Unlearning Limits

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• Unlearning Limits
• Brooke Holmes (bio)

The nature of the classical is to give the impression of immunity to time. In practice, what is most certain is its endless rethinking. If the classical is unstable, so much more so is that thing we call Classics. For professional classicists, this last point unsettles at a moment when the future of the field is so precarious within a broader crisis of the humanities. The risk of rethinking Classics is often posed as the loss of the academic study of ancient Greece and Rome. But doubling down on the status quo undoubtedly puts the study of the ancient Mediterranean in as much danger as demands for radical change, especially if complacency becomes the modus operandi of well-resourced institutions like my own. In any event, swinging between inertia and millenarianism uses up energy better spent on organizing and sustaining new communities inside and outside universities convened around a shared attention to an ancient past, as in fact so many scholar-activists—in many cases from marginalized positions that bring heightened risk to speaking out—have been doing.

By reframing the object of attention in the expanded terms of an ancient past, we confront one of the most pressing issues for disciplinary reimagination: What are the boundaries of the ancient world? And how do these boundaries determine its study? It's hardly a radical claim, at least in essays of this genre, to declare that these boundaries extend far beyond Greece and Rome in their most "classical" periods (fifth- and fourth-century bce Athens; Rome of the first centuries bce and ce). The study of the once maligned periods of Hellenistic and late antiquity has flourished for decades. Ancient history has been adroitly navigating between the micro-scale of local community and much broader research zones organized by comparison and contact. The rapid rise of classical reception studies, focused on how ancient texts and artifacts have been read and reread across time and space, has redefined the temporal boundaries of the field so that they exceed "antiquity" altogether. Increasingly, those trained as classicists are not only reading but also writing histories of modern classicism as defined by the narrowed nineteenth- and twentieth-century valuation of ancient Greece and Rome and the formation [End Page 24] of Classics as an academic field in Europe and the US through processes imbricated in biopolitical racism, empire, nationalism, and fascism.

These critical histories of the discipline have helped expand its boundaries and clarified the urgency of centering receptions of ancient Greece and Rome by all of those who have had classical humanism weaponized against their sovereignty, their flourishing, and their communities. But efforts to redefine the field continue to hit against the formation of Classics as the first humanistic discipline to distinguish itself from the amateurish polymathy of the antiquarian through specialized research within the new landscape of the German university. For a while, Classics was the model of expertise emulated by the natural sciences. This idea of Classics as a science still governs not only what counts as knowledge worth having but also what counts as knowledge in the first place in professional training: mastery of the canon, the tools of positivist history, and, above all, the mechanics of ancient Greek and Latin.

I do think there is more important work to be done with such expertise in the work of decentering ourselves from what seems given and reimagining the ancient world through the problems of the present. There is more to be done in rereading Greek and Latin texts in the original languages and in ways that restore them to the material conditions and the entangled cross-cultural networks integral to their production. We can interrogate the making of concepts that feel timeless and "natural"—the human, the body, race, gender, beauty, and nature itself—both in antiquity and through modern engagements with Greek and Roman texts in feedback loops with European colonial expansion and the rise of the transatlantic slave trade. At the same time, we shouldn't mistake the massive impact of ancient Greece and Rome on the formation of European modernities for a teleological arc that bolsters the pernicious claims of nation-states or...