SCS-2: HYBRID: Re-Tracing the Archive: Affects and Ethics

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.

Imperialism often asserts itself through an encyclopedic impulse: the drive to collect, evaluate, and classify a wide range of knowledge in a centralized archive (Mbembe 2002; Padilla Peralta 2020, 157). In Rome, this archival drive powered a panoply of intellectual practices, from the sweeping collection of facts and anecdotes in works such as Pliny’s Natural History; to practices of cross-cultural literary citation that might also be understood as a form of “spoliation” (Haimson Lushkov 2018).

Critics have long noted that forgery and philology are curiously entangled (Grafton 1990). Such entanglement has led to a rich reassessment of the ‘pseudepigraphic’ in classical literature as a corpus worthy of our critical faculties (e.g., Peirano 2012, Kearey 2019). And yet, the category of ‘forgery’ per se continues to have a dubious, if not abject, status.

“What is required to imagine a free state or to tell an impossible story?

How can scholars overcome the omissions and misrepresentations that characterize historical evidence in general, and especially evidence about enslaved individuals and other groups on the margins of societies? In this talk, I offer Saidiya Hartman’s methodology of critical fabulation—used by her to re-animate the silenced voices of captives on the trans-Atlantic slave route and of Black women in early 20th-century New York and Philadelphia (2007, 2008, 2019)—as one way forward (see also Kamen and Levin-Richardson 2022).