Race and Classical Reception in the Colonial Americas

With a general understanding of classical reception and a historical understanding of classicism in the colonial and early United States, it is time to begin exploring the intersections of race and classics in these moments. The following books and articles offer ideas and techniques about how to begin exploring this intersection.

Moyer, Ian S., Adam Lecznar, and Heidi Morse, eds. Classicisms in the Black Atlantic / Ian Moyer, Adam Lecznar, and Heidi Morse. First edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.

Classicism in the Black Atlantic presents a series of studies on literary, artistic, and political uses of classical antiquity in modern constructions of race, nation, and identity in the Black Atlantic. Indeed, the volume explores how black authors and artists in the Atlantic world have shaped and reshaped the cultural legacies of classical antiquity from the aftermath of slavery to the modern world. All essays share the goal of examining the past and present intersections of classicisms, race, gender, and social status. 

Malamud, Margaret. African Americans and the Classics : Antiquity, Abolition and Activism / Margaret Malamud. London: I.B. Tauris, 2016.

Malamud’s African Americans and the Classics is one of the leading texts in the field of “Classica Africana,” the study of classical receptions with African American thought and literature. However, much of that literature is concentrated on the 20th century. Malamud, however, finds a new way to explore this scholarly area of interest by going back into history (namely the very end of the 18th century and the entirety of the 19th century). In doing so, Malamud explores the uses and abuses of the models provided by classical antiquity in the antebellum era. Malamud’s text offers important insight into the intersection of race and reception studies in earlier periods of American history, yet there are still more connections to be made in even earlier chapters of American and transatlantic history. 

Slauter, Eric. “Neoclassical Culture in a Society with Slaves: Race and Rights in the Age of Wheatley.” Early American Studies 2, no. 1 (2004): 81–122. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23546504.

Slauter’s article attempts to place the conflations of mental and political equality at work in debates about race and rights in the context of aesthetic disputes over neoclassicism. It further considers the neoclassical poetry of Phillis Wheatley (a black, enslaved woman writing in Boston) in relation to the contests of her black and white contemporaries over natural rights. While these two conversations may seem separate from one another, cultural discussions around the topic of neoclassicism shared with political debates of the Revolution a common metaphorical language of slavery. Indeed, Slauter posits that an emerging cultural revolution against neoclassicism transformed the meaning of mental activity at the same moment the political revolutions against the British placed mental activity at the center of what it meant to be a “rights-bearing individual” (83). This article begins to think not only about how black persons in America interacted with the classics, but also how white Americans could use the classics as an exclusionary means.