Nandini Pandey, Johns Hopkins University
Reexamining the classical archive, and our relationship with it, is essential to efforts to ‘decolonize’ our field. Yet we rarely confront the psychic self-violence this reexamination asks of classicists whose intellectual maturation was inextricable from our disciplinary formation. Following McLuhan’s dictum ‘the medium is the message,’ this paper brings unspoken practices, exclusions, and contestations into documentality via three S&M ‘scenes.’ It hopes to enact a disciplinary critique within a methodological intervention, and to model a reparative, affective, and ethical approach to the silences, violences, and ghosts of the classical archive.
Scene I: The seminar room of the classics department where I currently teach, or where you or I studied classics. Green and red Loebs stand in perfect order, self-assured of their value, enclosing all knowledge into bodies of identical shape and size, whipping us into fetishizing comprehensiveness and authority. In front is a plaster bust of Homer, with no hint of polychromy, just the implication that we kneel before what’s dead and white, old and blind. What message does this mise-en-scène send? What if we looked instead at what’s absent: the portrait of Basil Gildersleeve that recently presided over the room; the thousand hands that wrote down those words in Greek or Latin, then copied them through the centuries – or made the wealth that printed and bought these books? I offer methodological and pedagogical solutions for empowering historically oppressed students with such questions and transforming our archive into a set of tools for building something new.
Scene II: The SCS Annual Meeting. For every paper that gets accepted, how many were rejected, and why? How many scholars were too intimidated or under-funded to apply? (These are not rhetorical questions; I have some data and plan to ask the 2024 program committee for statistics, with particular interest in general-call abstracts that are rejected because they don’t fit traditional categories.) The conference program, and its web afterlife, remain an instrument of disciplinary exclusion. Those of us who attend become living archival documents of the biopolitics of our field. And those who don’t trace a vocational necropolitics. From William Sanders Scarborough’s debarment from Baltimore conferences (1909/1920), to Djesika Bel Watson and Stefani Echeverría-Fenn’s exclusion from the San Diego conference in 2019, what absent presences haunt our archive? How might a hauntological approach to these lost potential futures enrich our disciplinary outlook?
Scene III: Arachne’s tapestry in Ovid’s Metamorphoses 6. I conclude by brainstorming ways to represent and repair our own silences as a discipline without falling into the Arachne/Minerva trap of power struggle and punishment. Those of us interested in “history from below” will always fight against the constraints of our disciplinary archive. But approaches modeled particularly by African-American Studies, including autoethnography and critical fabulation, offer new ways of propitiating the unburied ghosts that haunt our field and building a reparative repository of historically excluded voices – while (I hope) appealing to traditionalists on affective and ethical grounds and widening our future living archive.