Dan-el Padilla Peralta: The Haunted House of Classics

In the 2020 Natalie Boymel Kampen Memorial Lecture, Dan-el Padilla Peralta explores 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 generates 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.