Who Owns Antiquity? Latinx Scholars and the Fight for the Classical Past
Notre Dame in Paris. Photo by GodefroyParis (Wikipedia Commons).
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I. The Appropriation of Antiquity
Devastation of the Notre Dame last year made waves across the internet faster than the Paris Fire Brigade could arrive at the burning cathedral. The reactions were immediate and impassioned. Steve King, a U.S. representative from Iowa known for endorsing self-identified Nazi symphathizers and white nationalists, mourned the destruction, tweeting that the Notre Dame was “priceless to all of Christianity and all of the West.” In an interview on Fox News, Philippe Karsenty, deputy mayor of the municipality Neuilly-sur-Seine and noted polemic right-wing figure in French media, suggested that the fire was an intentional terrorist attack stating: “it’s like a 9/11, a French 9/11.” And before the flames had been extinguished, social media users on Twitter and 4chan—an internet message board notorious for its anonymous users’ vitriolic rhetoric against women, minorities, and the LGBTQ+ community—fueled false accusations that religious and ethnic minorities were responsible for setting the cathedral ablaze.
Though perhaps unsettling, the reaction to the Notre Dame’s destruction as a clear sign of the decline of Western civilization, one devised and executed by historically-marginalized communities, is far from new. The Unite the Right rally that took place in 2016 to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia, elicited similar sentiments. Though ostensibly set up as a peaceful demonstration, the motivations propelling the demonstration were made immensely clear from its outset. Self-described “pro-white activist” Jason Kessler, one of the lead organizers of Unite the Right, stated on a radio program the day before the rally, “the number one thing is I want to destigmatize Pro-White advocacy…I want a huge, huge crowd, and that’s what we’re going to have, to come out and support not just the Lee monument but also white people in general, because it is our race which is under attack.” And on the gaming chat app Discord––the preferred method of communication for the rally’s attendees and organizers on account of the platform’s stances on anonymity––one attendee reminded co-conspirators of the rally’s larger purpose, declaring: “If you want to defend the South and Western civilization from the Jew and his dark-skinned allies, be at Charlottesville on 12 August.”
These urgent proclamations that bemoan a Western civilization in decline extend beyond the anxieties of American chauvinism. At the beginning of 2018, the BBC generated controversy across social media for selecting British actor David Gyasi to play the principal role of Achilles in Troy: Fall of a City, a television series retelling of the Iliad. The reason for this response? Gyasi, a Brit of Ghanian descent, is black. Upon the announcement, one aggrieved user tweeted: “#TroyFallOfACity Good old BBC...Greek hero Achilles plated [sic] by a black actor...the obvious choice for the role...we should be thankful Helen of Troy isn’t wearing a burka.” And in October of 2018, Margaret Talbot uncovered the art world’s “best-kept secret that’s not even a secret” for the New Yorker: ancient marble statues, often lauded for the pristine quality of their forms, were in fact decorously painted with a variety of pigments, a technique known in the art world as polychromy. Beyond revealing the true nature beneath the surface of marble sculpture, Talbot’s piece traced the history behind the glorification of its denuded form which Talbot suggested stemmed, in large part, from a long history of beauty, art, and aesthetics rooted in white supremacy. Despite this, many remained unconvinced with Talbot’s assessment or took umbrage with a presumed argumentative leap in linking white marble to more insidious socio-political underpinnings. One response to Talbot, published in the New Yorker, read: “Nothing Talbot writes credibly explains how these ancient sculptors—driven by a naturalistic aesthetic so intense that they labored in marble in order to replicate muscles beneath the surface of human skin and to painstakingly re-create delicate drapery—would allow painters to effectively obliterate the subtlety of their hard effort with daubs of color…” It’s worth noting that Sarah Bond, a Roman historian at the University of Iowa, endured similar backlash at a much larger scale, for describing this same art historical technique in an article for Hyperallergic in 2017.
The vehement and often racially-charged response to these incidents is far from idiosyncratic or innocuous; rather, this public outrage over the destruction of cultural monuments or perceived revisionism of Western history reanimates old narratives wherein relics like the Notre Dame, the Homeric tradition, and ancient art stand as symbols of Western civilization and consequently become weaponized for ultranationalistic ideologies. Irene Soto-Marín, a postdoctoral scholar in ancient history at the University of Basel is acutely aware of this danger. She says, “I always remind my students that the appropriation of antiquity is nothing new.” Soto-Marín, who is one of a handful of Latinx scholars in the field of Classics, is quick to point out that the manipulation of the ancient for political purposes is anything but a novel strategy. “We have Mussolini who is probably the most salient example for creating this symbol of Romanità and using these symbols to coerce people into nationalism,” she says.
Indeed, the deployment of ancient Rome as both a rhetorical and aesthetic tool proved incredibly effective under the totalitarian regime of Benito Mussolini. At a speech from April 21, 1922 delivered to reaffirm that day as the official birthdate of Rome, Il Duce declared to a crowd of supporters: “Rome is our point of departure and reference; it is our symbol or, if you wish, our myth…Much of what was the immortal spirit of Rome, resurges in Fascism: Rome is the Lictor, Roman is our organization of combat, Roman is our pride and courage.” Ancient Roman art and architecture became a focal point for Mussolini throughout his reign. He worked to preserve archaeological sites of the Graeco-Roman past, such as the Mausoleum of Augustus, even at the expense of destroying of non-Classical architecture and monuments, which he viewed as not serviceable to the authoritarian mission of constructing ancient Rome as a paragon of virtue. This misfortune befell a 17th-century Jewish cemetery which was gutted to expose the ancient site of the Circus Maximus. In so doing, Mussolini’s hope was that Italians, compelled to reckon with the spatial, visual, and historical continuity of the city, might be more emotionally and intellectually convinced by the authoritarian project. This project was more or less effective: Mussolini was able to reconfigure Italian identity to cultivate political power through appealing to the grandiose, if flattened and uncomplex, notion of a unified Italy.
This technique of exploiting misinterpretations of antiquity for political gain was not limited to Mussolini. On the staying power of the misuse of the ancient, Steven Gonzalez, a graduate student in Classics at the University of Southern California, mentions the longevity of this tactic. “In my view, this fascination isn’t anything new—there has always been an instrumental use of antiquity by different actors: states trying to form cultural programs to fit their regimes, organizations using it in order to give themselves legitimacy, and even individual artists and literary figures engaging in past academic or literary traditions.” He is quick to point out that the invocation of antiquity in and of itself is not necessarily the issue, but rather how and why these invocations are being deployed. Gonzalez says, “The danger is when the character of these cultural programs exhibit nationalist or elitist sentiment and embolden racist attitudes and violence. This is why it is an absolute necessity for Classics as a discipline to have a public voice on these issues.”
II. The Current Struggle
And yet, these conversations are challenging even for scholars whose expertise makes them especially prepared to counter these narratives. For one, a significant number of academics who study the past are often reticent to engage in public conversations, either due to disinterest in wading into more modern concerns of diversity and inclusion or because of concern of professional backlash. Regarding the temperament of cerebrally-minded medievalists, scholar and president of the International Society for the Study of Medievalism Richard Utz says, “Most are monkish creatures who just want to live in their cells and write their manuscripts.” Classicists might well be charged with a similarly hermetic temperament, as the field has historically struggled to contend effectively with race. Dan-el Padilla Peralta, an Assistant Professor of Classics at Princeton University who garnered much public attention for his memoir Undocumented: A Dominican Boy’s Odyssey from a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League, has urged his colleagues to reconsider their role in how the field is engaging, or not engaging, with the current political climate, calling the field out for being “Euro-American in composition” and “avowedly non-presentist in its focus.”
Dan-El Padilla Peralta’s memoir (Penguin Books, 2015).
The demographics of scholars studying antiquity have also proved to be a potential cause of the field’s insularity from today’s political landscape. Data from the last few years of placement service reports conducted by the Society for Classical Studies, the largest professional network for scholars working on Classical antiquity in the United States, revealed that of more than 500 candidates who enter into the academic job market each year, nearly 60% are male and over 90% are white. Gonzalez points to these numbers as blind spots that do a disservice to the field and students. “The demographics of the field should match the demographics of the country. What use is it to act as curators and fact-checkers if the field is still maintained by predominantly white men,” asks Gonzalez. “The diversity we embrace should occur along the lines of race, class, gender and sexuality. But even though diverse representation in our field is an admirable thing to aspire to, there is also the danger that representation on a limited scale will only allow other forms of inequality and asymmetry to persist, creating the possibility of interpreting that representation as tokenism, a perfunctory gesture to satisfy public concerns through the hiring of a privileged minority.”
For Adriana Vazquez, Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of California, Los Angeles, understanding how to process these contemporary conversations bubbling up in the public discourse as a scholar has not only resulted in much reflection on the discipline and its pedagogical techniques, it has also surfaced more complicated questions about what it means to identify as Latinx and as a woman in a field that, for all its effort in trying to diversify, is still largely white and male. “I have struggled a lot myself with what my role in all this is. As a Latina in Classics, I have had to come to terms with my own marginalized status,” says Vazquez. “I’ve had a lot of sobering conversations with myself and looking back on the past and identifying moments of implicit bias, or moments where I felt myself or my voice discounted, or felt that I was asked to prove myself in ways that my peers who aren’t Latin and aren’t female didn’t have to do.” For scholars of color, navigating the professional academic sphere is already challenging enough; some feel that entering into these controversial, politically-contentious conversations, however necessary, would only push them further into professional precarity.
Although scholars across the discipline, and scholars of color especially, are doing the work to create a more inclusive field, many cite the problematic contexts out of which their academic fields were created as a barrier to addressing the appropriation of antiquity and diversifying the study of ancient history. Nicole Lopez-Jantzen, a professor of ancient and early medieval history, is especially cognizant of this. Regarding the creation of medieval studies as a subject of academic inquiry, she points out that the “discipline grows out of nationalism, and specifically German nationalism––the idea that this is the core of our nation.” Indeed, while contemporary attacks from right-wing pundits critique what they view as the increasing appropriation of the humanities by leftist academics, the overtly political origins of these humanistic fields, and the methods by which they became reconfigured into a modern notion of Western civilization, have largely been ignored.
A closer look at the development of medieval studies reveals the ethno-nationalist concerns of its architects. In the mid-19th century, as the need to establish a distinct national identity arose across Europe, the need to untangle the muddled, complex history of the millennium between the 5th century and the 15th century––from the fall of the Western Roman Empire to the Turkish conquest of Constantinople––became more pressing. It was by yoking the political, economic, and cultural institutions and practices of the present day to those of the Middle Ages that the citizenry could create for itself a unified, if imaginary, nation, one whose historical thread could evince a linear trajectory and offer a coherent narrative for national identity. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the construction this intelligible, shared history on the German side coincided with Otto von Bismarck’s nearly single-handed undertaking to unify the disparate German states, a collection of mostly germanophone states whose only tether was their former domination under the Holy Roman Empire. Despite this, the ultimate goal of von Bismarck’s project was eventually realized with the 1871 Treaty of Versailles which ended the Franco-Prussian War and established Wilhelm I of Prussia as the first emperor of a united Germany.
This political restructuring served to fortify changes in academia that would further promote nationalist rhetoric. In Germany, the study of medieval texts—together with a rigorous, state-mandated education in German and the scientization and elevation of philology—transformed into a national virtue which received generous financial backing from the newly-formed German empire in the latter half of the 19th century. This model became so effective at cultivating German chauvinism and produced academics of caliber such an impressive caliber that it eventually became the model for humanistic disciplines in universities across Western Europe and the United States. The chauvinism, too, became an integral part of nation-building, as it provided an alibi for acts of brutality: British writers in the early-19th century deployed the story of the Crusades as preparation for—and retroactive justification of—the modern colonial enterprise, Napoleonic France conducted an expedition into Egypt and expropriated Egyptian antiquities, a move defended through the invocation of France’s Graeco-Roman roots, and in Germany the consistent abuse of a constructed lineage to the ancient past in Nazi propaganda mobilized a nation to undertake devastating atrocities.
The transformation of Classical studies into a symbol of Western civilization arises out of equally sociopolitical concerns. When the United States entered the First World War, President Woodrow Wilson created the Committee on Public Information and appointed as its leader longtime supporter and journalist George Creel. The Committee, which later became known as the Creel Committee, served the singular purpose of mobilizing the American people to support the war effort. Under Creel’s leadership, the committee worked tirelessly in pursuit of this mission. It stuffed mailboxes across the United States with pro-war images and slogans, employed Hollywood producers and directors to create films affirming American involvement, and utilized all media available to create the image that cast American presence among the Allied Powers as a necessity by portraying the war as a fight for larger ideals of democracy and even Western civilization itself. Linking the United States to a grand, Classical inheritance gave Wilson ample justification to intervene in what had largely been considered a European affair, despite the fact that Wilson won his re-election on an anti-war platform. Other politicians, too, employed this rhetoric in pursuit of nationalistic ends. Former President Theodore Roosevelt embraced allusions to the Graeco-Roman past, going so far as to call Americans “the lineal heirs of the ancient Latin civilization” and binding Americans with Europeans in “supremacy of the so-called white race” through the distinct factors of biology, religion, and culture: “the so-called white race...who undoubtedly have a certain kinship of blood, who profess the Christian religion, and trace back their culture to Greece and Rome.”
Despite the circumstances from which these fields originates, or partly because of them, Latinx scholars have been working to create change both inside Academe and beyond it. “I try to show that there were things that were perhaps lauded in the past that now should not be,” says Soto-Marín. She explains how she counters these narratives typically presented to her students by emphasizing a more empathetic framework of engaging with ancient history. “I always try to humanize the past as much as possible,” she says. She takes the example of Alexander the Great, best known for being one of history’s most prolific military commanders and for securing Greece as one of the largest empires in the ancient world. Soto-Marín says that she reminds her students of the material cost that invariably followed this reputation. “Alexander’s army must have killed how many local populations throughout Eurasia to achieve the feat that we see portrayed in [the writings of the historian] Pausanias, or that we highlight when we think of Alexander the Great. There’s this sense of glorifying violence.” It is through recontextualizing the material horrors of war and grounding these histories in their real, lived conditions that Soto-Marín has been able to push back against the prevailing, grandiose narratives of antiquity which, because of their temporal and cultural distance, often feel as though they transcend reality and thus risk evading culpability for the brutal realities they reflect.
Vazquez interrogates how she might convey stories from the ancient world to a contemporary audience with different cultural and social frameworks, particularly when dealing with more sensitive subject matter. In a large undergraduate course on Classical mythology, she’s had to confront the issue of how to handle conversations around sexual assault, a theme that undergirds many Graeco-Roman myths. “How do we teach rape myths? How do we plug in those stories into modern discussions about consent?” she asks. “These are very difficult topics and maybe ones in the past that I would have shied away from. But it’s just so clear to me that these are the important discussions for all of us to be having, regardless of what field you’re in. Classics is already a part of that discussion whether I want to acknowledge that or not.”
Not only are these conversations urgent, scholars insist, because of how various groups are already manipulating the past for malevolent ideological purposes, they are vital if Classics as a discipline hopes to persuade anyone that there is indeed value in studying the ancient world. “You have to show the ugliness of Classics to be able to discuss the ways in which it has used been positively. Not doing so would not only be dishonest, but I think it’s the very thing that allows many of the narratives [from the alt-right] to exist...it allows people to draw a straight arrow between now and antiquity,” says Andres Carrete, a graduate student in Classics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Carrete advocates for a nuanced approach to teaching the Classical past, one which uplifts the ways in which the study of the ancient world has been valuable as much as it criticizes misuses of antiquity. In his own work, Carrete researches the reception of Classical antiquity in Latin America; while his previous work has explored how the Spanish deployed misreadings of Aristotle to commit and justify atrocities against indigenous populations of Mexico, his current project focuses on the reception of Greek tragedy, in particular Sophocles’ Antigone, in Mexico. Sophocles’ play centers on the conflict between Oedipus’ daughter Antigone and Creon, King of Thebes, who refuses to give her recently dead brother last funeral rites, holding him in public shame. When Antigone defies the edict and is sentenced to be buried alive, she instead takes own life, refusing to obey what she considers state-sanctioned immorality. For many groups, Antigone lends itself well to the discourse of resistance in the face of oppression. While the forms of political resistance against the state are self-evident, Carrete notes that the tragedy has been helpful in feminist circles “as part of the mourning process” in Mexico especially, where the crisis of femicidio (“feminicide”) overruns many parts of the country. Carrete says that ancient works like Antigone offer a framework for understanding and grappling with the trauma of gender-based violence.
III. The Stakes
Ultimately, scholars say that these conversations are long overdue, especially now as the field is undergoing a reckoning around race. Early last year, the field reached a boiling point when, at the annual conference held by Society of Classical Studies, several racially-charged incidents occurred against scholars of color. Classicists of color Stefani Echeverría-Fenn and Djesika Bel Watson were at the conference as recipients of an excellence award from the Women’s Classical Caucus for their work on Sportula, a grassroots organization that supports classicists with micro-grant funding. Upon their arrival, however, the two were racially profiled by security at the Marriott hotel where the conference was taking place, stopped by staff and asked to show identification. They have reason to believe that they were approached and harassed by staff because, as two people of color attending a nearly all-white conference, they stood out from the majority demographic of other attendees. And during the question-and-answer period at a panel titled, “The Future of Classics,” Mary Francis Williams, an independent scholar in the field, spoke in favor of safeguarding the idea of Western civilization, and accused Padilla Peralta, one of the panelists, of receiving his position at Princeton because of his race.
Despite all this, Latinx scholars are still hopeful. “I’m very heartened by the fact that there are so many senior scholars who are willing to speak out against the association between Classics and white supremacy,” says Vazquez. “They really are pushing the discourse forward, even though they’re met with pushback.”
Beyond the internal politics of Academe these conversations matter because they have consequences that stretch beyond the discipline. Vazquez explains: “If we’re really serious about the democratization of higher education, if we’re really serious about accessibility, Classics as a field needs to change.” Classicists, and in particular classicists of color, are most equipped for the work of radically redefining the perception of antiquity in public discourse. Yet the field has largely elected to remain silent on public discourse, even as extremist ideologues vitiate antiquity, usurping ancient narratives and contorting them for their own political ends. “There are so many ethical mandates to combat: racism, white supremacy, sexism. Insofar as our field embodies any of those things, or is used to justify any of those things, we as classicists have, in my opinion, an ethical obligation to counteract that narrative,” says Vazquez.
Gonzalez believes that academics have an imperative to enter into these conversations, not in spite of the association with contemporary politics, but because of this connection. “I think there is even a moral obligation for Classicists to engage with the public and, in some ways, act as curators of the material of which we are specialists, especially in our current political climate,” says Gonzalez. “With an increasing number of right-wing groups emerging in the U.S. and throughout Europe, it is important for Classicists to act as a check on narratives of Western exceptionalism.”
Kevin Garcia is a queer, Latinx journalist currently based in his hometown of Los Angeles. He loves museums, cultural criticism, and chisme. His work has appeared in the Stanford Arts Review, NPR, and elsewhere. You can follow him @keangarc.