African Americans and the Classics by Margaret Malamud

My response to Margaret Malamud’s book African Americans and the Classics: Antiquity, Abolition and Activism (2016) also functions as a call to explore points of conceptual crossing between the fields of African American studies and classical reception studies. I argue that scholars of classical reception should be invested in building on existing scholarship in multiple fields—not just “sampling” authors or references who fit a particular narrative—and crafting arguments that will have purchase in more than one scholarly conversation.

Illustrating how the Classics served as potent weapons in the expansion of liberty for African Americans from the pre-revolutionary period through emancipation, Margaret Malamud’s analysis underscores both the relevance and adaptability of the classical canon in the battles over slavery and equality. My own research on the influence of antiquity in the American founding, which addresses the loyalists’ use of the Classics as a counter-narrative to the patriots’ revolutionary agenda, intersects with Malamud’s study in two key areas.

I know as a Black woman who has been exploring race in the ancient world and the racism of the Classics disciple for nearly forty years, “I have a burning need to work out my own ambivalence and, at times, animosity over the newfound enthusiasm for [the field of Black Classicism] that I think of as my own hard won territory” (DuCille, 87). In my response to Margaret Malamud, African Americans and the Classics: Antiquity, Abolition and Activism, I will raise a number of questions about the sense of dis-ease that the work engendered in me.