Kelly Nguyen (Stanford University)
Calls to “decolonize” the discipline of Classics have resounded across the field. Yet, as Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (2012) have reminded us, the goal of decolonization is indigenous repatriation – “decolonization” itself should not be used as a metaphor for other social changes. What exactly is meant when we wield the term “decolonize?” What historical contexts and structural forces are we critiquing and how are we doing so? What future are we envisioning for the discipline and for whom? To explore these questions, this paper falls into two parts: the first discusses the issues behind uncritical calls for “decolonizing” the field and the second suggests a new methodology that aims to shift our mindset from decolonization to anti-imperialism: a transimperial approach. One of the main pitfalls that attempts to “decolonize the Classics” fall into is the reliance on diversity as a solution. From people on reading lists to people in the field, diversification seems to be the knee-jerk reaction to issues ranging from epistemic injustice to racial violence. However, this emphasis on plurality is not enough. Reparative action needs to also encompass critical examination of the power structures with which Classics has been and continues to be entangled. In this paper, I focus specifically on the relationship between Greco-Roman antiquity and imperial powers in the Global North. In the last few decades, the study of imperial histories has shifted from inter-imperial processes to intra-imperial, and more recently to trans-imperial—that is from examining the interactions between empires, to those within empires, and now to those beyond empires. I examine the development in imperial histories from Frederick Cooper and Anne Stoler’s groundbreaking call “to treat metropole and colony in a single analytical field” (Cooper and Stoler 1997: 4) to the recent trend of putting colonizer and colonized—not only from the same empire, but also from different ones—in dialogue with each other (e.g. Rothman 2012; Kamissek and Kreienbaum 2016; Hedeinger and Hée 2018; Hoganson and Sexton 2020). This latter trend constitutes the transimperial turn, which builds on the transnational turn by recognizing the porousness of borders (both real and imagined) to examine how interconnectivity has influenced histories of empire. A transimperial approach decenters empires while still holding them accountable by shifting the focus to the various connections and ruptures within/across/beyond those empires. However, studies using the transimperial approach have limited it to contemporaneous empires, or to a diachronic study of empires (e.g. how a later empire draws on an earlier one). I propose to apply it not only in a synchronic or diachronic way, but also asynchronously, in order to examine the dynamic relationship between ancient and modern empires and the plasticity of imperial histories. More specifically, I explore the relationship between the Roman Empire and European and American empires from the 19th to the 21st centuries in terms of empire- and race-making. I suggest that applying a transimperial approach that transcends time helps elucidate the transhistorical processes of racial formation across empires.