11/03 Nandini Pandey (Johns Hopkins) "The Violence of Diversity: From the Roman Amphitheater to the Field of Classics"

How, where, and at what cost did Romans acquire and come to know their empire’s diversity? This paper zooms in on the Roman arena as one place where ethnically and even zoologically heterogeneous bodies were collected and consumed, staging diversity’s subordination to the state. Yet gladiatorial spectacles also solidified interethnic bonds and detached ethnicity and its visible markers from origin and identity. I explore some ways that the violence of the Roman arena performed racecraft and diversity work while asking how we can recuperate the experiences of individuals marginalized by the archive. I also suggest some lessons for our field as it strives to diversify – but why, and for whose benefit?