This introductory chapter explores the key themes of Classicisms in the Black Atlantic, and introduces the structure of the work, the essays in question, and contemporary debates to which the collection is responding. Drawing on the work of Paul Gilroy, the authors argue that the essays in the volume demonstrate the productive results that issue from re-examining historical relationships between modern classicism and the construction of race and racial hierarchies, as well as the making and remaking of various forms of classicism by intellectuals, writers, and artists circulating in the diasporic world of the Black Atlantic. These explorations provide grounds for challenging racialized visions of the classics as a white European heritage that have re-emerged in contemporary politics, and for reimagining the role of classical humanism in anti-racist struggles.
Slave narratives emerged on the world literary stage in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in response to the human rights violations of the transatlantic slave trade. Tracing the trajectory of slave narrative scholarship from questions of authorship, authenticity, and literacy acquisition to the prioritization of transatlantic and hemispheric studies in the wake of Paul Gilroy's
The Black Atlantic
(1993) to the rise of comparative media studies, this chapter offers an introduction to major avenues for reframing slave narratives as world literature. Innovative readings of the narratives of Frederick Douglass, Olaudah Equiano, Sojourner Truth, William and Ellen Craft, and Henry Box Brown offer case studies of transatlantic book tours, rhetorical self‐fashioning, and “performing narratives,” or the way that slave narrators paired their autobiographical texts with visual and aural performances of race, gender, and freedom.
Since the 1970s, the topic of feminist adaptations of Greco-Roman mythology has been dominated by narratives of revision and retelling from the perspective of female characters, including—via Hélène Cixous—Medusa as a creative muse for women’s writing. Pairing the modernist US poet Louise Bogan’s 1921 lyric “Medusa” with Ovid’s Metamorphoses, this essay asks what modes of women’s engagement with myth have been left out or undertheorized in the wake of feminist critics’ investment in narratives of reclaimed voice. Instead of being a prosopopoeia in which the imagined woman speaks, Bogan’s Medusa is a metonymic figure—the ancient Gorgoneion mask that preceded the woman in myth—whose silent rhetorical force dislodges a literary history of petrified gender relations first consolidated in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. By rethinking Ovidian mythological figures in Bogan’s “Medusa” and related twentieth-century poems by US women writers, this essay identifies alternative modes of feminist revisionist mythmaking.
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