This course will examine uses of ancient Greek and Roman Classics in the literatures, arts, and thought of Africa and the Black diaspora. We will analyze how African and black diasporic authors and intellectuals have engaged with, revised, and re-imagined the classics of ancient Greece and Rome, both to expose and critique discourses of racism, imperialism, colonialism, and white supremacy, and as a rich source of radical self-expression. At the same time, we will study the emergence of scholarship on black classicisms in the last thirty years and the theoretical underpinnings of this field. The course is offered as a research seminar with an incorporated pedagogy workshop: one of the coursework assignments is to develop a syllabus for a course on an aspect of Black classicisms that you might teach in the future and seminar discussions will involve short segments on pedagogy.

The syllabus is arranged thematically, taking in uses of Classics in literature, art, journalism, and politics. Writers, artists, and politicians whose work and ideas we will study include Phillis Wheatley, William Sanders Scarborough, Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, W.E.B. Du Bois, Romare Bearden, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Rita Dove, Hastings Kamuzu Banda, Ola Rotimi, Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona, Wole Soyinka, C.L.R. James, Eric Williams, Aimé Césaire, Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite, Austin Clarke, Marlene NourbeSe Philip, Dionne Brand, and Edwidge Danticat. In addition to works by individual authors we will also consider the circulation of Greek and Roman classical myths, history, and thought in vernacular cultures. Throughout, we will be attentive to the relationship between national contexts and transnational histories and networks, and the phenomenon of classical appropriation in invented modern traditions.