Radical Re-Imaginings: Classics for the 21st Century — a Symposium
The history of Classics is marked by no small forms of epistemic, political, and material violence. What would it take to radically reimagine the discipline, both in theory and in practice? How might we free our scholarly and pedagogic habits from their complicity with this history of epistemic assumption and real violence—racist, colonial, classist, gendered, and ableist? And how could a reconfigured field—reframed, retheorized, and repoliticized—help us to navigate our own present of political crisis, savage authoritarianism, and chauvinistic reaction?
Join us Friday and Saturday, September 5th and 6th, for two days of public conversation aimed at articulating a new and critical approach to the ancient world, one that is open to radical revision and radical futures. Across four panels, and in conversation with an interdisciplinary cast of scholars, we will interrogate Classics’ past and present, as we work collectively to forge a more capacious and politically forthright field of study. The event begins, Friday, September 5th, at 7pm, with an opening panel dedicated to the speculative exploration of what a radical pessimism might do: if the discipline—in its history, formation, and methods—is so profoundly complicit, is there anything to redeem here? What would it mean to fully jettison this past? The symposium continues, Saturday, September 6th, at 11am, with panels on the topics of “The Politics of Translation,” asking: what does it mean to continuously retranslate antiquity?; “The Question of Comparison,” asking: what constitutes useful comparison, and what might be gained from taking incomparability as a starting point?; and, the closing panel, “Doing Classics in Dark Times,” in which we’ll explore how we might, consciously and ethically, repoliticize our scholarship and our pedagogy, in resistance to the cyncial leveraging of antiquity towards reactionary ends and in the service of emancipatory horizons.
Participants include guests Dan-el Padilla Peralta, Mathura Umachandran, Marchella Ward, Emily Wilson, Brooke Holmes, Del A. Maticic, Huda Fakhreddine, Nancy Worman, Lynn Kozak, Kiran Pizarro Mansukhani, Kate Meng Brassel, Donna Zuckerberg, and Curtis Dozier, and BISR faculty Bruce King, Laura Slatkin, Erin Petrella, James Redfield, and Lauren K. Wolfe.
“Radical Re-Imaginings: Classics for the 21st Century” is made possible by grants from the Society for Classical Studies and the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes. A complete program schedule and list of participants is available here. The event is free to the public, and, for those unable to attend, the symposium’s proceedings will later be released in podcast form. Please visit https://thebrooklyninstitute.com/items/events/radical-re-imaginings-classics-in-the-21st-century/ to RSVP.
