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Notes
‘Black classicism’ has certainly been at the forefront of the attempt to re-think power and the potential subversiveness of the classical tradition, but such efforts can also be found in the emerging study of other national sites, such as Ireland. See, e.g., S. McElduff, ‘Fractured Understandings: Towards a History of Classical Reception among Non-Elite Groups’, in Classics and the Use of Reception, ed. C. Martindale and R. F. Thomas, Oxford, 2006, pp 180–91. For more on the range of sites being reconsidered in terms of classical reception, begin with Classics and National Cultures, ed. S. Stephens and P. Vasunia, Oxford, 2010 and Classics in Post-colonial Worlds, ed. L. Hardwick and C. Gillespie, Oxford, 2010.
For an important introduction to the work of many scholars in this field, see African Athena: New Agendas, ed. D. Orrells, G. K. Bhambra and T. Roynon, Oxford, 2011. More recent work includes E. A. Hairston, The Ebony Column: Classics, Civilization, and the African American Reclamation of the West, Knoxville, 2013 and P. D. Rankine, Aristotle and Black Drama: A Theater of Civil Disobedience, Waco, 2013.
Questions about the extent and meaning of contact between ancient Egypt and Greece were raised most energetically in the field of classics by Martin Bernal’s multi-volume Black Athena, the first volume of which was published in 1987. However, as many scholars have pointed out, such ideas were circulating long before Black Athena among African and African American intellectuals and writers. Some of these earlier strains of thought, as well as Black Athena itself, are critically evaluated by S. Howe, Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes, London, 1998. African Athena presents an attempt to re-think the legacy of Black Athena, while setting parameters for future study (see n. 2 above).
Roynon does acknowledge important similarities between Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Morrison’s work when recognizing that her ‘interest in the permeability of boundaries and the fragility of hierarchies has an obvious appeal’, but she dismisses deeper connections between the two works with the puzzling and unsubstantiated assertion that Ovid’s ‘postmodernism’ is ‘amoral’ (p. 21), a claim that many feminist classicists would take issue with. In fact, recent scholarship on Ovid has probed the diverse methods by which male and female subjectivity are produced and also destabilized in Ovid’s poem, examinations which could deepen Roynon’s analysis considerably; see, e.g., V. Rimell, Ovid’s Lovers: Desire, Difference and the Poetic Imagination, Cambridge, 2006, which examines the myth of Narcissus specifically.
See, e.g., M. Suzuki, Metamorphoses of Helen: Authority, Difference and the Epic, Ithaca, NY, 1989, and, more recently, R. Blondell, Helen of Troy: Beauty, Myth, Devastation, Oxford, 2013.
N. Loraux, The Children of Athena: Athenian Ideas About Citizenship and the Division Between the Sexes, transl. C. Levine, Princeton, NJ, 1993.
The one exception is Roynon’s excellent discussion of the novel Home, which is treated for the most part in a single chapter (pp. 117–27). In that discussion, she provides a nuanced and compelling account of the ways Morrison’s classicism contributes to the novel’s themes of violence, burial and redemption.
In her discussion of ‘America as Lucretia’ (pp. 31–7), which serves primarily to link the reception of Lucretia to narratives of American colonization, Roynon refers to individual aspects of Lucretia’s story in her analysis such as Lucretia’s suicide, but never gives a succinct account of the myth itself, and I suspect non-classicists would have difficulty apprehending the central features of the story in Roman narrative. Towards the end of the section, it should be noted that Roynon briefly considers Ovid’s specific version of Lucretia’s story as told in the Fasti (pp. 35–6); but this seems an odd focus given that Livy’s account of Lucretia is entirely overlooked, and surely his version would be at least as influential as Ovid’s on later reception. Nor is it accurate to say, as Roynon does, that ‘Ovid’s account of Lucretia’s rape in Fasti (II.685–856) is noteworthy for the way in which the woman’s experience is subordinated to, or used to explain, the shifting power dynamics or the change in the nature of the government of Rome, from that of the monarchy to the republican system’ (my emphasis, p. 35). In fact, that very notion – that Lucretia’s rape can serve as political aetiology – is essential to Livy’s earlier telling.
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McCoskey, D.E. Tessa Roynon, Toni Morrison & the Classical Tradition: Transforming American Culture . Int class trad 25, 190–200 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-016-0418-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-016-0418-2