Vanessa Stovall (University of Vermont)
Taking after Shelley Haley's 1993 open inquiry around the potential that Black Feminism and classicism had to offer one another in her essay "Black Feminist Thought and Classics: Re-membering, Re-Claiming, Re-Empowering", this paper aims to bridge two very separate essays on Black classicisms and the myth of Medea--Haley's 1995's "Self-Definition, Community, and Resistance: Euripides' 'Medea' and Toni Morrison's 'Beloved'" and Jackie Murray's 2019 "W.E.B. Du Bois' The Quest of the Silver Fleece: The Education of Black Medea". Using the myth of Medea as a focal point, this presentation will consider the underpinning libidinal investment around notions of "schooling" Black women in American society under an umbrella term of classicism. Following Du Bois' marriage to one of his Wilberforce classics students and publishing of The Quest of the Silver Fleece, this paper will first consider the Harlem Renaissance writers who critiqued his classical pedagogical failure (Srinivasan 2020) under the direction of Zora Neale Hurston, most explicitly in her short story "The Conversion of Sam". I will then turn to the overwhelming critique of scientific classicism embodied in the character of School Teacher, whose scholarly attentions haunt Sethe, the Black Medea from Toni Morrison's Beloved, and attempt to problematize the relationship between philology and the sciences. I will explore further themes around natural (re)production in metaphors of planting, implanting, and transplanting that are shared in both Morrison and Euripides, in addition to a further layer of "transplantation" via Seneca's Medea. Lastly, I will turn to Alice Walker's gardens in contention with Spike Lee's negroclassicism and Saidiya Hartman's turn to the classical chorus as a mode to explicitly call out Du Bois's social pathologizing of Black sex workers in her 2018 Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals. I will consider the broader implications around the inherent (re)productive potential within classicism as inextricable from its libidinal investment in Black womanhood, and how these themes are present within the ancient stagings of Medea from Euripides and Seneca. In conclusion I will share clips from the forthcoming 2022 Whitman College production of Medea to show how Black feminists are attempting to address these stagings this very year with Sappho's Medeia as a focal point.