Serena Shah (Stanford)
At the intersection of the Classics and studies in race and ethnicity stands much recent research on the reception of the classical tradition among Americans of African descent. Largely centered around the invocation of Greek and Roman characters in the twentieth- and twenty first-century works of African American poets, novelists, playwrights, and directors, this growing subdiscipline of classical reception has been termed ‘Black classicism’ (Ronnick 2010, 2018). Studies in Black classicism do the important work of foregrounding the role that Graeco-Roman antiquity assumed in new-world African American contexts.
Obscured by the lettered approach to classical reception in Black America, nevertheless, is the reality that before the classical past was willfully retooled in twentieth-century works of Black art, literature, and drama, the legacy of Graeco-Roman antiquity was ‘received’ by African Americans through another avenue – an avenue marked by violence and brutality, defined by the racialized power dynamics that wholly encompassed the early American world. In this paper I examine the use of Greek and Roman slave names in the antebellum U.S. South. I treat the practice of classical slave naming as a phenomenon enmeshed in the history of Atlantic slavery, considering both the motivations of enslavers who revivified paradigms from antiquity through names and the lived realities of enslaved people onto whom these paradigms were imposed.
The paper begins with a theoretical inquiry into the role of the classical slave name in the early American South. It draws from existing scholarship on slave-naming practices to question the function of a slave name in a slave society, taking into account the layers of cultural distance between Graeco-Roman antiquity and the antebellum United States that would have affected the particular role of a Greek or Roman slave name in an American slave society. It considers the potential for ironic condescension contained within a name that was assigned to an enslaved person in the United States yet traced its origins to an elevated figure from the ancient Mediterranean past (cf. Benson, Kaplan and Bernays, Williamson, Berlin). The paper proceeds to examine the function of classical slave names in practice by engaging in a case study of James Henry Hammond’s South Carolina plantation, Silver Bluff. It uses plantation records from Silver Bluff dating to the 1830s to attempt to reconstruct the stories of individual enslaved Black people and learn about their lives through the lens of their classical names.
The various forces at play in this picture, it will become clear, reveal that classical reception took hold in early America beyond the worlds of authors and artists who actively sought inspiration from the Graeco-Roman past. Classical slave names in the antebellum U.S. South indicate that antiquity was invoked here in another way, amidst a tense environment of racialized power dynamics and against the violent backdrop of the transatlantic project. While the motivations for such actions can be debated, the ultimate result was a vibrant practice of Black classical naming that eventually came to shape and be shaped by the broader forces of African American culture.