In Search of Henry Alexander Saturnin Hartley, Black Classicist, Clergyman, and Physician

The multifaceted career of Henry Alexander Saturnin Hartley (1861–1934) has been almost entirely overlooked by scholars. It however offers us a window into the way the study of classics traveled up and down the Atlantic seaboard and through the Americas. His peripatetic life which took him from Trinidad, to Paris, to maritime Canada, to South America and also to parts of the U.S. figures into the larger history of black classicism when knowledge of classical languages was a “currency” of its own. His 134-page book Classical Translations (Nova Scotia, 1889) was a singular achievement. It is the first book of translations taken from the literature of ancient Greece and Rome that was written and published by a person of African descent in the western hemisphere.

Athens and Sparta of the New World

This chapter reconstructs the reception and appropriation of ancient Greece and Rome in the Dominican Republic, tracing the long arc of classical reception from the foundation of the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo to the politics of the twenty-first-century nation-state. Two interlocking appropriations of classical Greece are documented and scrutinized: the glorification of colonial Santo Domingo by postcolonial Dominican elites as the “Athens of the New World,” and the celebration of the modern nation-state as the “Sparta of the New World” during the dictatorship of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo (1930–61). Both modes of scripting hispanophone Hispaniola as classically Greek turn out upon closer examination to derive their impetus from a racialized—and racist—cultural and nationalistic program whose imprint on Dominican debates about statehood and race remains visible to this day.

“Nero, the mustard!”

This chapter considers the renaming of enslaved people in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Jamaica. Using plantation records and narrative accounts, it focuses on the classical names that made up 10–15% of inventory listings. Those who renamed newly acquired slaves after powerful historical and mythological figures from antiquity added a cruel irony to the physical practices of enslavement. They also laid claim to the cultural capital of high European culture, while mocking those denied access to it. But their claim was bogus, resting on the physical and legal power to enslave rather than on any deep knowledge of antiquity. The claim to civilizational and racial purity that underpinned it was also undercut by new meanings, including the perceptions of the enslaved: deployed in the service of racial purity, Classics became creolized. The implications can be traced in an early-nineteenth-century Johnny Newcome print and in the fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt.

Africana Andromeda

The Tate’s national collection of British art includes work about the Greek myth of Andromeda who, according to the Roman poet, Ovid, was an Ethiopian princess rescued from death by Perseus. This chapter explores this racialized, gendered narrative and Andromeda’s suppressed African heritage through writing, reading, digital design, painting, photography, and drawing. How do British, Classical, and Black identities interact through art, and how are such processes mediated through a complex history characterized by colonialism and slavery, as well as by independence, struggle, and settlement? Informed by the disruptive spirit of Frantz Fanon, the author’s studio practice responds to Tate artworks, like Henry Fehr’s monumental sculpture, as well as to whiteness in Burne-Jones’ and Turner’s paintings. The author’s own artwork Rescue of Andromeda is proposed as demonstrative of how critical reading and studio methodologies can facilitate new art celebrating ascendant black womanhood, whilst contributing to debates about artistic tradition and popular culture.

Classics for All?

This essay examines the contradiction of classics for all, evident in but not exclusive to the not-for-profit enterprise by the same name (Classics for All) that seeks to promote the Greek and Latin classics in schools across the United Kingdom. Embodying a form like the classics can mean not slavish mastery, but an improvisational artistry that alters the form so that it bends to one’s will. Issues of access, however, problematize the simple assertion of classics for all. The realities that necessitated the Black Lives Matter movement, in contrast to a more hopeful, turn-of-the-twentieth-century Du Boisan notion of the removal of the Veil of segregation, run counter to classics for all. There have been sufficient signs within the twenty-first century of the rejection of a broad, democratic, multicultural movement toward American wholeness symbolized in the election of President Barack Hussein Obama. Nevertheless, economic disparities that separate black and white in the United States remain, and the post-Obama era evidences significant backlash across the “Black Atlantic” world. The classics is caught up in this backlash.

Middle Passages

This chapter analyzes uses of Greek and Roman classical texts as mediating passages in anglophone Caribbean literature of the Middle Passage. In Derek Walcott’s Omeros and Marlene NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!, the classics are remediated and reclaimed as part of the project of framing the ineffable epic of the bones of those killed in the crossing. Walcott’s and Philip’s use of multilayered Latin etymologies and their subversive signifying of classical texts exemplify a subversive, anagrammatic philology explored in the radical black aesthetic theories of Fred Moten and Christina Sharpe. In the process, both authors explore the potential of Greek and Roman classical texts as a source for mediating modern historical memory in the Caribbean.

Roman Studios

The Roman residencies of two American artists, nineteenth-century sculptor Edmonia Lewis and contemporary photographer Carrie Mae Weems, illustrate the value of locating classical receptions in the African diaspora in unexpected places and mediums. Rome’s status as the epicenter of ancient imperialism, as well as a hub for the intertwined legacies of race and neoclassicism in transatlantic modernity, makes it a particularly charged site for black women artists. Analyzing photographs in Weems’s 2006 series Roaming as portals into the cultural and geographic spaces occupied by Lewis as she designed her 1876 sculpture Death of Cleopatra, this chapter demonstrates the breadth and vibrancy of black women’s visual interventions into modern perceptions of the classical past. Inspired by the enduring material and cultural presences of ancient Egypt in modern Rome, both artists mark out Roman spaces as historic as well as contemporary spaces for blackness, rather than facades performing whiteness.

Introduction

This introductory chapter explores the key themes of Classicisms in the Black Atlantic, and introduces the structure of the work, the essays in question, and contemporary debates to which the collection is responding. Drawing on the work of Paul Gilroy, the authors argue that the essays in the volume demonstrate the productive results that issue from re-examining historical relationships between modern classicism and the construction of race and racial hierarchies, as well as the making and remaking of various forms of classicism by intellectuals, writers, and artists circulating in the diasporic world of the Black Atlantic. These explorations provide grounds for challenging racialized visions of the classics as a white European heritage that have re-emerged in contemporary politics, and for reimagining the role of classical humanism in anti-racist struggles.

The Tragedy of Aimé Césaire

This chapter examines the forms of classicism that proliferate in the writings of the Martinican poet-politician Aimé Césaire (1913–2008), focusing in particular on his 1963 drama The Tragedy of King Christopher. The classical form of tragedy, mediated through Nietzsche, provides Césaire with a way of reconsidering the reverberations of the Haitian revolution throughout the black Atlantic as a foundational event of black identity. Césaire uses tragedy to dramatize the story of Henri Christophe, the creator of a monarchy in the northern part of Haiti in the early nineteenth century, as a way of instructing his audience on the urgent issue of black political organization in the mid-twentieth century.

Myth and the Fantastic in the Work of Junot Díaz

This chapter explores the ways in which Junot Díaz draws on ancient Greek myth in two of his works, Drown (1996) and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). Placing Greek myth alongside the stories from other fantastical worlds, such as those found in the works of Tolkien and Marvel Comics, Díaz offers a pathway to realms seemingly not affected by transatlantic slavery, racism, or modern dictatorship and diaspora. Yet, as much work on magical realism has shown, a turn to the fantastic can be deeply political. Díaz’s evocation of Greek myth (most prominently, those of Homer’s Odyssey and the House of Atreus) is given only as much space as the myths of other times and places, thereby stripping the classical canon of the aura of superiority which it gained during the colonial period. In doing so, Díaz works to creates a new epic for the Dominican diaspora.