Black Venus: An Absent Presence
By Lylaah Bhalerao (Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University)
Venus, writes Saidiya Hartman, is a "ubiquitous presence […] in the archive of Atlantic slavery," the "emblematic figure of the enslaved woman in the Atlantic world" (Hartman 2008: 1). Venus is also an emblem for Black women in Robin Coste Lewis's poem "Voyage of the Sable Venus," which draws from museum labels and descriptions to highlight how the art world obfuscates the Black female identity.
Negroclassical Complications: Black Feminist Critiques on the Pedagogical Failure of W.E.B. Du Bois
By 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".
The Song of Scybale -- The Pseudo-Vergilian Moretum Revisited
By Hannah Čulík-Baird (Boston University)
At the end of a winter's night, a poor man grasps for the hearth to coax a flame and proceeds to gather ingredients for a small meal of cheese, garlic, and herbs. Simulus "sings his country songs" (rustica carmina cantat, Mor. 29) as he works and with that same "clear voice" (clara uoce, Mor. 91) he "calls" (uocat, Mor. 36) to Scybale -- a woman of "African descent" (Afra genus, Mor. 32) who is also identified as Simulus' "slave" (famula, Mor.