Transactions of the American Philological Association最新文献

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Following recent developments in the scholarship on premodern racial formation, the present article examines Cicero's racializing representations of Sardinian provincials in the Pro Scauro (54 b.c.e.). In this speech, Cicero defends Marcus Aemilius Scaurus, former governor of Sardinia, against charges of provincial mismanagement. In order to secure Scaurus's acquittal, Cicero portrays the Sardi as a distinct and "deficient" genus, characterized by innate and homogenous somatic, cognitive, and "genetic" qualities. At the same time, Cicero also disparages the Sardinians as a "mixture" of the Africans and the Carthaginians who occupied Sardinia prior to Roman conquest. The result is a juxtaposition between racialized Sardinians and "pure" Romans that is designed to convince the jurors to side with Scaurus, whose participation in the provincials' dehumanization, murder, and exploitation Cicero presents as morally unproblematic.

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Scholarship on Hannah Arendt's receptions of Greco-Roman antiquity has largely neglected debates about anti-Blackness in her writing. To begin to fill this gap, this article focuses on Arendt's concept of the public (The Human Condition) and her condemnations of Black student movements (On Violence). Her account of how texts confer immortality on people in the public sphere clarifies the connections between an exclusive ideal of the public, an exclusive textual tradition, and an exclusive view of humanity. Arendt's work raises a challenge for classicists: can commitment to the immortality of a textual tradition be disentangled from anti-Blackness?

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This article provides a new interpretation of the anonymous poem Moretum as erotic satire. Mindful of Shelley Haley's invitation to read it through a Black feminist lens, this article turns to recent Black feminist scholarship on pornography to argue that the presence of sex does not automatically negate the agency of Scybale, the African woman described in the poem as Simulus's custos. Further, I review the evidence for Simulus's own identity. Through a combination of Audre Lorde's Black queer lens and Paul Preciado's trans scholarship on the dildo, I further argue that by imagining Simulus as Black, queer, and/or trans, the power imbalance between Simulus and Scybale is greatly reduced. Lastly, I heed Haley's invitation to read Black protagonists of Latin poetry through Yoruba mythology, and turn to Henry Louis Gates Jr. to argue that Simulus's Blackness brings them closest to Esu, the genderqueer trickster god, which in turn helps us identify him with the author themselves.

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The focus of this article is a 2019–2020 demographic data collection, visualization, and analysis project on race and Classics. Based on the findings of the project, this article advances arguments in favor of regular, frequent, and well-publicized demographic data gathering and visualization as practices crucial for effective, research-driven diversity and inclusion efforts in Classics. By fueling and bolstering these efforts, such practices have the potential to expand and reshape the boundaries of Classics as a discipline.

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Today, few ancient historians believe that Greek and Roman slavery had anything to do with race or racism. But when histories of ancient slavery were first written in the 1780s, the connection was assumed. This article explores how and why race and racism persisted in Anglophone historiography on ancient slavery into the twentieth century, only disappearing in the 1950s. I argue that it might be time to reopen the book on whether ancient slavery was a racialized institution. Adopting insights from premodern critical race studies (PCRS), I argue that the real differences between ancient and Atlantic-world slaveries should not be seen in terms of discontinuity and rupture. Rather, I see the question through what Margo Hendricks calls a "bidirectional gaze," by which social arrangements of the past few centuries might bear uncanny resemblance to institutions of the ancient past.

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A century ago, in Fascist Italy, archaeological evidence was used to demonstrate the racial superiority of ancient Roman civilization. This article analyzes a particular moment in the construction of the Fascist empire, namely its colonial, exploitative relationships with the ancient Roman past both in Italy and in Libya and with the people living there. The article will focus on the link between racism and Roman antiquity and how it was reinforced by disciplines such as archaeology, museology, and anthropology.