On Yearning, from the Spectacular to the Speculative

Abstract

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• On Yearning, from the Spectacular to the Speculative
• Sasha-Mae Eccleston

it is difficult to survey a field accurately from a single vantage point. Likewise, reflecting on one issue of one journal, I cannot accurately survey the entirety of ancient Greek and Roman studies or even the branch of it represented by TAPA's readership.

However, Patrice Rankine and I have spent considerable time over the last few years in the company of the articles that constitute this special issue. Editing has required that we revisit these pieces of scholarship repeatedly and sustain dialogue with both their authors and their reviewers.¹ As a result, these articles have frequently come to mind as I read research across this field and others. Their interpretations of passages have already influenced how I review applications, teach, mentor students, or edit other people's work. I appreciated the variety of methods these authors use and their arguments from early on in the editorial process. Having to focus on their individual nuances while keeping an eye on how they drift together or apart from one another has brought a deferred reward: I now especially value the matters this issue's articles bring to the fore but do not resolve. Those moments of irresolution have highlighted the parameters of what contributors have been habituated to consider the limits of the field, what it prioritizes and what it considers transgressive. They direct my attention toward what lies just outside the field's ken and toward what we need to do as practitioners of various kinds in order to grasp it.

When Patrice and I began to brainstorm this issue's call for papers (CfP), the spectacular emerged as an important prism for seeing race in classical scholarship otherwise, echoing Emily Greenwood's own citation of Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and for intervening meaningfully in the development of these [End Page 331] areas of research that the field has only recently sanctioned.² My interest in this prism responded to Patrice's description of the field's propensity to ignore White supremacy as a bedrock of American society as "Oedipal zeal," but it had longer-term origins in three areas of concern.³

First, I acknowledge how pointing out the presence of X people in or influencing ancient Greek–speaking communities, in the ancient Greek or Roman imagination, or as subjects of the Roman Empire seeks to combat centuries of historical erasure that credits European(ized) civilizations with many or all of the greatest human achievements and associates non-Europeans with a passivity that renders them appropriate objects of domination. For those less attuned to racism's nuances and the politics of presence as well as erasure, this quest to identify X people in the ancient Mediterranean could nevertheless further reify race as naturally meaningful somatic difference and, therefore, as a stable transhistorical and transcultural phenomenon. Yet, as Geraldine Heng summarizes, critical theories of race matter precisely because "race has no singular or stable referent."⁴

Focusing on supposedly self-evident somatic difference depends on a particular form of race thinking along with its attendant regimes of visuality. This form neither represents the sole form racism takes nor the sole form worthy of interrogation, let alone repudiation. As much attention must be paid to parsing the logics that make meaning out of real and purported difference as to finding representatives of the races those logics produce. In place of transhistorical and transcultural meaning that the uncritical quest for race seems to offer, researching racism tracks shifting relations of power, however they may be expressed.

Second, intellectual exploration and experiential knowledge have sensitized me to the way the aforementioned reification of race tends to freight Black bodies and those approximate to them with race's "problems," matters that colorblind, post-racial, and neoliberal ideologies attribute to individual deficiencies and cultural priorities (or improprieties) rather than to power and systemic flaws. Media coverage of spectacular incidents in the field over [End Page 332] the last decade has followed familiar scripts by portraying Black scholars as troubling the pure waters of Classics and its draught of choice (philology) while leading the weak-willed or other racial innocents astray.⁵ In addition to...