Classicisms in the Black Atlantic ed. by Ian Moyer, Adam Lecznar and Heidi Morse

Abstract

Reviewed by: Classicisms in the Black Atlantic ed. by Ian Moyer, Adam Lecznar and Heidi Morse Ronald Charles Classicisms in the Black Atlantic. Edited by Ian Moyer, Adam Lecznar, and Heidi Morse. Classical Presences. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp xiv + 338. Hardback, $150. ISBN 0198814127 This volume is a groundbreaking study of how Classical texts, tropes, figures, art, myths and history have been received, used, deployed and interpreted within the Black Atlantic. The book aims to show how artists and intellectuals in the Black Atlantic have excavated the classical texts, images, narratives and practices in order to imagine new possibilities. The essays emphasize the outcomes of slavery's aftermaths by way of various geographical (dis)location and cultural connections. The volume is divided into three parts: 1) Wakes, 2) Journeys and 3) Tales. The editors grace the book with a programmatic Introduction in which they lay out the aims and contours of the project. Paul Gilroy's famous work on the Black Atlantic provides the broad conceptual framework for these analyses of the reception of the classics in the diasporic world. Part I : Wakes The first chapter is by Emily Greenwood, "Middle Passages: Mediating Classics and Radical Philology in Marlene NourbeSe Philip and Derek Walcott." This chapter explores the use of classical texts and figures as mediating elements in the historical and representational space the Middle Passage plays in the work of Marlene NourbeSe Philip and Derek Walcott. The Middle Passage remains a site of memory or, as the author identifies it, "a zone of translation based on the physical transportation and translation of bodies" (31). Both NourbeSe and Walcott use classical texts as tools of resistance and radical rewriting. Greenwood shows how the notion of critical memory is used in a creative way in Walcott's works, pointing [End Page 356] out his recurring evocation of bones as poetic touchstone. NourbeSe's goal, Greenwood highlights, is to dismember the Classics, that is, to challenge certain Eurocentric readings of the classical texts and to make them serve her own purpose of remembering the fate and the story of her Black ancestors. Playing with languages and with texts, she engages in reading the classical texts, such as the Aeneid, subversively: "While Philip may not find common cause with Derek Walcott, both poets are engaged in a profound philological project because they ceaselessly address the question of how to love a conflicted language that bears the traces of a colonial history, as well as the question of how to express Caribbean experience within this language" (54). The second chapter in this section of the book, "Nero, the mustard!: The Ironies of Classical Slave Names in the British Caribbean," was authored by Margaret Williamson. The author demonstrates how slaveholders took names (place names, literary and classical names) from a wide classical stock of names and imposed them on to the Black slaves. The point was to ridicule the slaves, and to differentiate "slaves as a group from free whites by means of nomenclature and to assert the primacy of European culture" (63). Williamson also shows how this naming of slaves participated in the overall violence exercised against the slave's body and psyche. The classical names were also used for animals (domestic pets and working animals), thus obliterating in the minds of the slaveholders the difference between slaves and animals. As the author states, "Those who named their slaves Homer, Virgil, Pindar or Sappho were not offering any commentary on those individuals' poetic prowess. Rather, they were boasting of their own fluency in the language of power" (78). The third chapter is a fascinating contribution by Dan-el Padilla Peralta, "Athens and Sparta of the New World: The Classical Passions of Santo Domingo." He shows how classical tropes, figures and myths have been at the core of Santo Domingo's claims to racial purity and ethnic identity throughout its history. This particular way of presenting the DR, as the Athens of the New World, is placed within a clear racialized anti-Haitianism propagated by the Dominican Republic's dominant classes. This racist attitude, or this deep-seated desire to be seen by others as a...