### **Critical Ancient World Studies**

This volume explores and elucidates critical ancient world studies (CAWS), a new model for the study of the ancient world operating critically, setting itself against a long history of a discipline formulated to naturalise a hierarchical, white supremacist origin story for an imagined modern West.

CAWS is a methodology for the study of antiquity that shifts away from the assumptions and approaches of the discipline known as classical studies and/or classics. Although it seeks to reckon with the discipline's colonial history, it is not simply the application of decolonial theory or the search to uncover subaltern narratives in a subject that has special relevance to the privileged and powerful. Rather, it dismantles the structures of knowledge that have led to this privileging, and questions the categories, ideas, themes, narratives, and epistemological structures that have been deemed objective and essential within the inherited discipline of classics. The contributions in this book, by an international group of researchers, offer a variety of situated, embodied perspectives on the question of how to imagine a more critical discipline, rather than a unified single view. The volume is divided into four parts – "Critical Epistemologies", "Critical Philologies", "Critical Time and Critical Space", and "Critical Approaches" – and uses these as spaces to propose disciplinary transformation.

*Critical Ancient World Studies: The Case for Forgetting Classics* is a mustread for scholars and practitioners teaching in the field of classical studies, and the breadth of examples also makes it an invaluable resource for anyone working on the ancient world, or on confronting Eurocentrism, within other disciplines.

**Mathura Umachandran** is a Tamil scholar from London, trained at Oxford and Princeton in classics. They teach ancient Greek at the University of Exeter and dream of ways of making more just knowledge.

**Marchella Ward** (Chella) has been Lecturer in Classical Studies at the Open University since September 2022, when she left Oxford to go in search of a more egalitarian approach to the study of the ancient world. Before that she was the Tinsley Outreach Fellow at Worcester College, University of Oxford, where she split her time equally between postdoctoral research in classical reception and work to oppose the inequalities, inequities and biases that structure access to higher education. Her research has focused on disability justice and classical reception and on attempts to find non-hierarchical, non-hegemonic and non-linear ways to figure ancient influence. Her writing has appeared in the *Classical Receptions Journal*, the *Classical Review*, the *Guardian* and the *Times Literary Supplement* and across various blogs and other open access platforms.

# **Critical Ancient World Studies**

The Case for Forgetting Classics

## **Edited by Mathura Umachandran and Marchella Ward**

Designed cover image: Hollow, 2011. Faig Ahmed. Image Courtesy of Faig Ahmed Studio.

First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158

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© 2024 selection and editorial matter, Mathura Umachandran and Marchella Ward; individual chapters, the contributors

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Names: Umachandran, Mathura, editor. | Ward, Marchella, 1991– editor. Title: Critical ancient world studies : the case for forgetting Classics / edited by Mathura Umachandran and Marchella Ward.

Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN<PHONE_NUMBER> (print) | LCCN<PHONE_NUMBER> (ebook) | ISBN<PHONE_NUMBER>126 (hardback) | ISBN<PHONE_NUMBER>119 (paperback) | ISBN<PHONE_NUMBER>637 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Classical literature—History and criticism. | Classical literature-Study and teaching. | Civilization, Classical—Study and teaching.

Classification: LCC PA3013 .C75 2024 (print) | LCC PA3013 (ebook) | DDC 880.09—dc23/eng/20231124

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023034154

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023034155

ISBN: 978-1-032-12012-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-12011-9 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-22263-7 (ebk)

DOI: 10.4324/9781003222637

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**For all those that Classics in its current colonial formation has excluded, othered and dehumanised – with love and hope for a different future.**

### **Contents**

### **Figures**

### **Contributors**

#### xii *Contributors*

Center for Human Values. He is the author of *Undocumented: A Dominican Boy's Odyssey from a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League* (Penguin 2015) and *Divine Institutions: Religions and Community in the Middle Roman Republic* (Princeton 2020), and co-editor of *Rome, Empire of Plunder: The Dynamics of Cultural Appropriation* (Cambridge 2017) and *Making the Middle Republic: New Approaches to Rome and Italy, c. 400–200 bce* (Cambridge 2023). He has also published pieces for *The Guardian, Matter, Vox*, the *NYT*, *Fabulist*, and *diaphanes*.

His research is focused on decolonial political theory, and he is the author of numerous works on Islamism, Islamophobia and decolonial thought, including *A Fundamental Fear, Thinking Through Islamophobia* (co-edited with Abdool-Karim Vakil) and *Recalling the Caliphate*. He leads the Critical Muslim Studies research programme and is also the founding editor of *ReOrient: The Journal of Critical Muslim Studies,* and Executive Producer of *Radio ReOrient* podcasts.

#### xiv *Contributors*

*Towards New Ways of Looking and Looking Back* is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press in late 2023.

**Helen Wong** is a PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania in the Art and Archaeology of the Mediterranean World program. She received her MSt from the University of Oxford in Classical Archaeology and her BA in History and Classical Studies from Brandeis University. Her dissertation explores the intersections of imperialism, funerary ritual, and generational memory in the Hellenistic Levant.

### **Acknowledgements**

It was not easy to put together this volume. The CAWS collective began its life as a group of junior scholars around the world, and its meetings regularly involve coordination across at least four continents and many more time zones. As a collective we initially operated from a position of relative lack of power and resources. Many of us were graduate students and early career researchers employed on insecure, temporary and part-time contracts and feeling the hard edge of the neoliberal university's undervaluing of labour and the human. (Some of us are less precarious than this now, employed in our first permanent positions; others have been pushed further to the margins of academia or outside of its fortress walls entirely). We were exhausted, many of us having spent years working in access and outreach, in curriculum reform and on equality, diversity and inclusion committees without seeing substantial change (or even honest commitment to change, beyond outward facing statements, diversity-speak, defensiveness and public-relations-focused initiatives that prioritised looking diverse to the outside world over being equitable). We had grown weary of false promises.

We were also living through a period of industrial action, of COVID-19, of underfunding in the humanities, of undergraduate student organising (including movements like "Decolonise the Curriculum" and "Rhodes Must Fall" and the open letters calling out disciplinary and departmental racisms in classics at many higher education institutions), of environmental collapse, of the growth of fascism, anti-Blackness, Islamophobia and other racisms, and of increasing inequalities that structured how we related to each other as well as to our disciplines and the wider world around us. We were aware that this project was unlikely to be advantageous to our careers. We knew that the phrase "forgetting classics" in particular carried the potential to provoke the wrath of those content with the colonial formation of the discipline. We worked together on this volume in the belief that the attempt to create more equitable modes of knowledge production was worth enduring the wrath it might provoke. We hope that this last point proves to be true! Our thanks, first and foremost, then, go to all of the members of the CAWS collective, who have been our companions in thinking over these last few years. Not just to those in this volume – though thank you to those too – but those whose writing, thinking and activisms shaped this project. Thank you to Sam Agbamu, Qasim Alli, Lena Barsky, Anurima Banerji, Marcus Bell, Ashley Chhibber, Shadreck Chirikure, Eleonora Colli, Nicolette D'Angelo, Rebecca Georgiades, Bet Hucks, Ahuvia Kahane, Gifty Etornam Katahena, Leo Kershaw and Andi Marsh. It has been an enormous privilege and an even greater pleasure to think in community with you all.

This task may not have been easy, but it was made easier by a number of kind individuals and supportive organisations. Thank you to Jo Quinn, who talked us out of starting a CAWS journal on the grounds that as early career researchers it would consume our entire professional lives, and suggested that we do a volume like this one instead. And thank you to Constanze Güthenke and Fiona Macintosh for all of their sage advice. Thank you to the teams behind *ReOrient* and critical Muslim studies at the University of Leeds, who, in searching for a more critical relationship with their own parent disciplines, created a model we could use to build the foundations of CAWS from classics. Thank you to the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama at the University of Oxford, who invited us to hash out some of what we thought "decoloniality" meant alongside Joanna Page at one of their seminars – and to the Open University, who invited us to give a tentative retrospective on this first exploratory stage of the project at their "Global Classics" seminar. Thank you to Queer and the Classical and the Res Difficiles teams, who have on different occasions provided opportunities for so many of us in this volume to try out our ideas at their conferences. Thank you also to the Hellenic Society, who provided us with a small grant to buy the internet access that enabled one of the speakers at our initial conference to present his work. We would like to thank the University of Exeter for their generous support in making this volume Open Access, since accessibility is a core part of the vision of CAWS in making and disseminating our knowledge. And thank you to all of the justice activists worldwide from whom we have learned so much in the course of these last few years – and from whom we still have enormous amounts left to learn.

As well as not being easy, the task of CAWS will not ever be finished. Stillness, as Frantz Fanon pointed out, describing the motionless colonial world as a "world of statues" (1963, 50), is anathema to critical scholarship. This volume's aim is not to replace one fixed discipline with another. It is beyond the purview of many of us in this volume, who have been formed by the discipline of classics, to imagine a closed, final discipline of which we can be proud. Instead, our "weedy hope" (to use words we will borrow in this volume's introduction) is to offer some starting points for the changes that we believe to be urgently needed in the study of the ancient world. Our final thanks, then, go to all those who will join us in imagining this justice-focused future. We hope that you will find inspiration in the things we have got right, call us in on the things we have got wrong, work together with us to unsettle the colonial foundations of the discipline we have been trained in and develop methods, tools, approaches and ideas that in this present moment we are unable even to imagine.

#### **Reference**

Fanon, Frantz (1963), *The Wretched of the Earth*, translated by Constance Farrington, Grove Weidenfeld.

## **Introductions**

### **1 Towards a Manifesto for Critical Ancient World Studies**

### *Mathura Umachandran and Marchella Ward*

Critical ancient world studies (CAWS) is a methodology for the study of antiquity broadly defined (temporally, ideologically and geographically) that makes the following four critical steps away from the field known as classical studies and/or classics. Firstly, it critiques the field's Eurocentrism and refuses to inherit silently a field crafted so as to constitute a mythical pre-history for an imagined "West", in particular, by rejecting the "universal" as synonym for the "Western" or the "European". While classics has been content to construct an ancient world whose value lies in its mirror image of modern Europe, CAWS investigates the ancient history of a world without accepting the *telos* of the West. Secondly, it rejects the assumption of an axiomatic relationship between so-called classics and cultural value, divesting from cultural capital as a mode of knowledge-making in the field. Thirdly, it denies positivist accounts of history, and all modes of investigation that aim at establishing a perspective that is neutral or transparent, and commits instead to showcasing the contingency of history and historiography in a way that is alert to the injustices and epistemologies of power that have shaped the way that certain kinds of knowledge have been constructed as "objective" within the discipline known as classics. Fourthly, it requires of those who participate in it a commitment to decolonising the gaze of and at antiquity. It is not simply, however, the application of decolonial theory or the search to uncover subaltern or "wretched of the earth" narratives within a subject that has special relevance to the privileged and the powerful.1 Rather, it dismantles the structures of knowledge that have led to this privileging, and questions the categories, ideas, themes, narratives and epistemological structures that have been deemed objective and essential within the inherited discipline of classics.

In practice, these four epistemological orientations will require two further practical commitments: (1) to confronting the inequalities and inequities that structure access to the field and imbalance who gets to work and study within it and (2) to rejecting the centrality of ancient Greece and ancient Rome within the study of the ancient world. In this approach, CAWS takes its theoretical and epistemic example from *ReOrient*, a journal of critical Muslim studies that has taken a similarly critical attitude to its own parent disciplines. Summing up their critical distance from such disciplines, the authors of the *ReOrient* manifesto state,

In the process of the forging of a critical space, we are de-naturalizing the historiographies, ideologies and teleologies that are normalized, produced and enabled by unquestioned protocols of knowledge formation.2

The goal of CAWS is not to defend the discipline known as classics from criticism, or to argue simply for wider access to the subject, but to take up the invitation of such critiques to change the epistemological structures of the study of the ancient world such that access to the subject would, by definition, be equitable. This will involve not only denaturalising the methodologies that go unquestioned in the discipline of classics but the active creation and dissemination of more critical methodologies.

In the course of this book, the contributing authors will set out some of the ways that they see these new methodologies for the study of the ancient world operating critically, setting themselves against a long history of a discipline formulated (both from inside and outside) so as to naturalise a hierarchical, white supremacist origin story for modern Europe (and by extension the United States). Much has been made in recent years of the uses of classics for explicitly racist purposes, with classicists often leaping to defend their subject from what they positioned as "misuses" of the ancient world, distinguished from the academic study of the subject by their moral depravity.3 As we will see throughout the contributions to this volume, however, many of the assumptions that permit and legitimate such uses of the ancient world in support of white supremacist, ableist, Islamophobic or otherwise hateful aims are not only evident in *mis*uses of the ancient world, but are fundamental to the structures of knowledge formation in the discipline known as classics.

The chapters that make up this book result from a series of conversations and a virtual conference in September 2020 that set out to find different – and more critical – ways of studying the ancient world. They offer a variety of situated, embodied perspectives on the question of how to imagine a more critical discipline – rather than a unified single view of such a discipline (though all of them respond, at varying levels of distance, to the four key critical steps away from classics that those of us working within the CAWS collective sometimes refer to as our "manifesto").4 CAWS is a journey rather than a destination; it is by definition activist, unfinished and partial. It represents a search rather than a discovery.5 This volume presents the initial results of that search for more critical methodologies.

#### **Why Be Critical?**

Classics is – we are not the first to say it6 – the disciplinary equivalent of a haunted house. The spirits are summoned both by those who make their intellectual homes within the old creaking mansion walls and by those who stand outside and call upon those spirits to do their ideological bidding. To enter the haunted mansion means not only to encounter these ghosts but also to risk possession by them: to have one's ways of being and thinking controlled from within by a spirit summoned from a past time, whose prejudices persist among the living. "To reckon with being haunted" writes the disability justice worker and artist Johanna Hedva, "is important political work. It can account for how the world has come to be as it is, and it can reimagine a world that is not already foretold".7

Ghosts have for some time been an image for imagined transhistorical community with the inhabitants of antiquity: there are two chapters about ghosts in *Deep Classics: Rethinking Classical Reception* (2016), for example, and the seances and other occult practices by which Victorian classicists communed with the ancients are a well-known part of the history of the discipline.8 More recently, those critical of the colonial ideological formations of classics have made particular use of ghosts as a disciplinary image. Setting out the futility of increasing access for under-represented groups to a subject often distinctly hostile to such students, Danel Padilla Peralta referred, in his address to the Society of Classical Studies annual meeting in 2018, to the ghosts of classics:

What exactly do we propose to do by expanding access? Are we simply in the business of bringing fresh blood to the ghosts?9

The critique levelled here is one familiar to those who work in access to higher education, where schemes designed to increase access are frequently co-opted to serve an agenda that seeks to project an image of diversity to the outside world without tackling the institutional inequities that produce the access problem (an institutional reflex that is discussed at length in Nadena Doharty, Manuel Madriaga and Remi Joseph-Salisbury's 2020 article "The university went to 'decolonise' and all they brought back was lousy diversity double-speak!"10).

This access problem is particularly pronounced in classics, where access projects often rely on precisely those ideological and methodological orientations that exclude under-represented groups to make the case for the subject. One of the clearest examples of this is the charity Classics for All's impassioned vaunting of the western civilisation narrative, affirming the relevance of classics on their website on the basis that "it shows us why we in the West are as we are". The article, entitled "Why Classics?" replaced Peter Jones' article of the same title and which celebrated Homer as "the first voice of the West" only recently.11 The same charity were also in December 2020 widely criticised for benefitting from an auction that included the unethical sale of unprovenanced Egyptian, Greek and Roman antiquities. Following criticism from large numbers of academics (with the art historian Erin Thompson describing the charity event as "a bit like trying to support a charity that helps protect people from human trafficking by auctioning off the services of an undocumented worker to clean your house without pay"), the charity later withdrew from the event, but it served to illustrate the role that some of the most harmful practices and ideologies can have even in projects designed to increase access to the discipline.12 Projects that feed fresh blood to the ghosts, as Dan-el Padilla Peralta has it, are unsurprisingly also complicit in their summoning. The goal of CAWS will not be to romanticise these ghosts, scoff affectionately at their summoning or indulge their bloodthirsty natures any further by making a defence of classics. Rather, we will seek to name (some of) the ghosts of the discipline in this introduction, so as to find alternative ways of studying the ancient world that set themselves against their summoning throughout the rest of this volume. In short, to use Johanna Hedva's language, we wish to "reckon with being haunted".

It is now widely acknowledged that the discipline known as classics benefitted from and lent weight to oppressive systems of power, serving to naturalise certain kinds of bodies, power structures (particularly settler colonialism) and epistemologies as normal or neutral – and even universal. Emily Greenwood (2009) and Phiroze Vasunia (2013), among others, have written of the ways in which the discipline of classics and its materials of study were weaponised within particular colonial contexts (Caribbean and Indian schoolrooms respectively), but the idea that the colonial can persevere in neocolonial epistemologies has been much more explicitly theorised outside of classics than inside of it.13 Boaventura de Sousa Santos in his "archaeology of knowing", *The End of the Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South* (2018), writes against what he calls "dominant epistemologies" that take for granted a Eurocentric notion of objectivity:

The dominant currents in the epistemologies of the North have focused on the privileged validity of modern science that has developed predominantly in the global North since the seventeenth century. These currents are based on two fundamental premises. The first one is that science based on systematic observation and controlled experimentation is a specific creation of Western-centric modernity, radically distinct from other sciences originating in other regions and cultures of the world. The second premise is that scientific knowledge in view of its rigor and instrumental potential, is radically different from other ways of knowing, be they lay, popular, practical, commonsensical, intuitive or religious.14

Although Santos does not say so explicitly, his critique of the assumed objectivity of the science of the so-called West echoes in many ways the challenges that Black studies and in particular Black feminist philosophy had long been levelling at the very notion of objective knowing. Sylvia Wynter's critique, in particular, was for much of her career levelled at the ways in which the epistemological structures of much of so-called Western philosophy elevated a certain kind of humans and particular way of defining human knowing to the level of the universal, returning throughout her work to Aimé Césaire's critical approach to the presumed objectivity of science.15 Critical discussions around the impossibility of objective knowing are well known from feminist philosophy (perhaps most famously Donna Haraway's 1988 *Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective*), but Wynter's demand for the overthrowing of colonial epistemology took explicit issue with the involvement of the classical in the sustaining of epistemological dominance. Wynter referred scathingly in a 2015 interview with Katherine McKittrick to "the Western bourgeoisie's projected Grecian norm of being and beauty".16 Knowledge-making's reliance on pretended objectivity was, Wynter wrote much earlier, evidence of the need for "a new science of human discourse".17

In their chapter in this volume, Salman Sayyid and AbdoolKarim Vakil demand not a new science of human discourse but a new history of the world, looking to CAWS to provide a new prologue to a critical history of the world that is "built within multiple world histories, shorn of their Eurocentric trappings and partitions, able to narrate the historical ontology of the present".18 In recent years, classicists looking to provide new ways of understanding how the past comes to influence the present (or to narrate its "historical ontology") have leaned on scientific metaphors to explain how that relationship might be structured, with Shane Butler in the introduction to his edited collection *Deep Classics: Rethinking Classical Reception* (2016) calling on metaphors not only of geologic layering and stratigraphy but of Darwinian and genetic inheritance to explain the endurance of the classical. But while some of the contributors to Butler's volume (among them Helen Slaney) rightly counter that the classical is "a necessarily imaginary property", Butler's scientific metaphors bring with them the false objectivity that Santos, echoing Wynter and Césaire, decries.19 The past, such metaphors assume, really *is* in the present, and our relationship with it is epigenetic and measurable. A number of chapters in the present volume offer paradigms of classical reception that negotiate a relationship with the past that is actively created rather than passively inherited (see, for instance, Holly Ranger's chapter), or understood to be an imaginary property – and the relationship between historical positivism and objectivity will be the subject of a later section of this introduction. But the new history of the world that Sayyid and Vakil call for requires the establishment of a critical methodology for describing its relationship with the ancient past – and it is this critical mode of figuring the study of the ancient world, where the ancient world constitutes a prologue to a decolonised world history and not an imagined pre-history for a hegemonic and colonial idealised vision of Europe that CAWS seeks to provide.

Critical Muslim studies, the discipline from which CAWS takes its inspiration, began its criticism of the Western episteme with the desire to leave behind the Orientalising gaze that sought to establish a hierarchical privileging of the West over the Rest (a residual category that designates not the East in any geographical sense, but the Orient against which the West directed both its material violence and its imperialist gaze).20 This hierarchical and constructed opposition between the West and the Rest, a structuring of knowledge that is both taken for granted and carefully established in the "dominant epistemologies" that Santos describes, has a long history of opposition in decolonial studies, but the term "critical" in CAWS brings with it the opportunity to unsettle and interrogate received conceptual categories and frames beyond this structuring. That empire and the logics invented to justify it both constructed and were co-constructed by epistemological models for the study of the past is beginning to become apparent in studies of historiography. In *Time's Monster: History, Conscience and Britain's Empire* (2020), the historian of the British Empire Priya Satia recounts "the twinned story of the history of empire and the history of history", and her account sets out in particular to be critical of the way that a narrative of progress, disguised as history, "has conveyed us to the brink of disaster".21 Progress, like East versus West, is for Satia (among others) an epistemological model that is fundamentally colonial in its structuring of knowledge.22 Decolonisation movements have repeatedly called for the dismantling of the figureheads of empire (literally, in the case of Rhodes Must Fall and similar movements) and a critical approach to the memory of the imperial past.23 CAWS takes aim not simply at the trappings of empire within the discipline of classics but at the epistemological frameworks by which classics and empire co-sustained each other.

Recent years have seen the prefix "critical" incorporated within reorganised and rebranded versions of a number of subjects of academic study, appearing in tandem with the much-lamented decline of critical theory.24 The "death of theory" was announced for classics by Charles Martindale in a review in the classics journal *Arion* in 2002, but much like the death of the author, it seems to have gone unperceived in most parts of the discipline: critical theory, like the author, is it seems perpetually dying and never quite dead. Many contributors to this volume have by now grown used to their provocations for altering the epistemological orientations and structures of knowledge in the discipline known as classics meeting with the response that a series of canonical critical theorists have said all of this before. The names of such theorists are littered throughout this volume (Michel Foucault, Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, Karl Marx, etc.), but this veneer of criticality that has characterised the field for some time seems not to have done much to alter the field's epistemological orientations.

Classics is hardly one singular entity, and it would be incorrect to suggest that certain scholars had not made use of the critique of these positionalities to alter the epistemic structure of the discipline, but the field has on the whole remained structured by the very Eurocentrism, teleological notion of history and abetting of power that many of these theorists had themselves decried. Further, the deploying of this canon of – almost exclusively white and male – critical theorists has the consequence of further marginalising voices from disciplines that might have carried a much greater weight of critique for the epistemological orientations of classics. Though many contributors to this volume have been told that they ought to be reading Foucault or Heidegger or Bergson, none have been told that they ought to be reading Achille Mbembe, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Sumaya Kassim, Stacey Park Milbern or other philosophers and writers working within activist disciplines that have levelled their critique at concepts central to the sustaining of the Western episteme.25

In the last 15 years analyses that explicitly address the relationships between the classical and coloniality or between empire and the discipline of classics have begun to surface in increasing numbers (see, for instance, Mark Bradley's edited collection *Classics and Imperialism in the British Empire*, 2010). But such analyses often restrict themselves to describing the nature of that relationship (which is weighty enough to fill several such volumes) or to setting the harms of the classical firmly into the imperial past rather than engaging with their ongoing harm in the present. Such disciplinary-historical work, crucial though it is for a critical re-evaluation of the study of the ancient world, is not alone sufficient for reimagining the study of the ancient world for a decolonial future. Attempts to do this reimagining have thus far been met with the requirement that the discipline apologetically document its colonial past for the benefit of critics who seek to redeem their beloved discipline from such accusations (and stall any attempts to refashion it). And in this repeated requirement that those wishing to undertake a more critical study of the ancient world prove over and over again to their detractors that classics *really was* structured by and *really did* co-construct European cultural hegemony lies the difficulty of imagining a future for CAWS. The demand becomes a tool for distraction, a tactic for delay.26 Like the pre-emptive counter that critical theory has done all of this before, this disciplinary reflex which incessantly demands proof of coloniality serves to stall change and shift it further into the distant future.

This problem presents itself similarly for many in other disciplines who have sought to reimagine their study in the light of decolonial thought and to unsettle the categories and epistemologies taken for granted within their disciplines. Writing of anthropology, Ghassan Hage asked a question similar to the one this volume is asking of classics, in an article entitled "Anthropology is a white colonialist project' can't be the end of the conversation" (2017). In the article, Hage offered some suggestions for a critical future for Anthropology beyond simply denouncing or redeeming itself from its white supremacist structuring of knowledge. Not all of Hage's suggestions are compatible with the CAWS project, but his overt recognition that "the history of anthropological knowledge is the history of white colonial knowledge of non-white cultures", and desire to ask the question "what next?" offers a starting point for a future-focused CAWS.27 Beyond simplistic and never-ending conversations that return compulsively to the same questions hoping to redeem the subject (were the ancient Greeks and Romans exclusively white? is it possible to write a good grammar of Latin and also be an enslaver of people? who really owns classical antiquity?), there is, in Hage's suggestion, the potential for a critical mode of studying the ancient world that seeks *to learn* from the fact of classics' relationship with white supremacy, not simply to prove or disprove it.

Hage is not alone in his suggestion that future modes of knowing need to be built on the recognition of the field's complicity as well as on a desire for decolonial "disentanglement".28 In *Recalling the Caliphate: Decolonization and World Order* (2014), Sayyid refers to the need for "a clearing of the ground, a clearing of the objections that are constantly made and endlessly recycled".29 It is this process of "clearing" that opens up, for Sayyid, the possibility of a "decolonial horizon" and in this, he notes, "the division between clearing and dreaming cannot be absolute".30 Acknowledging, then, as Sayyid does, that there is a relationship between clearing and dreaming, this book refuses to engage to such an extent in clearing the ground that it loses the impetus to reimagine (dream) it. Proving the coloniality of the classical will not be the object of this book, though the idea will recur as a referent throughout. The case has by now been made frequently that the discipline of classics was shaped by a desire to legitimate coloniality and by the Western episteme – handbooks and companion volumes now exist characterising this relationship in close detail (including, most recently, Blouin and Akrigg [eds., forthcoming], *Handbook of Classics and Postcolonial Theory*) – this volume will not repeat the work of these books. Instead, it will (for the most part) accept the "clearing" as already accomplished, and will perform the work of "dreaming" a new critical discipline – the second part of the "reckoning" with being haunted that Hedva refers to.31 Laying bare the complex interdependencies of the field of classics with various kinds of power structures will occasionally be necessary; the main focus of this book, however, is not on cataloguing those relationships but on reimagining a discipline that is equipped to critically confront them.

#### **Forgetting and Remembering (Against Positivism)**

The disciplinary boundaries drawn around classics, as currently formulated, engage a complex process of remembering and forgetting. Those boundaries are geographical, linguistic and temporal – and in so being they are not simply neutral facts of the discipline, but the ideological curation of a specific slice of the past, remembered in such a way as to render it a justification and authentication of the present condition of the world. That memory results less from passive inheritance than it does from active – and ideologically laden – choice, is made apparent by Saidiya Hartman, who writes in *Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route* (2006),

Every generation confronts the task of choosing its past. Inheritances are chosen as much as they are passed on. The past depends less on "what happened then" than on the desires and discontents of the present. Strivings and failures shape the stories we tell. What we recall has as much to do with the terrible things we hope to avoid as with the good life for which we yearn.32

This active choice of a particular past as the special inheritance of modern Europe (and by extension the US) affects how that past is studied in the discipline of classics – and how the ancient past is perceived by those outside the discipline. Lylaah Bhalerao's chapter in this volume exemplifies this, showing how the presumption that ancient Greece constitutes a global universal past has the effect of dismissing Islamic heritage. Such presumptions are of course a-geographical – they redraw the geography of the world so as to imagine antiquity at its centre. Moving beyond these assumptions requires a commitment to local histories and a critical separation between "the classical" and "the European", but this process will also require, as Mathura Umachandran's chapter in this volume points out, a re-evaluation of the methods by which geographical knowledge is organised in the discipline.

As well as a redrawing of the world's maps, classics' idealised memorialising of a distant past also entails the forgetting of a more recent past.33 Despite the fact that classics as a subject is – in the UK at least – taught in only very few maintainedsector secondary schools (and much more widely in independent and public schools intended for the training of Britain's elites), it is easy to forget how the material legacy of colonialism shapes the spaces where classics is studied. One of the most revealing features of classics' disciplinary memory is the choice to forget empire: to forget that the buildings that once housed and trained bureaucratic elites also trained them to read Greek and Latin texts; to forget that the wealth that has been amassed in Britain over centuries and given power to these very institutions of learning was stolen from the rest of the world.34 (This forgetting is not limited to Britain – see Lyra Monteiro on the ideological programme and classical selffashioning of Thomas Jefferson as part of the white settler colonial project of the United States.)35 Classics has some degree of comfort in accepting that empire happened, but it chooses to look away from its ongoing material intimacy with colonialism.

And moreover when classicists do acknowledge the fact of empire, they too often relegate this less-than-palatable fact of the discipline to the stuff of the early to mid-20th century. This temporal move constitutes what Janet Mawhinney in her master's thesis (subsequently analysed by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang) named "settler moves to innocence".36 By setting the harms of classics firmly in the past, scholars of classical antiquity can safely proffer arguments about the polychromy of ancient sculpture or the racial and ethnic diversity of populations in the ancient world, without this work inviting them to confront how empire continues to structure the foundations of their institutions and knowledge-making practices. Such gestures allow scholars to make the case for their own innocence and position themselves as outside of complicity with their discipline's coloniality, without attending to (much less dismantling) the colonial structures of thinking that make such gestures necessary.

Scholar of British immigration law Nadine El-Enany acutely observes the contemporary effects of the repeated choices of a national culture that undertakes such forgetting of empire:

The abstraction of day-to-day life in Britain from its colonial history means that immigration law and policy, whether in the form of the hostile environment, visa requirements or other external border controls, are not seen as ongoing expressions of empire. Yet this is what they are; part of an attempt to control access to the spoils of empire which are located in Britain. British colonialism is thus an ongoing project, sustained via the structure of law.37

But the kind of disciplinary forgetting that is common in classics is not simply dangerous because of its naturalised forgetfulness, but because of the way that this subjective, partial and ideologically laden remembering and forgetting is elevated to the level of universal point of origin. This fantasy of universalism, coupled with the cultural authority and abetting of power that has long been curated for classics, allows the discipline to frame its partial and selective memory as objective knowing (or "history"). Contra to often-voiced claims on historicism and a rigorous insistence on historical and cultural distance of the scholar within the field, classics still traffics in the universal. It makes a set of historical particulars into the formula for thinking through the world and its history, privileging white Europe as the regnant subject. This is most evident in the most public-facing parts of the discipline, with writing for a wide audience often defaulting to patronising images of universal beginnings, origins, cradles of civilisation and a special ongoing relevance throughout the modern world.

#### 12 *Mathura Umachandran and Marchella Ward*

Feminist thought has brought attention to deconstructing the notion that any given particular could be elevated to the status of universal. Critical theorist and proudly self-declared "feminist killjoy" Sara Ahmed describes the universal as "a structure, and not an event" and argues that as a structure, the universal cannot apply to all people across time and space.38 She describes how the universal works in and through a set of contradictions:

The promise of the universal is what conceals the very failure of the universal to be universal. In contemporary theory this paradox of the promise that conceals its own failure . . . has led to the reinvention of universalism as formalism: the universal as pure or empty form, as abstraction from something or anything in particular.39

The universal, for Ahmed, is a failed promise because it is – and always was – an empty form. Any given idea or concept might be put into the place of the universal, *except for the fact that it has not been*. It is the West that has been placed at the heart of the universal by way of classical antiquity as its self-authenticating *mythos*, with its claims to have found first the best tools and best expressions of human organisation in philosophy, politics and culture. There is a kind of epistemic violence entailed in making any particular the content of the structure of universalism – of abstracting the particular and elevating it to the level of universal. In naming the contradictions of the universal, Ahmed points out how abstraction is violent:

But remember: abstraction is an activity. To abstract is to drag away. The very effort to drag the universal away from the particular is what makes the promise of the universal a particular promise; a promise that seems empty enough to be filled by anyone is how a promise evokes someone.40

Greece and Rome's position as the contents of the structure of the universal is not accidental, or ideologically neutral – not least because the process of abstraction from the particular required by universalism, as Ahmed points out, is an active one.

Fabricating Greek and Roman antiquity into the structure of the universal takes effort. It is a set of conscious and unconscious choices to build a framework (through partial and selective memory) in relation to which the rest of the world cannot fit. The disciplinary work of classics has been to invent an understanding of the past and relationships to the past that could underwrite a particular kind of present.

It is the emptiness of the promise that is the form of the universal; it is how the universal takes form around some bodies that do not have to transform themselves to enter the room kept open by the universal.

Entry to the room of the universal is carefully policed, through the exclusion of critical voices (for example, those in Black studies) that offer the opportunity to overthrow the epistemological ordering that masquerades as neutral in the unexamined classical. Classics closes the door of the universal with certain bodies inside it and certain bodies outside of it.41

It is unsurprising, given Ahmed's formulation of the universal as a promise extended to some and not to others, that considerable energy has been spent attempting to recuperate and redeem the discipline of classics. Diversity and inclusion have been key to this model, with fresh blood being brought to the ghosts of classics (as Dan-el Padilla Peralta has it) in efforts to justify the continued existence of the discipline. Such work masquerades as the generous extension of the universal but in fact often serves to underline classics' supposed universality without altering the pedagogical formation of the discipline so as to serve an increasingly diverse student body. The litmus test here is to ask the question *cui bono* – for whose good is it to recuperate classical mythology as tools for political resistance? If it is for the good of the ghosts of the discipline of classics, then it will simply serve to abstract such struggles from the particular, and to lend weight to the notion of Greece and Rome's universality.

In response to the rhetorical question she poses at the end of her introduction to *Antigone Rising: The Subversive Power of Ancient Myths* (2020) – "Who owns antiquity? Who owns culture?" – Helen Morales answers triumphantly, "We do".42 Morales' question, despite its optimistic aspirations to inclusion, serves to reinscribe a model of ownership in the study of classical antiquity (and in this, Morales is not alone, in his 2018 book *Classics: Why It Matters*, Neville Morley makes a similar observation: "there is always a struggle over it's [antiquity's] ownership, who gets to claim it and define it").43 Morales' question also pre-supposes a universal "we", a category made up of unmarked bodies that function as natural inheritors of this ancient past – and who do not struggle to access the room of the universal. The project of CAWS refuses this assimilation of the classical with the universal, insists that the "we" is not a unified, naturalised category or mode of mutual recognition. The idea of a universal "we" in the study of antiquity is its own particular kind of violence that erases the various ways that antiquity is kept from certain groups and shared out freely to others.44 CAWS rejects relationships to history or people defined as property (and thus commodified or fetishised). Ownership of this past cannot be righteously corrected or stringently policed by a certain subset of scholars who have the rights to exclusive access. It has long been a *topos* of Black studies that the notion of the human requires a renegotiation that denies its universality: being readily recognised as "human" is a particular experience that has (historically and actually) only belonged to certain humans but is falsely elevated to the level of the universal in much socio-cultural and political thought.45 Rather than seek to deny particular experiences in favour of the universal or simply expand the universal so as to include those previously excluded by it (without protecting them from its harms), CAWS looks to alternative modes of knowledge-making that do not pre-suppose unmarked subjects or objective encounters with the ancient past or with its long history.

For these reasons, CAWS demands that we divest from positivism, notions of absolute objectivity, universalism and ownership, and centre in our analyses of the ancient world the partiality, bias and embodied nature of all knowing, contextualising it within its histories of empire and other power structures (Ashley Lance and Helen Wong each offer, in their chapters, frameworks for confronting epistemic injustice through a re-evaluation of embodied and particular modes of knowledge-making46). And insomuch as memory is already acknowledged as partial, it will be a useful replacement for positivist historiography and claims to distanced or objective historical knowing. The productive partiality of remembering has been perhaps most useful in queer studies where, as Rahul Rao points out in *Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality* (2020):

[W]hat becomes evident is that memory is less a treasure trove of stories than a battleground on which competing accounts joust for hegemony. The point of the turn to memory is not that it promises to end conflict, but that it sometimes offers queers a more hospitable terrain for it.47

CAWS is a call to do different kinds of remembering (and forgetting) of the past, to seek out more ethical relationships that do not fall under the rubric of power, ownership and exclusion, universalism, dehumanisation, hegemony and supremacy. We argue collectively, over the course of this volume, that our scholarly activity in studying the ancient world has as much to do with fabricating the realities of the present as making stories of the past, and that it is only in finding ways to acknowledge the impossibility of objective knowing and universality that the study of the ancient world will cherish and foreground the partial perspectives that might craft their pasts around a more equitable present. As Saidiya Hartman insists, "the past depends . . . on the desires and the discontents of the present".48 We take up Hartman's invitation to critically establish pasts and to organise with care the relationships curated between those pasts and the contemporary world, acknowledging the selective nature of all memory and not seeking to naturalise the forgetting of power structures by disguising memory as positivist or objective history. Our call is for a more critical mode of remembering – and for a forgetting of the seeming neutrality of the epistemological organisation of the discipline of classics.

#### **Imagined Kinship: The** *Telos* **of the West**

This call to forget classics – or rather to de-essentialise and re-contextualise its constructed primacy, universality and privileging – is also a demand to cast off the faux biological and inheritance-model trappings of the field.49 Forgetting requires imagining and making kinship in a new way. The challenge of theorising a new understanding of kin-making is taken up by Donna Haraway in her *Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene* (2016) and is well commented on in other works that sit at the intersection of the biology and philosophy of the Anthropocene, such as by multiple contributors to Elaine Gan, Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson and Nils Bubandt's edited volume *Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene* (2017). The developmental biologist Andreas Hejnol, in his contribution to the Gan, Tsing, Swanson and Bubandt volume, makes an impassioned case for leaving behind some of the metaphors that have given shape to narratives around inheritance and evolution in biology:

For centuries, biology has relied on a particular set of metaphors – including ladders and trees – to classify and order living beings. Such metaphors have depicted life as a slow but inexorable march upward – as a stairway of creatures with humans at the top, positioned as the most advanced beings. This hierarchical understanding of life, which defines "progress" as a linear movement from the so-called simple to the complex, has long haunted biological inquiry . . . new biologies are forcing us to tell very different stories with dramatically different metaphors.50

These metaphors of evolution and ascent, which set their course to the *telos* of modern humanity, are for Hejnol grounded in a simplistic (and no longer accurate at the molecular level) understanding of genealogy:

Put simply, molecular data uproot the phylogenetic tree. Not only do they strengthen the deconstruction of the teleological elements in the understanding of the processes in evolution, including hierarchical orderings of beings, they also demonstrate that evolution itself is non-directional and unpredictable.51

But more than inaccurate at the micro level, metaphors that suggest linear descent – which Hejnol terms "ladder-thinking" – are problematic because they restrict the ways in which we can think about multi-species interactions and ecologies. The points that Hejnol makes here have been anticipated in many ways by Indigenous people, as the environmental biologist and Citizen Potawatomi Nation member Robin Wall Kimmerer explains in *Braiding Sweetgrass* (2013), where she remarks on the problems caused when metaphors from nature (particularly trees) are pressed into the service of an anthropocentric hierarchisation of the world.52 Hejnol continues,

Ladders and trees – structured around the idea of human superiority and linked to problematic ideas of complexity and hierarchy – have proved particularly discouraging of curiosity.53

Hierarchical metaphors of tree and ladder thinking, in other words, are unhelpful to the structuring of relationships because they discourage a more varied landscape of ways of knowing. In their place, Hejnol advocates rhizomatic understandings of biological relation, "meshlike" metaphors such as the image of branched coral, or at the very least "tree metaphors, read nonteleologically".54

For Donna Haraway there is a real urgency to altering the metaphors we use to describe biological relation and the stories we tell about ontology. Elaborating on the anthropologist Marilyn Strathern's "it matters what ideas we use to think other ideas", Donna Haraway continues,

It matters what thoughts think thoughts. It matters what knowledges know knowledges. It matters what relations relate relations. It matters what worlds world worlds. It matters what stories tell stories.55

For classicists, the genealogical model of ontological relation so strongly rejected by these biologists has a familiar feel to it. While Gan, Tsing, Swanson and Bubandt hold up the idea of organising life forms according to a great chain of being as an anthropocentric shift of the Renaissance, the image is familiar to students of classical reception from Charles Martindale's articulation of the process of reception as a chain in *Redeeming the Text: Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutics of Reception* (1993). The metaphor of the chain arises, as summarised by Gan, Tsing, Swanson and Bubandt, as follows:

In Europe, northern Renaissance thinkers came up with a great scheme linking classical, religious, and emergent modern thinking. They claimed that life had evolved from simple to complex. This was a grand and optimistic view that placed humans at the top of the Great Chain of Being, the highest rung of the ladder, where God had once resided. Like the Christian religious thought before it, this scheme assumed that we were all in a single time, on a single trajectory.56

This chain made its way into biology, as Hejnol explains, in the 18th century, as scientists began to fit evolution to the model they understood to have been outlined by Aristotle (the *scala naturae* or "ladder of nature"), organising life forms along a scale – or a chain – that positioned those at the end as both the latest in time and the most developed. And while Charles Darwin's work on evolution might be the best remembered description of this model, he was far from alone:

Up to the eighteenth century, the classification of organisms remained largely ahistorical. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, the scientific community began to debate historical ideas and consider that organisms might change over time. The integration of time and history into the discourse of ordering nature was a radical new view on the order of nature that became one of the foundations of modern science. Darwin's nineteenthcentury publications about evolutionary theory are the most well-known example of classification based on historical principles. Yet Darwin's theory was only one of many.57

This evolutionary moment in the history of biology – when a particular way of understanding time and metaphors of progress and genealogy now understood to be inadequate joined together to reinforce the supremacy of certain humans over others – was also, as Michael Silk et al. (2014), point out, the moment at which the idea of a classical tradition came into use.58

The echo of a genealogical and evolutionary logic in the metaphors used to make sense of classical reception has not gone unnoticed, Shane Butler in the introduction to his edited volume *Deep Classics: Rethinking Classical Reception* (2016) addresses the Darwinian logic of classical inheritance.59 Butler is interested in the Deep Time of this new science (which he relates to the Deep Time of geology and stratigraphy),60 and having offered an example of Deep Time as geological stratification, he proffers further examples of the concept:

Other kinds of Deep Time manifest themselves as similarly jarring juxtapositions of distant past and immediate presence, such as evolutionary time, which leaves pieces of the genetic code for our pre-human ancestors embedded in the DNA in our own bodies, or cosmic time, more dizzying than any earthly abyss, but still connecting everything in and around us to the matter with which the universe burst into being.61

But for the CAWS collective, the fact that the notion of a classical tradition and the genealogical models of science grew up concurrently is not cause to meditate on the depth of time or on the way that time resists knowing. Rather, these shared metaphors and epistemological frameworks indicate one of the ways that classics as a discipline was structured in service of European cultural hegemony and white supremacy that needs to be opposed and overcome. Such metaphors alarm rather than inspire us.

Haraway's 2016 book has as its aim to de-essentialise genealogy and human exceptionalism as the organising structures of ontology, to unseat the ways they come to be naturalised into kin relations, and to offer instead a myriad of messy possibilities for "making generative oddkin".62 The de-essentialising of kin relations, in which kinship is wrongly understood to be natural-biological, is called for by the scholar of English and Black Studies Christina Sharpe, in an article she wrote for *The New Inquiry* in 2016:

Rend the fabric of the kinship narrative. Imagine otherwise. Remake the world. Some of us have never had any other choice.63

Sharpe's desire to tear up the existing narrative of kinship results from the role of imagined kinship in the sustaining of white supremacy. In the article she explains that the Jim Crow laws that governed chattel slavery in the United States worked by recognising white familial relations as kinship, while unmaking Black kinship by refusing to recognise the personhood of Black people.64 "Kinship relations structure the nation", Sharpe writes, referring to the way that the assumption that whiteness indicates kinship continues to contribute to the ongoing unjust social order. Sharpe does not mention the Darwinian scientific precedent for this false-kin making, but the active creation of false kin relations was the explicit aim of much of the racist pseudoscience that sought to invent a justification for white supremacy in the 19th century.65 In their 2017 essay for the online classics journal *Eidolon*, Mathura Umachandran comments on the pervasiveness of this false kin-making in the present orientation of the discipline of classics. "Let us finish the fantasy of pure whiteness: in the past and in the present", they write, referring to the way in which the fantasy of genealogical relation between Greek and Roman antiquity and white Europeans is retro-projected onto an antiquity imagined as a realm occupied solely by white ancient people, just as much as it is used to justify white supremacy in the present.66

While Darwin and his cousin, the eugenicist Francis Galton, were busy organising life forms within their genealogical models of evolution, classicists were engaged in constructing their very own chains of being. The pretence of scientific justification established for the enslavement of people was abetted in no small part by the Egyptologists Josiah Nott and George Gliddon, who, along with the physician Samuel Morton, spent much of their lives making false kin with the ancient Egyptians, by using the pseudoscience of craniometry to racialise them as "Caucasian".67 Their abhorrent practice rested not only on a genealogical model popularised by Darwin and others (that imagined a scale of humanity ascending through evolutionary stages from a chimpanzee to a white man, represented by the head of the statue of Apollo Belvedere), but also on a particular way of positioning the classical as the inheritance of white Europeans specifically. And while Butler does not raise this as a critique of the epistemological models of classics he does remark that Darwin's work had a peculiar emphasis:

Darwin, on the one hand, despite his title's promise of "origins", is ultimately concerned with accounting for the present diversity of life forms on the planet, including of course, our own.68

The *telos* of Darwin's work, then, is a defence of the world as it is in his own time – and this fact is as important to note for biology (as Hejnol and Haraway do) as it is for classics. Genealogical models that imagine the world to be organised along a scale of progress that reifies inheritance and creates false bonds of kinship are as much as feature of the discipline of classics as they are of biology, and just as Hejnol says of them in biology, they have the effect of an epistemicidal stalling of curiosity and of the myriad forms of knowledge-making that need to be excluded from these disciplines in order for these genealogical models to be sustained. The *telos* of classics, like Darwin's *telos*, is to provide a justification for the modern world, and classics as a discipline has organised itself throughout its history around an aim to provide a justification for European hegemony and white supremacy (often disguised as a narrative of "Western civilisation"). Biologists, like classicists, have relied on these genealogical models to provide an imaginary kinship relation that justifies their elevation of the classical to the level of universal importance, and by pinpointing false kinship as the sustainer of white supremacy, Sharpe offers a challenge to CAWS: Rend the fabric of the kinship narrative. Refuse to allow the classical to provide justification for European cultural hegemony through an imagined genealogical relationship with white Europeans. Remake the ancient – and in so doing the modern – worlds.69

CAWS will need to find a new justification for the study of the ancient past in the present – one that does not rely on imagined kinship, on constructed genealogical relations and inheritance, or on any idea of the *telos* of the West. In its critical toolkit, CAWS will require new and more critical theories of relation and contiguity, but it will also need to find new justifications (both internal to the discipline and public-facing) for its continued relevance to the modern world.70 Much has been said about the appeal to the myth of Western civilisation to justify the continued attribution of value to and privileging of the classical, and the very idea of Western civilisation itself is now widely acknowledged to have been a fancy of empire and of an ongoing white supremacist desire to organise the world into two warring blocs.71 But despite this widespread denunciation both of the concept and of its misuse to position ancient Greece and Rome as the history of the mythical origin of white people (sustaining precisely the kind of false kinship narrative referred to earlier), the idea remains in circulation, and is often strongly defended by conservative voices in the field or accepted as simply an unavoidable side effect of studying antiquity even by more progressive ones.

Denying classics the justification of imaginary kinship with an even more imaginary Western civilisation comes, for CAWS, with the very real possibility of the subject's irrelevance to a whole variety of questions about the modern world. An ethical mode of studying the ancient world relies on the existence of a varied ecology of knowledges that are not secondary to or perceived as less rigorous than the study of the ancient world.72 CAWS will not be able to – nor will it want to – argue that the ancient world "continues to underpin Western culture and politics" (as Mary Beard offers in the opening pages of her bestselling book on Roman history, *SPQR*), and for that reason we anticipate that it will not be welcomed with open arms in all quarters, particularly by such institutions as have sold the study of classics to their students on this or similar bases.73 In the place of classics, CAWS will offer something else: the opportunity to unpick the European hegemony and neocolonialism of which classics continues to be placed in service, to hypercontextualise the subject within histories of empire, oppression and domination and to cast off the structures of genealogical relation that limit curiosity (as Hejnol puts it) in order to imagine more just and livable futures.

#### **Classical Pasts and Critical Futures**

The intervention of CAWS is by no means the first invitation classics has had to seek a more critical epistemological framework or to reckon with its supremacist structuring. Perhaps the most famous among such missed opportunities was the publication, in parts from 1987 onwards, of Martin Bernal's *Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilisation* (hereafter: *Black Athena*) – but the emergence of classical reception studies is now increasingly being understood as another such (missed) opportunity.74 Those arguing for a dismantling of supremacist structures in the discipline or seeking to be critical of embedded ways of knowledge-making are often confronted with two temporal positions that seek to diminish the effects of their critique: that the critical revolution sought has already happened and that change will come at some distant point in the future.75 CAWS arose from the conviction that a more critical approach to the discipline was both immediately possible and urgent and that previous invitations to reckon with the epistemological structures of the discipline had largely gone unheeded. Bernal's invitation to classics to reconsider its Western civilisation narratives and its implicit Eurocentrism was met with defensiveness – as we will demonstrate – and failed to produce the disciplinary transformation (pedagogical or epistemological) that it might have provided an opportunity for. The opportunities unheeded are further examples of the forgetting and remembering that has characterised the discipline, as we have pointed out throughout this introduction: most classicists remember that the publication of Bernal's book happened, but many forget that the book was received with knee-jerk defensiveness, and the specifics of its critiques were quickly covered over with platitudes about the importance of historical positivism.

The publication of sinologist Martin Bernal's *Black Athena* might have signalled to classicists their over-reliance on notions of history's objectivity. In the first volume Bernal traced how, up until the 18th century, European elites knew that their cultural, political, and intellectual achievements were later than and significantly dependent on those of Asia and Africa. The Enlightenment's formulation of a universalism (paradoxically predicated on European exceptionalism) required a refashioning of this pre-history of modernity.76 Bernal argued that classical scholars from the 18th century produced an idea known as "the Greek miracle" – a supposedly rationalising revolution in politics and philosophy located all over Greece but particularly on the Ionian coast in the late sixth century bce. In framing a sociological critique of knowledge production about the ancient history of Europe in step with the contemporary intellectual priorities of the Enlightenment, Bernal was not making use of or laying claim to the methodologies derived from classics. Rather he was leveraging his scholarly position from outside the field to cast light on its unmarked categories of knowledge-making and to lay bare the way that certain ideological assumptions masqueraded as neutral in the discipline.77 Though Bernal would himself deny the similarities between *Black Athena* and Edward Said's 1978 *Orientalism*, the connections between the two are evident in their sociological attention to knowledge production as well as their respective critiques of the West's historical self-narration as *narrative*, that is, as discursive constructions which relied on techniques of exclusion (whether romanticising exclusions from history or ontological exclusions from humanity), but were naturalised as objective knowledge-making in their respective fields.

As Denise McCoskey observes, the responses to Bernal's monumental challenge to classics as a field fell into two distinct camps.78 Confronted head-on with a charge that the positioning of white Europe as the fountainhead of Western civilisation might in fact be historically inaccurate and a myth perpetuated by Eurocentric and racist scholarship, *Black Athena* terrified many in classics into silence – a retreat towards (what was perceived to be) a neutral stance with respect to the politically charged discussion with far reaching cultural consequences, felt far beyond academic discussions and reverberating in the so-called culture wars of the 1990s. It is easy to forget that outside of classics, *Black Athena* was hugely celebrated: the first volume won the *Socialist Review* prize in 1987 and an American Book Award in 1990, and the subsequent volume won an ANC Kwanzaa Award in 1991, was the Mainichi Shimbun Book of the Year in 2004 and was translated into multiple languages. This silence on behalf of those classicists who refused Bernal's invitation to question the *status quo* of their discipline reverberated loudly when thrown into relief by the optimistic and enthusiastic reception of the book outside of the discipline.

But there was yet a louder camp of more outspoken classicists who in their attempts to ridicule Bernal's thesis, revealed their firm commitment to defending the intimacy of classics with the idea of the West as civilisationally prior and superior to the Rest. The latter camp took Bernal to task for his lack of expertise or diligence in a response McCoskey aptly characterises as follows:

[C]lassicists' response to *Black Athena* often remained bogged down in interminable detail, painstakingly focused on refuting *Black Athena* as an historical argument while remaining oblivious to *Black Athena* as a cultural phenomenon.79

Discussing the same group of scholars' reactions to *Black Athena*, as evidenced in Mary Lefkowitz's sole-authored *Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History* and co-edited volume (with Guy MacLean Rogers) *Black Athena Revisited* (both published 1996), the professor of African American studies Molefi Kete Asante put his criticism of these scholars in stronger terms than McCoskey:

The authors of this volume [*Black Athena Revisited*] are essentially agreed that Bernal's Black Athena undercut the rather placid Eurocentric world of classicists who had been content to hide behind the enduring myth of some noble and unadulterated miracle of Greece . . . I believe that what is especially troubling to some of the writers of this volume is that Bernal is a European scholar who, in their judgement, should have known better than to open the can of worms of racist research in the classics. It is a case of Bernal being viewed as traitor to the tradition of European and American scholarship that projected the white model of intellectual development as superior to all others and consequently had appropriated so much of ancient classical Africa as part of the "Mediterranean" or "Near East" or "Oriental" world that any disturbance of such a tradition had to be confronted . . . Nothing seems to bring out the circling of the wagons of Europe more than the questioning of European cultural superiority.80

The readings of Asante and – much later – McCoskey converge with our own on this central point: that by doubling down on the normative criteria by which scholarship is judged to be objective or scientific, a vocal group of classical scholars dismissed Bernal's critiques and refused to allow the work's publication to constitute an opportunity for self-reckoning in the discipline. Crucial to the development of CAWS is the recognition that this was not simply an opportunity accidentally missed, but one actively avoided and that those who sided with Mary Lefkowitz and her instinctive fear of Afrocentrism81 were not in any way fringe white supremacists or far-right political figures, but classicists, many of whom are still canonical figures in the discipline today. And although their methods may have seemed little more than academic pedantry, the stakes of swerving Bernal's political critique were high: for those not committed to reinscribing the civilisational supremacy of the so-called West, the issues raised by *Black Athena* could have been an opportunity to scrutinise and reassess the disciplinary structures of classics, including its sociological commitments, in order to build a disciplinary future (with tools and textbooks, methods of meaning-making, as well as epistemological structures) orientated towards justice.

With only a small number of exceptions there have been few takers of Bernal's challenge within classics (*African Athena: New Agendas* edited by Gurminder Bhambra, Dan Orrells and Tessa Roynon in 2011 is a notably sustained engagement with Bernal), and they have not catalysed the widespread disciplinary transformation that *Black Athena* surely calls for. As Nicholas Anakwue shows in his chapter on the false positioning of classical philosophy as "European" (amounting to the exclusion of Egyptian philosophy) in this volume, the critiques raised by Bernal have much more yet to offer for a CAWS that wants to prioritise learning from Bernal's critiques and from the possibilities that Afrocentrism offers for reconceiving of the discipline of classics beyond Eurocentrism, over dismissing, evading and closing down such critiques for the sake of pedantry (or worse, for the sake of reinscribing narratives of the superiority of so-called Western civilisation).

*Black Athena* is not the only moment at which a refiguring of the epistemological models of the discipline of classics away from Eurocentrism and a flawed search for a view-from-nowhere perspective on ancient history might have been possible. Over the last few years, a number of scholars have made reference to the lost opportunity that classical reception studies presented for a fundamental change to the discipline. At the end of a pungently pessimistic essay, classical reception scholar Luke Richardson frames the idea as follows:

While classical reception's moment seems to fade from view, we are left wondering about the revolution that never was, and what happens to the discipline next.82

Richardson is not alone in his disappointment that the revolutionary potential of classical reception studies has gone unrealised. Charles Martindale, widely considered to be if not the founder of classical reception studies (a title more usually conferred on such scholars of hermeneutics as Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser), then certainly its most important popularising force in Anglophone classics, via his 1993 *Redeeming the Text: Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutics of Reception*, has expressed similar disappointment. In a 2006 volume of reflections on the role of reception theory in the discipline of classics, Martindale writes,

[I]t is worth asking if the concept of reception today serves any useful purpose, now that the word's power to provoke has largely subsided.83

Both of the editors of this volume are trained predominantly in classical reception studies, and it is therefore unsurprising that this particular missed opportunity should be the one most apparent to us. But CAWS is not limited to classical reception in its scope, and no doubt classicists reading this introduction familiar with other subfields of classics are aware of similar proclamations of missed opportunities for critical disciplinary transformation.

These missed opportunities are apparent not only in analyses of the kind provided by Richardson or McCoskey but in the current organisation of the discipline. Scholar of Late Antiquity Blossom Stefaniw, in exploring how to bring about a feminist transformation of Late Antiquity studies (a field adjacent to classics and structured by similarly overlapping supremacist logics) observes that

[a] discipline which is striving for justice looks different from one which is only striving to make the minimum number of incremental changes necessary to sustain its own image of righteousness. A discipline which hungers for justice looks a lot different from one which is squirming around trying to get itself off the hook.84

We have already remarked on some of these attempts that the discipline has made "to get itself off the hook" earlier in this introduction, and named them as "settler moves to innocence", to use Janet Mawhinney's term again. As Tuck and Yang point out, in their analysis of Mawhinney's master's thesis (in which she coins the term), however, settler moves to innocence often serve to deliberately stall change and preserve the status quo:

Settler moves to innocence are those strategies or positionings that attempt to relieve the settler of feelings of guilt or responsibility without giving up land or power or privilege, *without having to change much at all*. In fact, settler scholars may gain professional kudos or a boost in their reputations for being so sensitive or self-aware. Yet settler moves to innocence are hollow, they only serve the settler.85

Our point here is that not "having to change much at all" is an important goal of many initiatives that are self-styled as "progressive" within the discipline but seek to maintain its fundamental structures (the "squirming" of Stefaniw's assessment) – and it is easy to see why. The current structures of the discipline are not solely epistemological, they are also pedagogical and financial and relate to the ways that students and scholars are recruited and employed by classics departments. Radically altering the discipline will mean making changes that will be uncomfortable to those comfortable within the discipline's current organisation, and it is this that explains the effusion of settler moves to innocence whenever opportunities for change present themselves.86

CAWS will require scholars in classics to recognise that there is no addition to the syllabus or (not-too-time-or-labour-intensive but well documented on social media) "outreach activity", one-off panel discussion or "difficult topic" seminar that can offset or undo the forms of colonial knowledge-making that constitute much of the discipline. Settler moves to innocence thrive not only in spite of a history of empire but *because* of that very history – Tuck and Yang point to the settler colonial scholar who gains professional advancement because of their performative, partial acknowledgement of supremacist logic and limited actions of redress that do not in any way compromise their established research agenda. Discomfort (personal or epistemological) can constitute a ready starting point for critical self-reflection because it registers a structural problem and a personal stake in that problem – but settler moves to innocence seek to address the discomfort rather than the structural problem that it underscores.

That there has been *a series* of missed opportunities for disciplinary transformation, *Black Athena* and beyond, is evidence that the discipline of classics, left unchecked, will not resolve itself around a more justice-focused future. We cannot simply wait patiently for such a future to come. A serious reckoning might have taken several guises: it could have looked like an abandonment (or reimagining) of language requirements, a clearer articulation of the relationships classics formed with other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, a sociological transformation in the composition of the discipline's knowledge-makers, a critical embedding of the history of the discipline within its pedagogy and modes of study, the widespread integration of decolonial pedagogies and opportunities to learn about colonialism and neocolonialism within its curricula, genuinely collaborative projects of inquiry within, across and beyond the field. In the "Critical Philology" section of this volume, the contributors each address, in different ways, the temporal problem of change in the discipline. For Krishnan J. Ram-Prasad, Proto-Indo-European's settler moves to innocence (in particular its claim to be intrinsically beyond Eurocentrism) need to be contextualised within the relationship between linguistics and race science that was key to the subfield's formation; for Hannah Silverblank, as for Ella Haselswerdt, philology's ableist and queerphobic assumptions are aided and abetted by its tools and techniques, which need to be left behind for a more justice-focused subdiscipline. The chapters in this volume are practical as much as they are epistemological, and many of them bear witness to alterations within subdivisions of the field formerly known as classics (see, for instance, Ashley Lance's pedagogical interventions or Nicholas Anakwue's "Critical Ancient Philosophy"). In each chapter, the authors argue not for a progress narrative, for the repetition of endless settler moves to innocence or for the redemption of their own subfield within the discipline but for a break with existing practices and the establishment of new methodologies and epistemological structures. Accordingly, the four sections are addressed not to particular categories of texts or artefacts, periods of time or theoretical approaches but are grouped around specific kinds of interventions and tools required for CAWS as a new composite discipline.

Our call then, in the title of this introduction, to "forget classics" is a deliberately provocative one – but it speaks to the reality of the radical transformation of this discipline that will be necessary, as we understand it. Classics has, as we have shown, been characterised by certain kinds of forgetting and remembering that have been naturalised as the tools of the discipline, masquerading as objective knowing, historical positivism, the *telos* of the so-called West and the view-fromnowhere, obfuscating their own ideological origins and biases. In calling for the forgetting of classics, we are requiring of classicists an acknowledgement that the changes required to transform a colonial relic into a justice-focused discipline will be fundamental, and will require radical alterations of the ways in which we study and teach the ancient world, as well as who is employed or admitted to teach and learn about it.

The notion that the forgetting or ending of the present disciplinary formation is necessary might be troubling to some (particularly those most empowered by the field's current organisation), but anthropocenic modernity in its current moment of ecological crisis is already familiar with the idea that ends that seem world-ending can in fact be not only necessary but generative. Writing of the realities of extinction, Gan, Tsing Swanson and Bubandt in the volume cited earlier in this introduction return us to the ghosts with which we began:

Ghosts, too, are weeds that whisper tales of the many pasts and yet-to-comes that surround us. Considered through ghosts and weeds, worlds have ended many times before. Endings come with the death of a leaf, the death of a city, the death of a friendship, the death of small promises and small stories. The landscapes grown from such endings are our disaster as well as our weedy hope.87

The ghosts with which we are so familiar in the discipline of classics also serve to remind us that the end of the discipline as currently organised might in fact serve as the beginning of a more critical, more equitable and justice-focused mode of studying the ancient world. CAWS is an invitation not to save the existing discipline from extinction but to find in that extinction the drive to establish something better. It is an invitation to more collaborative and collective thinking, with the past, present and future as well as with thinkers from a huge variety of disciplines aimed at establishing a decolonial future both inside and outside of the academy.88 And it is an invitation that is perpetual: the critical approach to the ancient world that CAWS offers will always be in the process of becoming, responding to the ever-changing nature of power and supremacist structures, and will never materialise as a closed set of tools, ideas or topics of study. It is our hope that students, scholars and other interested parties will return to this volume in the future and will offer more critical, more decolonial and more justice-focused approaches to the ancient world than we or our contributors are capable of imagining in our present moment.

#### **Notes**

28 Ibid.

#### **References**

Ahmed, Sara (2000), *Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality*, Routledge.

Ahmed, Sara (2012), *On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life*, Duke University Press.

#### 32 *Mathura Umachandran and Marchella Ward*

### **2 Critical Muslim Studies and the Remaking of the (Ancient) World**1

### *S. Sayyid and AbdoolKarim Vakil*

#### **Disorienting Classical Studies and Muslims**

Classics, as a field of study and cultural comportment, is to the West what origin stories are to comic superheroes: a foundational narrative that sets the protagonist apart from the rest of humanity.2 Origin stories help anchor the identity of the superhero despite the changing contexts of different writers, different times and different mediums. Origin stories may not necessarily be the most compelling adventures involving the superhero, but they are the ones that shape his/her/their distinctive character beyond any escapade or breakdown in continuity. Similarly, the classics ground the distinct characteristics of the West, underwrite Western exceptionality, and act as a guarantor of the West's temporal depth. The classics mark the beginning of a historical sequence occupied by ancient Greeks and Romans, followed by the Dark Ages, the medieval world and, finally, the extended inexorable march to modernity. Such a sequence is not just a hang-over from the Eurocentric historiography of the long 18th century or imperial narratives of the 19th century, but a vital continuing cultural statement. Not only do all roads lead to Rome, but they also begin from Rome.

The classics play a continuing and significant role as a surface of cultural transcription upon which the identity of the West is inscribed. For example, anxieties about the future of the West as a homogenous white entity not only animate white revanchism but seep into popular culture. Whether in debates about the whiteness of the Roman empire,3 in periodical alarums over an eternal conflict between the West and the Rest, from Thermopylae to Desert Storm, or in the ever reiterated defence of beleaguered Western values, it is possible to see how tropes from classical studies are mobilised and redeployed. Thus, any attempt to question classics is not simply an exercise in academic deliberations but is invested with broader cultural significance that turns on the essence of the West. In other words, with what the West is. What the West is, however, can only be known by drawing a contrast with what it is not. Extrapolating from Ferdinand de Saussure's insight that identity is contrastive and relational, it is only possible to assert the identity of any element by being able to say what it is not. Hence, Western identity is only possible by contrasting it with something non-Western. If classics is the origin story of the West, then it is also the origin story of the non-West. Classics is a field of study that is also confronted with the Orient, for the origin story as construction of an identity requires a constitutive contrast. The articulation of the Orient in the shape of the Achaemenids becomes part of the origin story of the West. Classical studies imply, if not necessitate, Orientalism.

Both academic fields are formed by combinations of other disciplines. They are centred around literature and language (ancient Greek, Latin, Arabic, Farsi), and arranged around this textual core, one finds art, philosophy, history and archaeology.4 There is a case to be made that both Oriental studies and classical studies share a common epistemology that accounts for the methodological convergence in how they produce knowledge about their respective subjects. Orientalism constructs the Orient as a means of shoring up the idea of the West. Orientalism is not simply captured by the academic field that it nominates but rather is constitutive of the construction of a world history centred on Europe that underwrites knowledge formations throughout the culture, whether it be the social sciences, the humanities or the natural sciences (Sayyid, 2019). The conceptualisation of the Orient was undertaken in philosophical and historical endeavours as well. Orientalism refers not only to a field of study and research but also describes cognitive and cultural comportments that insist upon a binary division between the West and the Orient, and a corporate enterprise for the myriad managing of relations with the Orient.5 Classical studies most often have a temporal range of a thousand years from the beginning of the age of ancient Greece to the fall of the Roman Empire. The fall of the Roman Empire is conceptualised usually by the switch from Latin to Greek using elite in the East. This Greek using polity was designated by 15th century historians as the Byzantine Empire, thus breaking the link between Rome and Constantinople and in the process re-drawing the boundaries of what constitutes the West.6 The world generated by classical studies continues to influence contemporary culture.7

Orientalism and classics share epistemologies and methodologies and are both involved in narrating the origins of the West. (Islamic studies as a branch of Orientalism appears as an excursus to the narrative line that begins with the classics.) Classical and Oriental studies are key pillars of a Eurocentric order of things. (It is not an accident that one of the fields outside the remit of the Orient which has been most receptive to the critique of Orientalism has been classical studies.) The critique of Eurocentrism has been accelerated in recent years by student mobilisations in advance of decolonising the curriculum.8 This movement, inspired by the development of decolonial thought which itself has a complicated relationship with Orientalism and the postcolonial, has been instrumental in persuading institutions of higher learning to recognise the colonial legacy both in their institutional format and some of their pedagogic practices. A recognition of the colonial ignoble beginnings of the current curriculum and its marshalling of knowing along disciplinary lines encourages a post-disciplinarity welcome as a provisional place holder, as disciplines are reconfigured for the post-Western, that is, for a world in which white supremacy is denaturalised, which is to say, not assumed but rather contested.

Therefore, an engagement between critical ancient world studies and critical Muslim studies is not only natural but necessary if both these projects of decolonisation are to meet their ambitions. For not only does the emergence of the Islamicate mark the conventional terminus of classical studies, but the entwining of the logics of both fields of study have been complicit in constructing Western identity as (temporally and spatially) self-contained and exceptional. If we are serious about decolonising as something more than a series of pedagogic injunctions, it is important to consider it as a philosophical undertaking. The deepening of decolonisation requires critical ancient world studies and critical Muslim studies working together to subvert the disciplinary boundaries that enframe the world. The challenge for such projects is how to find a way out of the conceptual vocabulary that Orientalism and classics have produced and perpetuated – a vocabulary that saturates our understanding both of the world around us and of ourselves.9 In what follows, we will present our argument in a series of radical translations, that transverse epistemes and disciplinary and genre boundaries in the service of expanding the range of examples by which we can begin to imagine an epistemic order that aligns not with Eurocentrism but with a post-Western horizon.10

#### **Example 1: Towards a Global Ancient History?**

Recent years have seen various attempts to interrupt the sequence from Plato-to-NATO, ranging from John Keane's (2009) insertion of Sumerians and Muslims of Makkah into his history of democracy, to work of African heritage scholarship disputing claims of an autochthonous ancient Greece (Bernal, 1987, and related debates, Gordon, 2008, 2–3), to the contributions of Jack Goody (2010), Andre Gunder Frank (1998) and Janet Abu-Lughod (1989) towards displacing the Western roots of the modern world system, to calls for new periodisation of world history which interrupts the movement from classics to Renaissance and modernity (Blankinship, 1991), to work by historians of the ancient world rescuing the Achaemenids from the Orientalism of Hellenocentrism.11 These attempts have helped to make possible the idea of ancient history which circumvents its enclosure in the classics, by emboldening classical scholarship to suggest a global (in opposition to Eurocentric) history.

According to Stanford historians Ian Morris and Walter Scheidel, all societies have an ancient history.12 Morris and Scheidel are classists, in that their primary focus is Greece and Rome, who master the classical canon but are also willing to use social sciences tools to render the past comprehensible.13 The statement that all societies have an ancient history would seem to align with the decolonial thrust of the times, and the broadening of the remit of ancient history globally would seem to promise a history that challenges Eurocentrism. Indeed, Scheidel's recent work is based on a sustained comparison of the Roman Empire and the contemporaneous Chinese Empire, which seems to bear out the promise of an ancient history that transcends the scope and range of Western civilisation. This geographical expansion, moreover, also seems to be a broadening of the methodological approaches of classical studies, and it is possible to see the work of the Stanford historians as part of a lineage that has included histories of the classical heritage of the West approached by moving beyond textually determined accounts.14 Escaping Eurocentrism, however, is not so straightforward that it can be realised by expansion of the comparative method alone. This becomes clear from a reading of the work produced by Morris and Scheidel for a more popular audience: Ian Morris's *Why the West Rules – For Now: The Patterns of History and What they Reveal About the Future* (2011) and Walter Scheidel's *Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity* (2019).

Morris's book designs a social development index to sustain a comparative study between the West and the East as to why the West rules and promising predictions for the future of great upheaval. There are four curiosities that emerge from Morris's account. First, there is the exclusion of large parts of the world. To some extent, this is justified by replacing Europe with Eurasia as a canvas of world history, but primarily this is a consequence of Morris's ahistorical formulation of "East" and "West" upon which to hang his comparative study.

The exclusion of South Asia and Africa, except Kemet, allows the argument for the multipolarity of the West against the unity of the East to be played out. So, for example, the West is represented by a range of national, cultural and linguistic formations and continuities whereas the East is confined to China and Japan. Then there are the problems with the social development index, especially the explanatory weight carried by the index's measurement of energy consumption per capita (almost 80–90% of index is derived from the measure of energy consumption), the nomadic anomaly (the historical impact of nomadic polities organised by nomads is not captured) and a materialist determinism that takes little account of the cultural/ideological transformations.15

Walter Scheidel offers another take on the most important question: why Europe? (A history of the emergence of this "important question" could not be separated from the way it arises in European consciousness.) The question is not exactly novel since it is a staple of the literature on the European miracle.16 Scheidel (2019, 129) asks in a series of counterfactuals if any polity could have matched the Roman state's achievement of ruling four out of five Europeans.17 The erudite compendium of counterfactuals includes various permutations and possibilities (an East Roman restoration under Justinian, the Arab (sic) conquests, Carolingian empire-building, the Mongol conquests, the Habsburg and Napoleonic attempts, etc.), all of which fail to re-establish the unity given to Europe by the Roman Empire. It is this failure to restore the Roman Empire that led to the road to prosperity, as "trajectories of state formation" in post-Roman Europe began to diverge from rest of the Old World (Scheidel, 2019, 337). It seems that the multipolarity inscribed in the landscape of Europe meant that the Roman Empire was an exception: no other political formation succeeded in controlling over 80% of Europe's populations (the benchmark that Scheidel establishes for measuring a restoration of the Roman empire), and this meant that the western peninsula of Eurasia remained multipolar, allowing persecuted thinkers, and innovators to move from one jurisdiction to another. Hardly a novel claim: the uniqueness of the European case is often reduced to a European multipolarity, which is contrasted with monolithic Oriental "empires". The trouble with this, is that it is not clear how multipolarity is the cause of innovation, which rather comes across as merely the monopoly of a specific region throughout time. Nor is it ever made clear whether multipolarity is simply a matter of scale or what constitutes a pole within multipolarity. For example, was the "heptarchy" that ruled England a cause of its development or was it its eventual replacement by the relatively unified polity of the Norman Conquest? What about the Islamicate commonwealth that began to emerge 200 years after the hijra – was it not multipolar? Or was South Asia not also marked by multipolarity? Or was Africa, again, not marked by multipolarity? One can imagine the riposte to such queries would be that these are but moments of multipolarity, whereas in Europe it was hard-wired. But this only raises the questions of the relationship between time and causality and of what should be the appropriate unit of analysis which does not axiomatically privilege the nation-state.

#### **Example 2: Beyond Methodological Nationalism: It's Nation Time**

Critical Muslim studies and critical ancient world studies both confront the persistence of epistemological and methodological nationalism. Thus, one possible nexus from which to open a discussion of broader articulations between critical projects such as between the explorations towards a critical ancient world studies exemplified in this volume, as well as critical Muslim studies, is Amiri Baraka's *It's Nation Time*. Baraka was recognised by his critics as a controversial, highly influential figure who epitomised the attempts to overcome intellectual challenges presented by the successes and failures of the civil rights movement.18 His various epithets ("the father of the Black Arts Movement", "the Malcolm X of literature", "the ever-dissenting dissenter") hint at his position and promise within a broadly conceived black radical tradition and particularly the epistemological possibilities of Black Power.19 Our purpose, however, is not to discuss Amiri Baraka himself, but to briefly reference his work by way of expanding the range of examples that intersect with the concerns of both critical Muslim studies and critical ancient world studies.20 In particular, we focus our discussion on the album *It's Nation Time* that he released in 1972 – itself drawing on an earlier poem/pamphlet of the same title (Baraka, 1970), significantly already recited by Baraka at the 1970 founding Congress of African People in Atlanta, Georgia, where "black self-determination and Pan-Africanism were central themes" (Woodard, 1999, 162; but see also Teague, 2015, 23).

*It's Nation Time* allows us to pick out three points, which disrupt the normalisation of a nationalist methodology. First, the album cover, visually (and the back cover text in words), with its Afrocentric depiction of a pan-African, diasporic civilisational genealogy, displaces the historical narratives and foundation of white supremacy in the Western classical civilisation in favour of a broad Islamicate Afrocentrism.21 Second, both as performance poetry and as cultural intervention, *It's Nation Time* embodies a moment in Baraka's evolving ideological journey of grappling with Black nationalism and Black cultural nationalism, nation time and nation place, pan-Africanism, Marxism and internationalism, in the development both of African American consciousness and self-determination. Third, the very polemics which accompanied him throughout his activist trajectory – over its sexual and gender politics, religion, race and Blackness – specifically the place of whites in the struggle, the Black male, the question of antisemitism in the critique of capitalism and Black economic oppression, the question of the Black bourgeoisie and Uncle Toms foreground both the political nature, and the historical ontology of political subject formation, and the questions of power, context and relational positionality in critique beyond liberal criticism pertinent to both the meaning and the work of critique in our own, very different, conjuncture. *It's Nation Time* illustrates the raising of three key questions the attempts to answer which provide the impetus for critical ancient world studies and critical Muslim studies – namely, the question of displacing the classical heritage of Eurocentric narratives, the question of the relation between autonomy and the nation and the question of the political of political identities and their historical ontologies.

#### **Example 3: Why Be So Critical?**

It would be easy enough to conclude that the signifier "critical" announces the post-Western. There has been a proliferation of instances in which the prefix "critical" is attached to several academic endeavours: critical theory, critical race theory and critical legal theory. In academia, "critical" is ubiquitous (what field of academic studies could with legitimacy present itself as "uncritical"?), and there is great cultural capital in "critical" by way of positionality. It is important to note, however, that the absence of the prefix critical does not of course mean the absence of critique: consider, for example, cultural studies and Black and ethnic studies; both these fields emerged as insurgent knowledge formations. Why then "critical"? What work does this prefix do? This question becomes radicalised when we consider that proliferation takes place in the context of a naturalisation of a global neoliberal historic bloc and the reduction of alternative meta-narratives to fragments and margins. It is not by chance that critical race theory and critical theory are both hounded as ideological incursions in supposedly neutral and objective educational fields. What is common to critical race theory and critical theory is the focus on the structural and its constitutive role in the play of power (antisemitism in critical theory, [anti-Black] racism in critical race theory). The addition of critical Muslim studies to the family of what Foucault describes as a "proliferating criticizability of things, institutions, practices and discourses" (2003, 7), would make it just another instance of a localised critique and recovery of subjugated knowledges. In this case, critique would be no more than a means through a forensic scholarship to unconceal the hidden and forgotten existence of subjugated knowledges.22 Such a version of critical Muslim studies does no more than apply these decolonial and critical insights in the form of extending critical race theory to embrace racialised Muslim subjects caught in the crosshairs of the machinery of surveillance, interrogation and apprehension established by the war on terror. Such a version does not question the philosophical enterprise of accounting for Muslims, but it eschews the ontology of Muslimness for the ontic mapping of Muslims in precarious situations in the West, in the process re-asserting methodological nationalism and denying the globality of Muslimness. It is clear that such deployment of the signifier "critical" cannot deconstruct Europe and thus it cannot decolonise, and it cannot contribute to the imaginary of the post-Western. In contrast, the critical Muslim project associated with *ReOrient* makes the case for an ontological understanding of the Islamicate.23 The relationship between being critical and critique of Eurocentrism is not axiomatic.

To clarify this point we want to turn to a survey by Ian Almond who enumerates five principal strategies by which one can critique the idea of Europe that sustains Eurocentrism. He describes what he is doing as an investigation into deconstructions of Europe, but is quick to add that his is a deconstruction without its Derridean trappings. Almond's deconstruction refers to "any approach which tries to radically dismantle the idea of Europe as a largely self-contained space" (Almond, 2014, 53). It is a deconstruction that can be recuperated into the category of critique. Almond's survey provides a useful summary of strategies of critique which operate within the rubric of critical studies. The five strategies are re-origination, re-configuration, internal Othering, de-universalisation or provincialisation, and strategies of commonality (Almond, 2014, 53–58). Re-origination is based on demonstrating the false character of Eurocentrism by finding alternative origins to the formation of Europe. Such endeavours have an especial relevance for classical studies given that it articulates the origin of the West. Re-configurations of Europe try to evade Eurocentrism by putting into question the idea of Europe as a self-contained geographical entity. This is done by conceiving of Europe as part of a Eurasian supercontinent or conceiving a distinct Mediterranean civilisation. The strategy of internal Othering relies upon the proposition that Eurocentrism is undermined by the existence of multiple others in Europe which prevent its ability to fully centre itself as it is haunted by its marginalised population. The provincialisation of Europe would aim to undermine the claims of Eurocentrism by either proposing that some of the key characteristics of European identity can be found in other non-Western historical-cultural formations (e.g. Cyrus the Great and the Achaemenid Empire are given the "credit" for introducing human rights), thus deuniversalising Europe, or shifting the focus to the polycentric process of history making, thus provincialising, or "ontologically demoting", Europe as prime mover and disseminator. The final strategy is based on eroding Eurocentrism by making the claim for a commonality that transcends the frontier between the West and the non-West (Muslim organisations often find themselves in such inter-faith situations in which all religious communities and traditions are considered to be alike in their conception of the truth, good, etc.). Critical ancient world studies and critical Muslim studies would be able to ameliorate the Eurocentrism inherent in classical studies and Orientalism by applying one or more of these strategies to destabilise Europe, but would this truly fulfil their critical remit?

The post-Western cannot be reduced to the consequences of dismantling Europe as a largely self-contained space. The critical strategies that Almond has so helpfully outlined are predicated on the idea of Europe as a space. But Eurocentrism is built upon the notion that Europe is more than a space, it is more than just ethnocentrism (Sayyid, [1997] 2015). For the development of critical Muslim studies, the critique of Eurocentrism recognises the instability of "Europe" but sees this refracted through the prevailing paradigms of the nation-state, epistemological nationalism and migration studies: the "nations" of the age of nationalism were empire nations, "Muslim powers" to boot, such that "Europe" is no stranger to "Islam", or "Islam" to "Europe". But just as the discontinuities of Agarenes, Ishmaelites, Saracens, Moors, Turks, Mahometans, and Musulmans tend to be glossed over in the smoothing retrospective shorthand of the contemporary "Muslim", so the discontinuities of "Muslim" in the contemporary, too, are readily – and contradictorily – erased. For while people have been proffering the shahada since the time of Revelation (and indeed since the time of Creation), "Muslim" as a contemporary identity, public subjectivity and way of being in the world is of arguably recent emergence – less of one when than of multiple whens and wheres. The genealogies we narrate for them, in turn, reflect and set out its conditions of possibility.

Beyond their routing and grounding in diverse located stories and contexts, four global knots can be suggestively set out. The first is the 19th-century "Age of Steam and Print" (Bayly, 2004; Gelvin and Green, 2014), with its reinforcing forces of movement and fixity, of migrations and standardisation, of concreteness and abstraction, of nation-states and empires and of invented identities and "religions" imagined as perennial and traditional. The second is the mid-20th-century passing of the moment of Islamic socialisms and of Bandung internationalism. The third is the Iranian Revolution of 1979. The fourth, as familiar and as ideologised as the latter, is the knot of '89: the Rushdie affair, the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan and the beginning of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Bosnian War, the foulard affairs and the reinvention of laicism, the triumphalism of the End of History and the recasting of the geopolitical world order as a Clash of Civilisations naturalised by 9/11. Here the Rushdie affair may stand as a global marker of the making of the Muslim. The moment of reframing of "immigrants", ex-colonials and other "ethnics" into Muslims, of a shift from ethnic markers into markers of Muslimness, and of mobilisations and agency under the name Muslim. And not coincidentally, the moment of the retrenchment and conflation of whiteness, Europeanness and Westernness now reconfigured from racist exclusionism to a liberal disciplining of Muslimness.

But this, too, sutures important older continuities and discontinuities. For whether in terms of securitisation and the intelligence state, gendered Islamophobia and its white saviourism, fears of Muslim fanaticism and violent subversiveness, demographic panics, or racist nightmares of replacement and racial war, each and every strand has its precursor in both the contexts and logic of colonial rule and governmentality, and of the post–World War I collapse of empires and Spenglerian dissections of the passing of the European order. When missionaries and colonial administrators flagged the green peril of jihad in successive challenges to colonial rule, from the Scramble for Africa to the remaking of the Middle East (Habermas, 2014), when the global colour line buckled under fantasies of yellow peril and Islamic invasion in imagined future wars (Martín Rodríguez, 2018), and when white supremacists prophesised hand in hand the passing of the white race, the coming race war and the resurgence of Islam,24 then, too, Islamophobia and the Muslim were co-constitutive.

Historical, methodological and epistemological nationalism, not to mention reasons and logics of state, nation-building and the designs of citizenship and empire, shaped the disciplines and their orders of knowledge and divides – for example, between anthropology and sociology, between classical and modern languages, and between History, and indeed almost all European disciplines (from politics and theology to philosophy and literature), and Orientalism (see also Wallerstein, 1991). The same methodological and epistemological nationalism and reasons of state and policy configure both the disclosure of Muslims and the fields and disciplines that study them. A quick sketch of the beginnings of critical Muslim studies reveals it as an epistemological intervention that seeks to create a space which both articulates and disrupts existing disciplines and their boundedness within the imaginary of the nation-state.

Critical Muslim studies begins with distancing from the idea of imposing a prefix of Islamic on liberation theology as a means of making it decolonial.25 It turns the affair of prefixes into a series of interrogations between decoloniality and Muslimness, in the process rejecting the easy manner in which the decolonial imaginary was articulated by recruiting various subject positions made of the ranks of the contemporary wretched of the Earth. There was an underlying assumption within some precincts of decolonial thought that contemporary Muslims, that is, Muslims consumed by the logics of the war on terror could be reverse engineered to disclose their origins in Granada 1492. Granada signalled a doubly foundational conquest: of the Americas and the Islamicate. The formation of the New World was not only a geographical rupture but also historical: the conquest of Indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere was tied to the liberation of an autochthonous – that is, a Christian – Iberia, which was tied to the end of the premodern in Europe. Critical Muslim studies interrupts such decolonising narratives by questioning the Atlantic centrism of 1492. It complicates the picture of the play of power being unidirectional, it defers and disrupts the accounts of the "European Miracle" upon which much of decolonial writing still rests.26 It is a reminder that one of the key factors in the subjugation and eventual explosion of Muslims (and Jews) from Iberia was the fear that Muslim armies from the south would come and restore Islamicate fortunes.

#### **The Making of Muslimness and the Remaking of the (Ancient) World**

Academic research and teaching on Muslims takes place against a contemporary hypervisibility of Muslims. At its simplest, this means either that research and public and policy discourse on Muslims is disproportionate to the number of Muslims in the populations or, in Islamicate contexts, that Muslimness is problematised in the horizon of Eurocentrism.27 At its most insidious it meant that a convergence of politically framed securitarian and integration concerns generated a funding driven expansion of research which further disproportionately centres on Muslims. A correlative of this is the exceptionalisation of Muslims. Partly, such exceptionalisation merely reiterates racialising framings and moral panics familiar in the casting of diverse minorities and "backward" people as both social problems and threats. But partly it additionally builds on more historically specific loaded tropes of Islam and Muslims which trade on historiographical narratives of Europeanness and modernity, Orientalist conceptions of textualist Islam and novel post-Orientalist culturalist framings of universal values, all of which cast out Muslims as premodern Others.

One way of describing the aim of critical Muslim studies will be to reorient a world history so that it allows the disclosure of Muslimness as part of the fundamental plurality of the planet. One can imagine a world in which the curriculum shifts from critical ancient world studies to critical Muslim studies as it maps out the journey that denaturalises our present and in doing so opens the path for the articulation of a future that is not simply the extrapolation of the present. Ancient history is critical for the formation of political societies since it is a story of their beginnings and rooted in cosmologies of civilisations. Critical ancient world studies is not simply a supplement to arcane academic disciplines but potentially a political cosmology of the post-Western future. The post-Western is not chronological but epistemological. Ancient history draws the threads that stitch together the project of Western civilisation beyond its nationalist framing. The whiteness of ancient history/classics is necessary to connect Western civilisation as transnational imaginary. In dusty bookshops in Buenos Aires, Bucharest and Berlin, in charts, and in storybooks and textbooks, ancient history, as imagined by Eurocentrism, holds sway. There is, however, an attempt to argue that while the inheritance of such historical reconstructions continues to circulate in the culture, critique of Eurocentrism has in fact become mainstream. As part of the historiographical revolution which expands the archive from classical texts, and archaeological remains to using interdisciplinary methodologies to make the past and the present speak to us. Critical ancient world studies and critical Muslim studies seem to promise a global history that displaces Eurocentrism.

Critical Muslim studies is based on problematising the assumptions around a *history* of Muslims *in* the world. Its focus is not already constituted Muslim subjects but rather Muslimness and the making of Muslims.28 Its concerns are with issues of Muslim agency, autonomy, and Muslim worldmaking, and the coterminous and contradictory histories of the erasure and re-inscriptions of Muslims and Muslimness. In the vein of Ian Hacking's historical ontology of kinds of people, it approaches Muslim as a way of being in the world, attentive to its genealogy, its conditions of possibility and its historicity. The shift from Islam to Muslim to the making of Muslims, and from there to Muslimness, maps out the horizon of critical Muslim studies. Critical Muslim studies is a gesture towards a counter-history of Muslims told as the gnosis of Muslimness.

#### **Notes**

1 This chapter is based on the two presentations each of the authors made individually at the Critical Ancient World Studies Workshop, 7 September 2020, as well as a summary of work in progress for *Islamism as Philosophy* by one of the authors (Sayyid). We would like to thank the organisers and participants for fostering the rich environment and discussion in which critical Muslim studies and critical ancient world studies could play off each other's attempts to escape the gravitational pull of Eurocentrism.

#### 46 *S. Sayyid and AbdoolKarim Vakil*

can now be found even in the very introductory texts in ancient world studies. Thus, it is that, for example, *An Introduction to Ancient Mesopotamian Religion* dedicates its opening pages to each of the six words of the title (Schneider, 2011); more significantly, an introductory textbook such as Quirke's volume on religion in ancient Egypt in the Blackwell *Ancient Religions* series (2015) invites the student to confront from the start the Eurocentric framings of the field (from words, with Edward Said as the very first reference of the book's Preface, to periodisation, textuality, and colonialism), to "apply critical theory to Egyptology", pursue interdisciplinarity with the social sciences, and envisage that "the better future [of the field] lies in the hands not of established Egyptologists but of a new generation of thinkers particularly in Africa, including Egyptian Egyptologists and extending broadly across reflective and creative worlds" (12).

#### 48 *S. Sayyid and AbdoolKarim Vakil*

#### **References**

Sayyid, S. (forthcoming), *Islamism as Philosophy*, Bloomsbury.

# **Critical Epistemologies**

### **3 Reading for Diasporic Experience in the Delian Serapeia**

*Helen Wong*

#### **Introduction**1

The multicultural character of Delos, especially during the Hellenistic and early Roman periods, is one of its defining features. Delos was one of the most heavily trafficked sites in the eastern Mediterranean throughout antiquity, especially after its transformation into a free trade port by the Romans in ca. 166 bce. Its unique positionality as a major cult site, a free trade port and an island situated in the nearmiddle of the southern Aegean meant that religious, economic, and maritime travel networks intersected here in significant ways. In the Hellenistic and early Roman periods, Delos attracted large numbers of not only visitors but newcomers, arriving voluntarily or involuntarily, who made their lives there and who brought a marked cultural and ethnic diversity to the island. This is duly reflected in the archaeological record, in which several different ethnic/cultural enclaves, neighbourhoods and communities are clearly visible. The question of interpretation, however, is more complicated.

In the last decade or so, the term "diaspora" has appeared more and more frequently in ancient world studies.2 And yet, its meaning and actual use in the scholarship tends to vary, in part because calling a group "diasporic" encompasses many facets of possible identity and experience. Diaspora studies has become its own field, but even within it, there is disagreement on what, exactly, a diaspora is – in Jonathan Grossman's words, it is an "essentially contested concept", subject to constant debate over whether a "diaspora" is an explicitly definable group or simply a social construct defined by a certain category of mobilising discourse.3 Broadly speaking, when scholars use "diaspora" in ancient studies, they tend to be less concerned with interrogating the term itself and more interested in applying it. In that application, it seems apparent that there is a general understanding of "diaspora" as meaning any community or population living outside of their shared homeland/place of origin – for example, it has been used before to describe the cultural/ethnic communities on Delos, especially the *italikoi*, the Romans.4 This usage in ancient studies provides an interesting methodological counterpoint to how diaspora as a concept is approached within diaspora studies, sociology, postcolonial studies, and other disciplines that work with modern materials. In these fields, which generally have the benefit of working with the richness of

#### 54 *Helen Wong*

modern data, it is possible to get very fine-grained details on what forms the experience of diaspora. Of course, modern experiences do not map directly onto ancient ones, but as a discipline, classics could benefit from using this abundant information as reference points to think with. Modern experiences of diaspora can fill in, a little, the missing data about emotion, identity and belonging that is difficult to reconstruct from the archaeological data alone. This chapter considers how modern experiences and analysis of diaspora might be used as a way to read for diasporic experience in a particular archaeological dataset from the classical world: the Delian serapeia.

#### **Theoretical Background**