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.

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).