Reviewed by: Empire of Ruin: Black Classicism and American Imperial Culture by John Levi Barnard Shelley P. Haley John Levi Barnard. Empire of Ruin: Black Classicism and American Imperial Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. xi, 233. $78.00. ISBN 978-0-19-066359-9. “Black Classicism” began in Classics with the important work of discovery and recovery of Black classicists and their triumphs in the discipline, particularly in the United States. However, as the subfield of Black Classicism moves beyond that first phase and expands beyond geographical and genré borders, the depths of the political analysis engendered by African-descended intellectuals are breathtaking to behold. Barnard’s Empire of Ruin: Black Classicism and American Imperial Culture offers something for everyone. From the literary analysis of Phillis Wheatley’s poetry to a deconstruction of the National September 11 Memorial Museum and Kara Walker’s art installation A Subtlety, Barnard offers a thought-provoking [End Page 493] critique of the differing applications of ancient history between Black and white intellectuals from the 18th to the 21st centuries. Barnard’s discussion (69–88) of how Black intellectuals like William Wells Brown, David Walker, and Henry Highland Garnet used the neoclassical style of the US Capitol Building to delineate the United States’ decay stemming from slavery is mandatory reading for anyone interested in the connection between history and monumental architecture. On nearly every page, Barnard presents examples of the critique of the US’s monumental culture as that of an imperial slave society. The implicit and sometimes explicit conclusion of every critique is that the ancient imperial slave cultures rotted away and the same will happen to the US. In his play, The Escape; or, A Leap to Freedom, in which he names the main character “Cato,” Brown also provides a stirring antidote to Joseph Addison’s Cato. As Barnard states (64), “That Brown chose Cato for the name of a character he modeled to some extent on himself is also revealing of the ways black classicism critiques both American slavery and the ways classical tradition functions to enable and even to celebrate it. The naming of enslaved people after classical figures was common . . . But the name Cato had a particularly galling significance, since it was the name whites associated most strongly with the concept of freedom.” Barnard’s discussion of Charles Chesnutt’s critique of the Lincoln Memorial through the use of “conjure tales” is riveting. Every classicist should read Chesnutt’s “A Roman Antique.” I especially appreciated Barnard’s framing of Phillis Wheatley as a political actor at the pivotal juncture of US intellectual history when Classics is supplanting Biblical Studies as the intellectual authority. As Barnard states (25), “. . . knowledge of the classics was certainly a form of intellectual and political currency in Wheatley’s world.” Chapters 3 (“Ancient History, American Time: Charles Chesnutt and the Sites of Memory”) and 4 (“Crumbling into Dust: Conjure and the Ruins of Empire”) might be uncomfortable reading for some, especially those who want Black Classicism to remain a narrative of the exceptionalism of some Black intellectuals because of their classical education, rather than a scathing critique of white supremacy. Criticisms are few and far between but I would be remiss in describing the work as flawless. Several sentences are great examples of Ciceronian periods but are, generally, inaccessible to the average modern reader. The best example is the final sentence of the book: “If the unfortunate excerpt from Virgil’s epic of empire demonstrates the ongoing validity of Ralph Ellison’s perception that classical history and literature provide the sacred texts of Western cultural rituals of power—what he called the ‘myth and ritual business’ lying ‘beneath the foundations of the West’—then Kara Walker’s monument across the river attests to the ongoing relevance of a critical countertradition that aims to undermine the social and political power they have been made to serve” (151). Furthermore, Barnard perpetuates a debunked theory about the construction of the Egyptian monuments (132): “Neither of these perspectives ignores the fact that ancient Egypt was itself a slave society, the monuments of which were constructed by the coerced labor of the oppressed . . .” The general consensus...