I have just written up my notes from a paper I delivered last year at Revolutions and Classics, a conference held at UCL in June 2016. It will be published soon in CUCD Bulletin along with other pedagogic papers delivered at the conference. Here's a preview, though I should stress that the final version might change a bit as it goes through the editing process. I'll put out a notification when the final version is out, hopefully within the next couple of months.
Among the issues explored at the Revolutions and Classics, where I
presented the paper that has grown into this piece, was just how far the
discipline of Classics has been changed by the development of Classical Reception
Studies.
Indeed, as Sebastian Ronin, one of my fellow speakers, commented, the very
notion of ‘Classics’ originates as reception. In
one of the pedagogic papers, also published in this current collection in CUCD Bulletin, Luke Richardson advocated
a move from what Classics means to what Classics is for. He asked how far the
emergence of Classical Reception Studies has impacted on classical research and
on how Classics is taught. He asked whether Classical Reception managed to revolutionise
Classics – and, if so, where this revolution succeeded or failed. In this
article, I shall work through these issues in relation to Black Athena and the role it has played in my teaching.
I do this at a time when a
discussion of this particular topic is especially germane for several reasons. Martin
Bernal claimed in 2001 that ‘Black Athena has forced classicists…to make choice
on general issues and take “political” positions for or against the status
quo.’ Here I explore Bernal’s claim in light of a session that forms
part of a module I teach at the University of Roehampton – at a time when
students’ perceptions of Classics as an elitist or inclusive discipline appear
to be on the move. Certainly, they are on the move at Roehampton and from the
evidence presented by colleagues, including at the Revolutions and Classics conference at UCL, how Roehampton students
are perceiving their degree subject has echoes in other institutions as well. Secondly,
Professor Bernal died several years ago, and the death of an influential author
will typically generate reflections on their career and impact. In
Bernal’s case, this process of looking back had begun before his death, with
the 2008 Conference at Warwick that gave rise to the edited collection African Athena which included
reflections by Bernal on where he stood in relation to Classics. Thirdly,
2017 – the date of this written-up version of my paper from the UCL conference
– is the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of the first volume of Black Athena.
There is something about anniversaries that prompts a reflection in light of
the intervening years. During anniversaries, we are prompted not just to look
back, but also to look ahead to the future. So, writing in 2017, I would like
to ask not just how far Black Athena
has changed Classics, but also at whether it might have a place in future Classics
teaching.
I shall start with some
background information as to how and why I began teaching a session on Black Athena. I have twice taught this
session as part of a third-year undergraduate module called Athena the
Trickster. The module is about Athena, but it also uses Athena as a vehicle for
thinking about issues relevant to the study of Classics, including how the
reception of Athena has shaped – and constrained – how the ancient deity is
understood. For example, one of the sessions takes place in the Ruskin Room at
Whitelands College at the University of Roehampton. This room houses a
collection of books which Ruskin, a great benefactor of Whitelands, gave to the
College, including several of his working copies of The Queen of the Air, a study of Athena which he updated regularly
from the 1860s onwards. Here, Ruskin presents a vision of the goddess as an
exemplar of everything that author regarded as wholesome about British culture,
civilisation broadly and women in particular, especially young girls. The book
is steeped in Ruskin’s own version of Victorian thinking. But it also
exemplifies a trend in the perception of Athena that persisted into the
twentieth century and then into the twenty-first: that the goddess is an exemplar
of cultural and civilised values and of a kind of non-threatening, big-sister
femininity.
I am going to focus here in
particular on my first experience teaching the session on Black Athena in 2014/15, including on how the session on Ruskin’s
vision Athena complemented it. As the module was timetable for the autumn term,
I was able to respond to my Head of Department’s call for sessions tied in with
Black History Month, and I opened the session to students and staff from across
the Department of Humanities (Humanities at Roehampton encompasses Classical
Civilisation, History, Philosophy, Ministerial Theology, and Theology and
Religious Studies). This invitation led to the presence of two welcome
visitors, one a PhD student working on Greek tragedy, the other a lecturer in
Ministerial Theology, David Muir, who, I learned during the session, had taught
Black Athena in the past from a Black
Studies perspective.
At the session, I considered
first how Bernal received Athena. Secondly, I posed the question of whether he
was ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ in his reception of the goddess – and then explored what
it means to regard a particular act of reception as either right or wrong.
Thirdly, moving beyond the question of the rightness or wrongness of Bernal’s
vision of Athena, I considered how Black
Athena is played out in his work. In this section of the class, I considered
how far Athena, as received by Bernal, stands for elitism in Western Civilisation
in general and in Classics in particular. I examined how, as for Ruskin, there
is such a level of personal engagement with the goddess that Athena can also
stand for Bernal himself, as is expressed more strikingly in Black Athena Writes Back, the title of
Bernal’s volume responding to those who critiqued his work in the volume Black Athena Revisited. The ‘Black Athena’ that is doing the
writing back is Bernal, who has appropriated the goddess as his own image. The
title Black Athena had a ‘high
voltage charge’ as Molly Levine noted in 1989. I
now asked what kind of charge is created by a title that positions the author himself
as Black Athena.
I concluded the session with some
questions for discussion prompted by our exploration of Black Athena, namely: ‘what is the purpose of Classics?’, ‘who owns
the classical world?’, and ‘who owns Athena?’. In the discussion that followed,
the students began to reflect on their own relationship with Classics,
including as an elitist subject. This same group of students had been surveyed
in their first year on their experiences studying Classics. What came out there
was a sense of Classics as elitist. For example, on student defined the subject
as ‘A subject that was designed for rich, white, men’. But what also came out was a sense that nothing can really be
done about this and some students reported feeling content to be part of a
select group of those who had managed to gain the opportunity to study the
subject. However, the response of some of the students to studying Athena – set
out in the reflective reports that formed part of the assessment for the module
– suggested a new level of reflectiveness about the Classics and what it means
to study it. One student commented about the module as a whole: ‘Week by week
this module
broke all the boundaries on the
way, we as students, saw Athena
and this module questioned issues I had never thought
to question before.’ Another, also thinking back on the module as a whole, wrote:
‘Every week I have thoroughly enjoyed being able to
light-heartedly talk about our experiences throughout our lives and
the many questions we have been asked about our reasoning
behind wanting to study Classical Civilisation.’ Another reflected on a turn the discussion took I class concerning
how students respond to the commonly asked question of why they are studying Classics:
‘It was interesting to hear how many of my
classmates had
been questioned about their choice of study and I believe this helped us to bond as a class,
we were able to share different stories and the colourful answers
we have stored away for the next person to ask us on our choice
of subject’.
On our discussion of Black Athena in particular, one student wrote that the discussion of Bernal had ‘revolutionised this aspect of my
perception of Athena.’ Another
student was prompted to reflect about their own identity and background as
follows:
A further intriguing analysis was that Bernal felt the criticism directed
at him was simply elitist…Classics has
also built up a stereotype in the minds of many. That only
the white, privately-educated students study it
etc. To a certain extent I could be accused of fitting
into those preconceived ideas…However
Classics is not an elite subject, due to its large wide-ranging appeal.
I shall end this sample of
student reflections with this one, on the potential for Classics as an
inclusive subject:
From books to films
to television series and so on, Classics subsequently has been
able to reach a more diverse audience than ever before. Perhaps this has enabled people who
might necessarily not have considered studying Classics to step
out of their comfort zone and study it. Overall in conclusion it is
perhaps the built-up pseudo stereotype itself which has enabled
Classics to be regarded as an elite subject of
study when in reality it is not.
My colleague Dr Muir responded as
follows in an evaluation of the session:
An inspirational and radically
informed lecture on the birth of Athena, how Athena is received
and represented in the ancient and modern world. In discussing controversial themes like these it is
often easy to hear the (political) rhetoric above
the (intellectual) content. In this regard, SD was keen to remind students what Bernal
actually said: that he wanted to open new areas of research to those “far better qualified” than himself and to “lessen
European cultural arrogance”.
Dr
Muir commented as follows on the discussion of Classics and elitism:
I thought this was very rich
and informative, challenging some of the old assumptions about
the “classics” and offering it up as
a subject area for all – regardless of class and race. Overall, the lecture was
an excellent interdisciplinary exercise in how to introduce students
to a controversial issue in studying
the “classics”; the content and style of teaching were
inspirational. I left the lecture a little disappointed that such
an intellectual feast was not made available to a much
wider audience.
My experiences, along with these
evaluations, suggest to me that Black
Athena can occupy a useful place in
the classical classroom as a means to explore the foundations and prevalence of
Classics as an elitist discipline. Black
Athena can also prompt students to reflect on what they bring to their
studies whether consciously or unconsciously. In 2016, my colleague Fiona
McHardy and I ran the same survey for incoming students that the students who
took the Black Athena class had
themselves taken in their first year. The results were very similar in one
regard – again students commented on the elitism that they connected with their
degree subject. But here was also a striking difference, with students also
stating that it is the role of classicists to seek to combat such elitism.
Bernal played a part in
revolutionising Classics, but not because his theories were accepted but
because of how this work helped stimulate an increased awareness on the part of
classicists concerning their discipline. Teaching Black Athena has a part to play in helping to build a more
inclusive curriculum. To respond to the issues raised by Watson summarised
above, the Classical Reception revolution hasn’t succeeded or failed – it is
ongoing.
Bernal, M. (2001), Black Athena Writes Back: Martin Bernal Responds to His Critics,
Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
