A provocative case for why immortalizing Greek and Roman culture as "classical" marginalizes and devalues Black life
Greek and Roman antiquity has been enshrined in disciplines and curricula at all levels of education, perpetuating what the historian of political thought J.G.A. Pocock has called "a conceptual dictatorship on the rest of the planet." Classicism and Other Phobias shows how the concept of "classicism" lacks the capacity to affirm the aesthetic value of Black life and asks whether a different kind of classicism-one of insurgence, fugitivity, and emancipation-is possible.
Engaging with the work of Sylvia Wynter and other trailblazers in Black studies while drawing on his own experiences as a Black classicist, Dan-el Padilla Peralta situates the history of the classics in the racial and settler-colonialist settings of early modern and modern Europe and North America. He argues that immortalizing ancient Greek and Roman authors as "the classical" comes at the cost of devaluing Black forms of expression. Is a newfound emphasis on Black classicism the most effective counter to this phobia? In search of answers, Padilla Peralta ranges from the poetry of Juan de Castellanos to the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois and paintings by contemporary artists Kehinde Wiley and Harmonia Rosales.
Based on the prestigious W.E.B. Du Bois Lectures delivered at Harvard University, Classicism and Other Phobias draws necessary attention to the inability of the classics as a field of study to fully cope with Blackness and Black people. Dan-el Padilla Peralta is professor of classics at Princeton University. His books include Divine Institutions: Religions and Community in the Middle Roman Republic (Princeton) and Undocumented: A Dominican Boy's Odyssey from a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League. "Audacious and erudite, panoramic yet deeply personal, generational talent Dan-el Padilla Peralta's urgent dissection of Greco-Roman classicism's anti-Black, colonialist genetics doubles as a world-building initiation into the liberatory practice of theory. No humanist today can ignore Padilla Peralta's call to revolution. All who grapple with their disciplines' racialized debts-and all still in denial-must read this book. Today's minoritized creators of tomorrow's knowledge won't be able to put it down."-Nandini Pandey, author of The Poetics of Power in Augustan Rome
"Classicism and Other Phobias, written by one of the most prolific and original practitioners in contemporary classical studies, offers an essay in the fullest sense: an invitation to join in an exercise of critical imagination and self-questioning. Dan-el Padilla Peralta offers a probing examination of the past and present world-making of North Atlantic classics and asks whether alternative classicisms rooted in Black and Afro-diasporic traditions can generate reparative stances and practices that do not simply reenact past plunder."-Katherine Harloe, University of London
"In this vibrant, necessary, and expansively reparative book, Dan-el Padilla Peralta explores how the (in)humanities might overcome historic forms of overrepresentation in order to make space for non-Eurocentric classicisms. Whilst exposing the racializing processes through which systems of classical knowledge and value have been traditionally forged, Classicism and Other Phobias also looks beyond mediations of Greco-Roman antiquity to affirm the aesthetic and epistemic vitality of Black, Afro-Caribbean, and Indigenous ways of knowing."-Verity Platt, Cornell University
"Classicism and Other Phobias makes an electric case against classicism as it has been traditionally defined, widening the view toward the historical pluralities while simultaneously seeding critique at the core of the overall intellectual project that is the 'classical.' Through his personal voice and autobiographical reflection, Padilla Peralta makes a defiant assertio
