Nov 19, 2024
5:00pm - 6:30pm
Widener Lecture Hall, Penn Museum (3260 South St.)
The Penn Public Lectures on Classical Antiquity and the Contemporary World
Professional Classical Studies and its Others
Building on the diagnosis of a disordered system that fails at the task of democratic education (but serves the elite), I turn to instruction by other means. There is a long tradition in the U.S. and across the Black Atlantic of self-education. On any given day in Harlem, New York during the 1990s when I lived there, book sellers on 125th Street hawked histories that contested the truths taught at elite institutions. The books they sold included Ivan van Sertima’s They Came Before Columbus (1976), asserting an African presence in the New World before 1492; Stolen Legacy: Greek Philosophy is Stolen from Egyptian Philosophy (1954), by George G.M. James; and Martin Bernal’s Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Volumes I, II, and III (1987-2006). In this lecture, I am not primarily concerned with the truth-claims of these tomes, whether their Afrocentric assertions, or other assertions of authority. Rather, I am interested in these works within a sociology of knowledge, an epistemology cordoned off from – and quickly dismissed by – elite actors. In contrast to professional classical studies, these works circulated – and continue to circulate – outside of colleges and universities, in locations like the street corners of Harlem. Borrowing from fields like anthropology, sociology, and urban studies, I name the matrix of social spaces that interest me in this lecture “the streets,” a generative environment of unlikely interactions and creativity. The streets constitute a timeless matrix, and evidence of its longevity can be found in such classical authors as Horace and Juvenal, across genres of the epistle and satire. An advantage of approaching knowledge from the matrix of the streets is the disruption of the ideological trap of race, or civilization, in which we traffic in modern and contemporary times.