The Haunted House of Classics
The 2020 Natalie Boymel Kampen Memorial Lecture will explore the historical and contemporary implications of the discipline of Classics in epistemicide, a concept popularized by the postcolonial theorist Boaventura de Sousa Santos to designate the extirpation of locally rooted ways of knowing as a direct result of imperial violence. Drawing on the writings of Avery Gordon, Saidiya Hartman, and César Sánchez Beras, Padilla Peralta hopes to generate some critical momentum around the premise that Classics is a ghostly matter, haunted by its participation in global projects of race-making but insistent on denying responsibility for the violences committed in its name.
Dan-el Padilla Peralta is Associate Professor of Classics at Princeton University. He is the author of the forthcoming Divine Institutions (Princeton UP), co-editor of Rome, Empire of Plunder: The Dynamics of Cultural Appropriation (Cambridge UP, 2017), and author of Undocumented: A Dominican Boy’s Odyssey from a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League (Penguin, 2015).
Image: Statues outside of the Museo del Hombre Dominicano in Santo Domingo.