This volume explores and elucidates Critical Ancient World Studies, 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’.
This volume explores and elucidates Critical Ancient World Studies, 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’.
Critical Ancient World Studies (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 must-read for scholars and practitioners teaching in the field of classical studies, and the breadth of examples also make it an invaluable resource for anyone working on the ancient world within other disciplines.
Arvustused
"In its collectivity and variety, its effortful interdisciplinarity, and its self-annotating, self-critical practice, this exciting collection of papers represents part of a wider sea change occurring across ancient world studies. The contributions to the volume are refreshingly direct, clearly written, and, as an open access publication, available to anyone interested in its approaches. Critical Ancient World Studies is a generative, thought-provoking text. Iterative application of the critical mechanism at its core will guarantee even more field-expanding work in the years to come." - Bryn Mawr Classical Review
Introductions;
1. Towards a Manifesto for Critical Ancient World Studies
Mathura Umachandran and Marchella Ward;
2. Critical Muslim Studies and the
Remaking of the (Ancient) World S. Sayyid and AbdoolKarim Vakil; Critical
Epistemologies;
3. Reading for Diasporic Experience in the Delian Serapeia
Helen Wong;
4. Recentering Africa in the Study of Ancient Philosophy: The
Legacy of Ancient Egyptian Philosophy Nicholas Chukwudike Anakwue;
5.
Epistemic Injustice in the Classics Classroom Ashley Lance; Critical
Philologies;
6. Comparative Philology and Critical Ancient World Studies
Krishnan J. Ram-Prasad;
7. Forging the Anti-Lexicon with Hephaestus Hannah
Silverblank;
8. Sapphos Body as Archive: Towards a Deep Lez Philology Ella
Haselswerdt; Critical Time and Critical Space;
9. Colonial Cartography and
the Classical Imagination: Mapping Critique and Dreaming Ancient Worlds
Mathura Umachandran;
10. Away from "Civilisational" Heritage in the Eastern
Mediterranean: Embracing Classical and Islamic Cultural Co-presences and
Simultaneous Histories at the Parthenon and Ayasofya Lylaah L. Bhalerao;
11. Queer Time, Crip Time, Woman Time, Sick Time, Sleepy Time, Muslim Time
Remaking Temporality Beyond "the Classical" Marchella Ward; Critical
Approaches;
12. A Loss of Faith Brings Vertigo: Icarus, Black and Queer
Embodiment and the Failure of the West Patrice Rankine;
13. Critical
Reception Studies: The White Feminism of Feminist Reception Scholarship
Holly Ranger;
14. The Anti-radical Classicism of Karl Marxs Dissertation
Kiran Pizarro Mansukhani; Afterword(s); In the Jaws of CAWS: A Response
Dan-el Padilla Peralta.
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.
