SCHEIDEL: WHAT IS ANCIENT HISTORY?

Scheidel characterises his contribution as a ‘manifesto’. ‘Ancient history’, he notes, continues in many scholarly quarters to give top billing to classical Greece and Rome, reducing Egypt, Persia and Carthage to walk-on roles. Old academic divisions isolate ancient Graeco-Roman from other historians while moulding their training and research output around philological norms. Meanwhile, in popular culture ‘ancient history’ is a synonym for irrelevance: viewers either yawn or flip the channel to Ancient Aliens.

What Is Ancient History? tackles this state of affairs with ambition far beyond its page-count. The first chapter, ‘Worldmaking: How We Got Here’, argues that all major aspects of modern life derive from a ‘bundle’ of transformative innovations (such as agriculture, commerce, writing and urbanisation) that give every human equal stake in antiquity. Originating independently at different times and places across the globe, these advances ushered in competitive advantages, social complications and geographical interconnectivities that will be familiar in broad outline to readers of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1997), C. Mann’s 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (2005), D. Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years (2011) and J. Suzman’s Work: A Deep History from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots (2020), among other works of popular non-fiction not directly engaged with by Scheidel. His contribution to the discussion lies instead in his insistence on the need for better scholarly means of examining developments that were ‘planetary in scale but asynchronous in nature’ (p. 63) while avoiding chronological traps such as the ‘Global Middle Ages’ movement’s reinstantiation of Eurocentric periodisation. In opposition to social evolutionists’ assumption that ‘developmentally precocious societies were somehow superior’ (p. 60), Scheidel treats comparative ‘time lags’ as fertile ground for the study of context and causality.

Chapter 2, ‘Worldbreaking: Where We Went Wrong’, tells the most vivid story of all: how Altertumswissenschaft and disciplinary configurations we now take for granted coalesced around the nineteenth century under the gravitational pull of European Romanticism, nation-state formation and Germanic thinkers including Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Wilhelm von Humboldt and Friedrich August Wolf. The result was an academic-industrial complex focused on the production of specialised knowledge within disciplinary trammels varying somewhat across European and anglophone institutions.

The resultant intellectual consequences and counterproductivities, particularly for classical historians chained to philological expectations, find trenchant critique in Chapter 3, ‘Going Global: What We Should Do’. Scheidel outlines four productive alternative approaches: contextualisation, connectivity, comparison and world history. Chapter 4, ‘Closing Classics: Why We need to Move On’, most closely aligns Scheidel’s vision with calls for change from scholars of colour including K. Ram-Prasad, M. Umachandran, M. Seo and D. Padilla Peralta. Sharp analyses of argumentation used to critique and defend the field are counterbalanced by a brief conclusion’s positive vision of more collaborative, global, cross-cultural knowledge production.

What Is Ancient History? offers a provocative and persuasive vision of what ancient history could be, if only we could shed ‘the thickly layered encrustations of academic convention that block our view, and develop new strategies of engagement and understanding’ (p. 6). The ‘we’ this book imagines and addresses is one casualty of its necessary trade-offs between abstraction and detail. Global antiquity hopes to benefit the public (p. 14), but metadisciplinary insider baseball may lose general readers. Fellow academics may find Scheidel’s manifesto, like many others, longer on critique than on pragmatic solutions. The atomisation, inertia and institutional barriers Scheidel describes are also powerful obstacles to the broad-based collaborative effort that systemic change will require. Nonetheless, in taking us one step closer, What Is Ancient History? is indispensable reading for both advocates and opponents of global approaches to antiquity.

BLOUIN AND AKRIGG (EDD.): THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF CLASSICS, COLONIALISM, AND POSTCOLONIAL THEORY

In contrast with Scheidel’s slim prescriptive synthesis, yet delivering just as bold a transdisciplinary vision, the Routledge Handbook’s spine-cracking heft announces an ethos of abundance, inclusivity and polyvocality. Of all humanities subjects, editors Blouin and Akrigg observe in a thoughtful introduction, ‘Classics’ is arguably most implicated with European colonialism yet least conversant with ‘postcolonial’ thought (p. 5). Without over-defining these terms, a classroom-friendly section (at pp. 15–24) usefully distinguishes between anticolonialism, postcolonialism and decoloniality, with attention to indigeneity and E. Tuck and K.W. Yang’s caveat that ‘decolonialization is not a metaphor’ (2012).

Putting anti-imperial theory into practice, the Toronto-based editors make no claims for comprehensiveness, acknowledging contingencies that prevented many invited contributors (including this reviewer) from delivering during the pandemic. They avoid partitioning the volume into sections or homogenising idiosyncratic styles, perspectives and angles of colonial engagement. The 39 component essays are nearly as diverse as postcoloniality itself, spanning a vast array of research specialties, disciplinary backgrounds and epistemic landscapes. These stretch chronologically from the Bronze Age to the twenty-first century and geographically from the Mediterranean basin to South Africa and Asia, with particular strengths in Egypt and North America. The understandable self-containment of these essays, with individualised images and bibliographies, makes them easy to excerpt, but precludes much interconnection beyond three brief concluding envois by H.S. Dhindsa, S.P. Haley and B. Goff, plus a short volume-wide index.

This is therefore not a ‘handbook’ in the traditional sense. It nonetheless represents an extraordinary achievement. Though unlikely to be read in its entirety, it illustrates the strength of diversity. Collectively, though not in conversation, contributions disrupt ancient studies’ ‘symbiosis with European colonialism’ (p. 5) and add evidential kindling to field-transforming fires. The discussion below, organised to highlight emergent themes andconnections, should be read alongside full chapter titles and page numbers provided in the table of contents.

Several contributions interrogate disciplinary histories and blind spots, starting with P. Vasunia’s appraisal of intersections between classical philology and orientalism before Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978). Insights into Said’s theoretical prejudices and occasional misprisions of Graeco-Roman texts make Vasunia’s essay a valuable teaching tool. It nicely pairs with R. Mairs’s analysis of nineteenth-century Arabic phrasebooks, whose modelling on classical conventions rendered them all but useless for mutual interaction. Imperialist attitudes persist in Western scholars’ widespread failure to gain fluency in local languages, as Mairs drives home with a humble account of her own Arabic learning. D. Nakassis also peels scales from Eurocentric eyes in unravelling the false periodisation of Mycenaean palace culture as orientally separate from the supposedly Hellenic origins of ‘Western civilization’. K. Yu and K. Dosoo show how universalising Western ontologies have disenfranchised hybrid subjectivities in Greek religion and ancient magic, respectively. Whole other fields, including ancient India in M. Gomes’s assessment, still await integration into global analysis despite valuable insights into subalternity.

Another governing theme, the politics of space, finds apt expression in G. Parker’s discussion of colonial cartography, narration and ownership from the Odyssey to Abraham Ortelius’ sixteenth-century mapping of the Red Sea periplus. Archaeologists also navigate far beyond traditional geopolitical, bureaucratic and epistemic boundaries, as exemplified by S. Gorshenina and C. Rapin’s contribution on Hellenistic archaeology in Uzbekistan and S. Ghosh’s on Indo-Iranian borderlands in central Asia. Closer to home for readers in the Global North, J.M. Hall excavates the cross-fertilisation of local and touristic interpretations of archaeology at Argos, while C. Johnston tracks classical inspirations and anti-indigenous consequences of the 1906 US Antiquities Act.

Other powerful contributions explore indigenous struggles for epistemic purchase in ways sure to inspire next-generation research. C. Williams illustrates how native North American concerns have been marginalised and assimilated by both classical and postcolonial scholars. H. Abd el Gawad unpacks the emotional and logistical labour of local Egyptian knowledge producers conscripted as indigenous grant facilitators. Lived experience also informs U. Ali Gad’s account of the discrediting of Egypt and Egyptians in the study of papyri, which alongside M. Malouta’s essay on materiality and decolonisation should be required reading for budding papyrologists.

Heritage and ownership concerns also motivate R. Yuen-Collingridge’s revisioning of Constantine Simonides’s nineteenth-century forgeries as creative responses to unequal colonial conditions and B. Haug’s recognition of constructive local partnerships in the otherwise scurrilous conduct of amateur scholar Frederic Cope Whitehouse. One highlight for teachers and curators is E. Marlowe’s postcolonial guide to being a ‘critical museum visitor’, not just because it addresses that perennial question: ‘why do these statues have no heads?’ More hand(book)ily than most other contributions, Marlowe offers student-friendly advice on critically interpreting museum labels (with examples of best and worst practices), understanding the history and legality of antiquities traffic and comparing museum displays with ancient artefacts’ original contexts and assemblages.

More literary-historical contributions engage postcolonial thinkers such as Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha and Leela Gandhi. Analysing the refugee Danaids’ intersectional identities, N.S. Rabinowitz contrasts the internalised racism of Aeschylus’ Suppliants with Charles Mee’s gender-focused 2000 stage adaptation Big Love. A. Richlin explores the subalternity of authors and educators whose trafficking between Rome’s imperial peripheries and metropole hybridised regional cultures and engendered intellectual flourishing. E. Giusti’s analysis of Roman imaginings of Africa, and the imbrication of physical and imaginative space, usefully complements her 2018 monograph and the widely taught Race and Ethnicity in the Classical World: An Anthology of Primary Sources in Translation (edd. R.F. Kennedy, C.S. Roy, M.L. Goldman [2013]). N. Morley’s essay on Thucydides and L. Gloyn’s on Valerius Maximus tackle the conscription of Graeco-Roman texts towards imperial projects, in their own time and beyond. Straddling these periods, with rare intermedial insight into visual culture and postcolonial feminist thought, is P.E. Kim’s standout analysis of women’s iconographical and ideological role in Hellenistic colonialism and cultural hybridisation.

Further valuable pieces will inform syllabi on ancient race and modern identities. D.E. McCoskey zooms in on prejudices and politics surrounding the Roman playwright Terence’s variously ‘African’, ‘Berber’ or ‘Black’ identities, in an essay that should be read alongside R. Morrison’s Gruen Prize-winning research on the freedman’s reception in colonial America. With similar care for racialised receptions, D. Machado analyses representations of the Carthaginian general Hannibal as a proto-hero of abolition, African anti-colonialism and Black Radicalism. A. Pistone’s exploration of Greek tragic receptions by Kamau Brathwaite, Wole Soyinka and Rita Dove calls valuable attention to modern performance contexts and their racial implications. J. Bastos Marques and F. Naether reorient the conversation towards Latin America, still marginalised by anglophone scholars, in essays respectively analysing classicism in Brazil’s colonial, imperial and national stages of formation, and pharaonic Egyptian motifs in the Carnival festivities by which modern Brazilians articulate racially and culturally hybrid identities.

Signal contributions seek escape velocity from colonial legacies, limning theoretical and subjective possibilities by which historically minoritised scholars stand to inundatively regenerate rather than incinerate the field. M. Umachandran movingly documents struggles with implication in a ‘zombie discipline’ based on violence and extraction, thinking with New Mestiza pioneer Gloria Anzaldúa towards Classics as a ‘borderland’ that no longer conscripts intersectional minds and bodies in their own dehumanisation. D. Padilla Peralta interrogates colonial and disciplinary epistemicide through séance with Homeric ghosts haunting the colonial and postcolonial Hispanophone Caribbean. Meditating on ‘placefulness’ via Jamaican author Ishion Hutchinson, S.-M. Eccleston opens ecologically, even oceanically expansive modes of repairing ‘the relationship between matter and place that settler colonialism disrupted, with the ultimate goal of nurturing anticolonial agency’ (p. 97).

In pressing disciplinary assumptions about who gets to be a knower of what, in which contexts and in whose interests, these essays expand imaginative and methodological horizons. Similar themes characterise the handbook’s laudable care for teaching and learning across global landscapes that are never really ‘post’-colonial. Working from a Canadian classroom haunted by epistemic and institutional violence, as contextualised by A. Cleverley’s analysis of examination practices and disciplinary history at the University of Toronto, A. McMaster applies the indigenous concept of ‘Two-Eyed Seeing’ to interactions between local Italians and Trojans in Virgil’s Aeneid. From another hemisphere, A.L. Daniels surveys the value and relevance that her South African students derive from Classics, despite or because of their linguistically and economically divided nation’s ongoing colonial heritage.

The Routledge Handbook is a monumental, thought-leading achievement on the part of all concerned. Its greatest virtue is its refusal to define parameters; instead, it opens new horizons for racially and epistemically regenerative inquiry bucking traditional disciplinary norms.

PADILLA PERALTA: CLASSICISM AND OTHER PHOBIAS

Allied themes resurface in Padilla Peralta’s searing, summary-resistant Classicism and Other Phobias. Four central essays, based on the author’s 2022 W.E.B. DuBois lectures at Harvard and service at the forefront of a field that persistently devalues Black subjectivities, will inspire readers to unpack links among disciplinary formation, race and lived experience.

Padilla Peralta’s first book, Undocumented: A Dominican Boy’s Odyssey from a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League (2016), recounts the early fascination with Graeco-Roman antiquity that propelled his meteoric rise to a baccalaureate degree at Princeton, followed by tenure at the same institution on the strength of award-winning research into Roman religion. His most recent book marks a salutary return to the first-person voice, now wiser, more capacious and weathered by years in the public eye (see Rachel Poser, ‘He Wants to Save Classics from Whiteness. Can the Field Survive?’, New York Times, 2 February 2021).

Classicism and Other Phobias curls a fist against right-wing attacks on disciplinary ‘wokeism’ and lands some serious punches. An introduction distinguishes Classics from ‘Classicism’, here defined as a historical process that overvalues and overrepresents certain (white) domains of human experience, built to colonise time and pathologise Blackness. In constructive defiance, Padilla Peralta summons his own historically contingent embodiment of Blackness into alliance with thinkers including W.E.B. DuBois, James Baldwin, Sylvia Wynter and contemporary classicists of colour (several noted above). Subsequent essays tour Padilla Peralta’s formidable intellect, interpretative archive, positional experience and inimitable subjectivity in confronting Classicism’s racial legacies and creative possibilities. His meditations are densely textured, prone to academic-speak, but electrifying in their vision of epistemic repair.

Chapter 1, ‘Epic Maroons’, views Classics as ‘suspended in space-times either adjacent to or ensconced firmly within plantocracy and its direct beneficiaries’ (p. 28), asking with Audre Lorde whether the master’s tools can ever dismantle the master’s house. Padilla Peralta prefers to leave the plantation altogether, instead imagining a ‘classicism of fugitivity and insurgence’ (p. 30) grounded in Caribbean history and thought, notably Juan de Castellano’s 1589 Spanish epic. The book’s great strength is its sustained critical engagement with Black thinkers, histories and creativity across multiple media all too often marginalised by the anglosphere.

My favourite chapter, ‘Zealots’, combines autobiographical and magical realist modes to summon the ghosts of past selves, family members, Haitian revolutionaries (as depicted by Michel-Rolph Trouillot and Ulrick Jean-Pierre), even Quiara Alegría Hudes’ Orishas. This katabasis into the author’s intellectual formation explores creative modes of resisting Classics’ attempted colonisation of minds, bodies and time.

Chapter 3, ‘Let Me Clear My Throat’, intersects most explicitly with other volumes under review in asking whether and how Classics can transform without continuing to exploit marginalised communities. Through a critical examination of DuBois’s ‘ghosting’ of indigenous peoples and presences, Padilla Peralta challenges Classics to work beyond its settler-colonial genealogy towards an embrace of multiplicity, ‘intensification of difference’ (p. 101) and redistribution of material resources. As with Scheidel, some readers will desire more specificity on what this change might look like and how it might be accomplished. Chapter 4 pivots instead to the artist Kehinde Wiley while continuing to eschew the term ‘Black Classicism’ for its implied construction of a Classics independent of Blackness. Added consideration of gender, diasporic hybridity, Négritude and Afrofuturism connect this essay with Gayatri Spivak, Achille Mbembe, the artist Kara Walker and contributions to the Routledge Handbook, notably Eccleston’s. A brief conclusion refutes J. Grethlein’s attacks on positional epistemology and lifts up S.P. Haley’s generative employment of critical race theory to disrupt white normativity, valorising historically minoritised subjectivities’ ongoing contributions to the production of ancient knowledge (p. 138).

The best proof of this argument is the book itself. Classicism and Other Phobias is an idiosyncratic yet un-put-downable intervention by a generational thought-leader. Together with Scheidel’s monograph and Blouin and Akrigg’s handbook, it resoundingly proves the necessity, value and intellectual fecundity of ongoing disciplinary movements towards historical reckoning, racial justice and epistemic pluralism. All three books merit serious engagement by students and scholars of ancient Mediterranean literature, history and culture, not least those inclined to disagree with the premises. I just hope the authors and the many thinkers they inspire might also translate their paradigm-shifting arguments into terms likely to reach wider publics. Nobody need flip the channel to Ancient Aliens when such stars of the field are leading collective efforts to deconstruct and rebuild our disciplinary house, with room for many more.