Race, Racecraft, and Ancient Philosophy
By David Kaufman (Transylvania University)
This talk explores the construction of race in Greco-Roman philosophy, especially in the works of Plato, Aristotle, Galen, and the Stoics. Beginning with Plato’s kallipolis, I discuss Plato’s myth of metals and its relationship to political power and domination within the city.
Race in Roman Comedy
By Mathias Hanses (Penn State University)
My paper takes as its premise that the Aristotelian construct of the “natural slave” (Pol. 1254b16–1255b15) was active in ancient Rome, and that it involved an ascription of difference so essentializing as to constitute an act of premodern racial formation (for the relevant definitions of race and racism, see Isaac 2004 and 2006; Haley 2009; Heng 2018; and esp. Murray 2021).
Religion and Racecraft in Late Antiquity
By Yonatan Binyam (UCLA)
Recent works have pointed out the problem of fusing ancient and medieval categories of peoplehood, demonstrating the need for scholars to conceptualize more dynamic ways of thinking about identity in the premodern world.
Race and Classical Art History
By Katherine Harloe (University of London School of Advanced Study)
The systematic study of ancient material remains is often argued to have played a key role in the emergence of the modern (18th -19th century) disciplinary formation of classics as the comprehensive study of the ancient world from earlier humanist paradigms focused primarily on explicating and imitating classical literature or deriving ethical instruction from history (see e.g. Schnapp 1993; Harloe 2013).
Culture and Race in Classical Reception: African Adaptations of Greek Tragedy
By Olakunbi Olasope (University of Ibadan, Nigeria)
The staple stories of Greek tragic drama—Oedipus and his family, the internecine Atreid House, or the Trojan War with its preliminaries and aftermath— are theatrical instantiations of an infinitely malleable material, which has been subjected for centuries to innumerable forms of telling and retelling in a variety of media (Mee and Foley 2011, Michelakis 2013, Nikoloutsos 2013, Bosher et al 2015, Liapis and Sidiropoulou 2021).
Transimperial Approaches to Racing the Classics
By 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?