a non-European geography or an edgy analytical lens directly benefit the Classics? It seems to me that the question should be asked the other way around.
My guess is that anyone reading this review will likely understand that Eurocentric perspectives are not so valuable any more; also, they will likely be able to cite half a dozen postcolonial theorists on this matter (the well-established Spivaks, Fanons and Bhabhas of the academe, in addition to newer voices emerging in alternative, often collective spaces: Notes from the Apotheke, the Christian Cole Society, writer and artist V. Ness, among many others). But, despite not focusing on colonial points of view, it is still possible to write scholarship on non-Eurocentric topics in a colonial way. Most Classicists understand by this point that traditional 1950s-style Eurocentrism is both outdated and gauche. Indeed, classical reception and critical classical reception arose out of an extremely apparent need to write a different kind of scholarship. But it is still evident that, despite the best intentions of the editors, some authors have chosen to frame their essays using retrograde historical standards.
Gilmore's essay on the eighteenth-century Barbadian elite John Alleyn first emphasises the obvious importance of colonialism to the British Empire; he argues that Alleyn's use of Latin verse introduced the British Caribbean to wealthy Europeans. This close reading of Alleyn's Commercium ad Mare Australe flattens the imperial reality of Barbadian life. While recognising the island's colonial status and the poet's elite biases, Gilmore only mentions in passing the sugar plantations that were owned by the Alleyn family and the ‘gaping absence of Caribbean slavery in his poem’ (pp. 149, 170). Surely the slave labour and native genocide that generated capital for the Alleyn family coffers deserve more than lip service; scholars of colonial literature must acknowledge and interpret the self-exoticisation of colonial elites that so often erased the violence and trauma wrought by imperial actors (see K. Ross's monograph The Baroque Narrative of Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora [1993]). Similarly, Laird's chapter on the classical education of Nahua elites argues that indigenous scholars a generation removed from Spanish conquest had ‘no personal experience or memory’ of the ‘world of their ancestors’ (p. 231). This interpretation ignores the existence of oral histories in indigenous communities; the enormous canon of Nahua literature and philosophy that postdates the fall of Tenochtitlan; and the nuanced, generational after-effects of violent conquest that reverberate throughout the Americas to this day (see W. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance [1995]). Creole dynamics, which reflected both discrimination by Europeans in Europe and discrimination against non-European communities in the Americas, certainly require more explication. Those of us who study the early Americas cannot ethically deny the literary originality or the highly varied coexistence of non-European actors.
In a discipline so plagued by modern reckonings, ones so extreme that they have penetrated public scholarship and commentary in non-academic settings, I feel strongly that scholars of classical reception must pay close attention to what occurs in the twenty-first century. The excellent chapters in this collection all do so. The weaponisation of Classics by modern white supremacist groups is only noted by Spigner in her essay on Phillis Wheatley's reception of the Niobe myth; the ongoing legacies of early modern chattel slavery are only referenced and discussed by Spigner (again) and Padilla Peralta. I should note that the standout essays’ authors all hew closely to the high standards of truly interdisciplinary, critical classical reception scholarship: providing answers to the so what of imperial-minded cultural sharing in their various micro-geographies and the tangle of colonial legacies that result. Far from being at best scattered and at worst irrelevant, the activist agenda of critical classical reception analyses both the scholarly content and the larger discipline and institution out of which the discipline was generated. Be it literary studies, history or art history, humanistic subdisciplines that focus on the early Americas must necessarily highlight the longer, more insidious legacies that Classics – with all its reach and influence – may obscure.
In the essay on the seventeenth-century relationships between the Wendat people and French Jesuits Yuzwa concludes with the idea of the ‘classical imaginary’ and what it can offer scholars of Classics and the early Americas alike. As a Latin Americanist, I wonder: what was the classical imaginary, if not explicitly the colonial reality? It is my great hope that reception scholars continue to focus on the latter rather than relying on the former.
