See previous installments in this series here.
The RaceB4Race Mentorship Network began its work in 2022, intended to ‘offer new scholars support as they develop the research that will drive the academic conversation forward’. This Mellon-funded initiative spearheaded by Folger Institute director Dr. Patricia Akhimie not only includes individual mentorship opportunities, but also ‘a semester-long virtual reading/research group, meeting monthly to connect participants with a larger network of premodern critical race scholars.’
What are we reading?
The fourth and final meeting of this year’s seminar group occurred on Friday January 24, and featured Sasha-Mae Eccleston’s brand-new book Epic Events: Classics and the Politics of Time in the United States Since 9/11 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2025).
Dr. Sasha-Mae Eccleston is John Rose Workman Assistant Professor of Classics at Brown University. She is the co-founder of Racing the Classics (with Dan-el Padilla Peralta) and the journal Eos: Africana Receptions of Ancient Greece and Rome, and she was awarded the NEH/Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Rome Prize in 2021.
Why are we reading this?
It is not an overstatement to say that classical Greece and Rome are all around us. Sasha-Mae Eccleston opens this book with the striking image of a quotation from Virgil’s Aeneid that appears in English on the wall at the 9/11 Museum and Memorial in New York City: “No Day Shall Erase You From The Memory Of Time.” She interrogates this peculiar choice of quotation, whose original context suggests very different meanings from what is clearly intended at the memorial. But, she argues, only a few people (e.g. people who know the Aeneid) truly care about the original context. What matters is that it is a quotation by Virgil, a “rent-a-quote Latin author” whose “words mattered less as a poetic excerpt than they did as an aphorism, a valuable and timeless piece of wisdom” (5).
She then links this idea of timelessness to other chronological trends that surfaced in the wake of the 2001 attacks, how calls to unity immediately afterward were couched in language that “framed the already inevitable war as a way to put the United States back in control of time, as, he suggested, it had been ordained to be all along” (12). This sense of inevitability was then paired with the allochronistic framing of all Muslims as backward and barbaric (often using ‘medieval’ in a pejorative sense), as well as the emphasis in foreign policy on “logics of preemption and preparedness,” which, by “preferring speedy decisiveness over meaningful deliberation also meant, among other things, curtailing how democracies work, despite the pretenses of a war effort trying to effect humanitarian peace by spreading democracy worldwide” (15). While the connection to the classics may not seem apparent, that is indeed the point—that, here in the United States,
A host of processes, contingencies, and power struggles turn the fact that ancient Greek and Roman civilizations chronologically precede the nation’s founding into a license to derive standards from them, a responsibility to preserve their artifacts, a will to render them as a possession-in-common, and, consequently, the endorsement of—if not material rewards for—imitating, re-creating, and alluding to them. (18)
Eccleston is very clear that her book is intended as a point of departure, not as a destination; that she wants others to find and elucidate these parallels, these odd choices of Greek and Roman referents that seem out of sync with what they’re meant to represent. They are worth second guessing and interrogating, especially now.
While I will not be going into the particulars of the discussion, in order to preserve the seminar space as a safe and private one, below is a list of scholarship that came up at different points during the discussion.
Sasha-Mae Eccleston, ‘Only in Good Company: On Generosity and Pedagogy in Ancient Greek and Roman Studies’, The Hopkins Review 17.1 (2024), 78-85.
Sasha-Mae Eccleston and Dan-el Padilla Peralta, ‘Racing the Classics: Ethos and Praxis’, American Journal of Philology 143.2 (2022), 199-218.
Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021).
Sarah Sharma, In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).
Maria Wye, Caesar in the USA (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).
Organizations to donate to:
Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders
Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund
Anera
Jewish Voice for Peace
Save the Children
Avaaz (based in Syria)
Transgender Law Center
Advocates for Trans Equality
National Network of Abortion Funds
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