Wednesday 9/10 @ 6:00 PM

Labyrinth Books, 122 Nassau Street

Dan-el Padilla Peralta is joined by Kate Meng Brassel to discuss his new book Classicism and Other Phobias. The book, based on W.E.B. Du Bois Lectures delivered at Harvard University, draws necessary attention to the inability of the classics as a field of study to fully cope with Blackness and Black people.

Greek and Roman antiquity have been enshrined in disciplines and curricula at all levels of education, perpetuating what the historian of political thought J.G.A. Pocock has called “a conceptual dictatorship on the rest of the planet.” Classicism and Other Phobias shows how the concept of “classicism” lacks the capacity to affirm the aesthetic value of Black life and asks whether a different kind of classicism—one of insurgence, fugitivity, and emancipation—is possible.

Engaging with the work of Sylvia Wynter and other trailblazers in Black studies while drawing on his own experiences as a Black classicist, Dan-el Padilla Peralta situates the history of the classics in the racial and settler-colonialist settings of early modern and modern Europe and North America. He argues that immortalizing ancient Greek and Roman authors as “the classical” comes at the cost of devaluing Black forms of expression. Is a newfound emphasis on Black classicism the most effective counter to this phobia? In search of answers, Padilla Peralta ranges from the poetry of Juan de Castellanos to the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois and paintings by contemporary artists Kehinde Wiley and Harmonia Rosales.

Dan-el Padilla Peralta is professor of classics at Princeton University. His books include Divine Institutions: Religions and Community in the Middle Roman Republic and Undocumented: A Dominican Boy’s Odyssey from a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League.

Kate Meng Brassel is assistant professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to joining the faculty at Penn, she taught as the Shapiro Faculty Fellow in the Core Curriculum at Columbia and also worked in television production.

This event is cosponsored by The Princeton Public Library, Princeton University Press, Princeton University’s Department of Classics and Humanities Council, and Labyrinth Books.