{"title":"What Do They Know of Cricket, Who Only Cricket Know?\": Classical and Colonial Knowledge in C. L. R. James' Beyond a Boundary","authors":"Katherine Harloe, Mathura Umachandran","doi":"10.1353/ajp.2022.0024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ajp.2022.0024","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Part sociological analysis of race and class in colonial Trinidad, part autobiographical Bildungsroman, Beyond a Boundary is the cricketing memoir of Trinidadian intellectual and anticolonial activist C. L. R. James (1901–1989). We argue that it offers a good site for thinking through the position of the racially minoritized intellectual entangled in neocolonial logics of cultural hierarchy and identification. We examine James' use of ironic narrative voice to instrumentalize the colonial values encoded in the \"Spirit of Cricket.\" Beyond a Boundary therefore re-imagines the scope of knowledge-making, be it in cricket, art, or indeed Classics, beyond traditionally naturalized hierarchies of race and class.","PeriodicalId":46128,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHILOLOGY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48760201","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"African American Travelers Encounter Greece, ca. 1850–1900","authors":"John W.I. Lee","doi":"10.1353/ajp.2022.0026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ajp.2022.0026","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay examines the experiences of three 19th-century African American travelers to Greece—David Dorr (1852), Frederick Douglass (1887), and John Wesley Gilbert (1890–1)—using evidence from their letters, diaries, and published writings. The essay shows that although each traveler's unique personal perspective shaped his response to seeing the ancient sites and monuments of Greece, all three men responded most deeply to a site connected with Greece's Christian heritage: the Areopagus or Mars Hill, where according to 19th-century understanding the Apostle Paul had spoken the words recorded in the Book of Acts.","PeriodicalId":46128,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHILOLOGY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43533396","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Metal and Mettle: Odyssean Elements of the Racialized Body and Oddsee's Hybridity in Suzan-Lori Parks' Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3) (2015)","authors":"Sasha-Mae Eccleston","doi":"10.1353/ajp.2022.0023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ajp.2022.0023","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article compares the idealism underwriting both the survival of Odysseus' family in Homer's Odyssey and hybridity in Suzan-Lori Parks' Father Comes Home from the Wars (2015). Building upon an instance of indirect transmission from Homer to Fagles to Parks, it argues that Parks' creation of a hybrid human canine figure not only queries hybridity's role as the telos of Black liberation and racial justice but also sheds new light on the role of Argos and Telemachus for the idealized image that concludes the Odyssey. Reflecting on Parks' nuanced rejection of the idea that Father Comes Home from the Wars is an adaptation of the Odyssey, this article closes by explaining the urgency of directly addressing the challenges of being a racialized teacher in the Classics classroom rather than idealizing those teachers as the self-evident resolution of the racism in the field.","PeriodicalId":46128,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHILOLOGY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43045874","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Felling the Canon: Classical Roots and Anti-Genealogies in Monica Youn's Blackacre","authors":"Erynn Kim","doi":"10.1353/ajp.2022.0027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ajp.2022.0027","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article analyzes the use of classical references in Monica Youn's collection Blackacre. Inspired by rhizomatic models of classical reception studies, my reading focuses on the relationship between classical references in the body of the poems, on the one hand, and classical references in the paratexts on the other hand. I argue that Youn's oblique engagement with classical material exposes the limitations of an arborescent or genealogical model of reception and, on a related note, the constraints imposed by the construct of the canon as Youn leverages the heterogeneity of Asian American literature to resist the idea of a simple, hierarchical, one-way classical canon.","PeriodicalId":46128,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHILOLOGY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45335645","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Comic Echopoetics in Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazousai","authors":"A. Melzer","doi":"10.1353/ajp.2022.0016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ajp.2022.0016","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The Thesmophoriazousai brims with themes of imitation, from its broader tragic parodies to its finer sonic textures. This study uncovers the functions and effects of imitation on the dramatically crucial (but often neglected) verbal level by means of Echo—a bizarre metatheatrical character who embodies the dynamics of mimicking speech and parody. The aural echo is provided as a conceptual frame, illustrating how verbal mimicry functions to both degrade and bolster identity and status in Echo's scene and elsewhere in the play. Echo's speech patterns ultimately serve to perform, manipulate, and expand forms of mimicry in Old Comedy.","PeriodicalId":46128,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHILOLOGY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48726883","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Aleksandr Fedchin, P. Burns, Pramit Chaudhuri, J. P. Dexter
{"title":"Senecan Trimeter and Humanist Tragedy","authors":"Aleksandr Fedchin, P. Burns, Pramit Chaudhuri, J. P. Dexter","doi":"10.1353/ajp.2022.0019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ajp.2022.0019","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The lack of extant contemporary comparanda obscures the workings of iambic trimeter in Senecan tragedy. This article offers a quantitative analysis of the reception of Senecan trimeter in four early works of Italian Humanist Tragedy, which illuminates the creative possibilities afforded by the basic structure of the meter and identifies specific features important to questions of style and semantics. Our analysis demonstrates, among other things, that both Seneca and the Humanist tragedians use clusters of resolution in conjunction with antilabe as a literary device to convey high emotion.","PeriodicalId":46128,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHILOLOGY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41979334","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Global Empires and The Roman Imperium","authors":"B. Shaw","doi":"10.1353/ajp.2022.0020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ajp.2022.0020","url":null,"abstract":"The volumes under review are an impressive if unequal diptych. The first, the slimmer of the two, entitled “The Imperial Experience,” comprises a series of analytical studies on the creation, management, and ideologies of empires, and forms of resistance to them. The second, “The History of Empires,” is a forbidding tome of forty-four specific studies of individual empires and imperial ventures, from Ur III and Middle Kingdom Egypt to the Mongols and the British, ending, naturally, with America’s “global imperium.” In the analytics, the usual suspects, including Michael Doyle, Frederick Cooper and Jane Burbank, are on display; and the conceptual approaches of Michael Mann and Ernest Gellner are favorite points d’appui. For premodern empires, the ideas of the Maghribi thinker Ibn Khaldūn provide a different focus, so it is heartening to see Bang and others applying them more consistently (e.g., 1:13, 40, 326–9; 2:162, 246–8, 253). Especially for premodern empires, these volumes can be seen as an extension of earlier handbooks devoted to the state, one devoted to the ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean state and another on ancient empires.1 As an aspect of world history, the endeavor is the culmination of a decades-long project on the history of empires fronted by Peter Bang.2 He has usefully produced detailed historical introductions not only to both volumes, but also to the subsections in each of them. Perhaps not surprisingly, empire turns out to be a virile enterprise. As Ian Morris notes, “the story of empire . . . is so strongly gendered that it","PeriodicalId":46128,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHILOLOGY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44929943","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Lucian's Fatherland Encomium and the Meaning of Samosata","authors":"Stephen E. Kidd","doi":"10.1353/ajp.2022.0018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ajp.2022.0018","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Lucian's Fatherland Encomium is thought to have been delivered at Samosata, Lucian's hometown. Although he never mentions \"Samosata\" in this speech, he repeatedly toys with the \"name of the fatherland\" as the speech's theme. But what is the name of his native city? The Greeks called it \"Samosata\" but this is clearly a transliteration. I consider the Aramaic, Persian, and Armenian versions of the name, and notice that the Aramaic \"Shemshat\" has a number of resonances in Lucian's speech, not least the set theme of the speech itself \"the name of (shem) the fatherland.\"","PeriodicalId":46128,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHILOLOGY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43911615","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
B. Beck, A. Melzer, J. Ulrich, Stephen E. Kidd, Aleksandr Fedchin, Patrick J. Burns, Pramit Chaudhuri, J. P. Dexter, B. Shaw, Emily P. Austin, William M. Breichner
{"title":"Harshing Zeus' Μέλω: Reassessing The Sympathy of Zeus at Iliad 20.21","authors":"B. Beck, A. Melzer, J. Ulrich, Stephen E. Kidd, Aleksandr Fedchin, Patrick J. Burns, Pramit Chaudhuri, J. P. Dexter, B. Shaw, Emily P. Austin, William M. Breichner","doi":"10.1353/ajp.2022.0015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ajp.2022.0015","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The dominant interpretation of Zeus' words at Iliad 20.21, which regards μέλουσί μοι ὀλλύμενοί περ as an expression of sympathy for dying warriors, poses a number of serious contextual and lexical problems. This article argues that Il. 20.21 is not an expression of compassion, but attention. Zeus is not concerned for dying warriors, but attentive to them, as indeed his deadly βουλή (Il. 20.20) requires him to be. The interpretation of Il. 20.21 has relevance to questions of great significance for the interpretation of the Iliad, including Zeus' relationship to humans and the meaning of the Διὸς βουλή.","PeriodicalId":46128,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHILOLOGY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42924403","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The AJP Best Article Prize Winner","authors":"William M. Breichner","doi":"10.1353/ajp.2022.0022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ajp.2022.0022","url":null,"abstract":"for her contribution to scholarship in “Dissecting a Forgery,” AJP 142.3 (Fall 2021): 493–533. Valdivieso conclusively demonstrates that Exsul Immeritus, a letter in an Italian collection attributed to the mestizo Jesuit Blas Valera and dated by some to the 17th century, is a forgery written in the second half of the 20th century. Using philological tools—close linguistic analysis and source criticism—Valdivieso makes a decisive contribution to the field of colonial Latin American history. Yet the article is irresistible for scholars of classical antiquity as well, engaging as it does with ungrammatical Latin, Italianisms, and a patchwork of citations from Roman authors, the Vulgate, and the Latin works of Dante, Ficino, and Politian. Valdivieso shows that the letter depends on critical editions and compilations that were not available until much later, establishing a terminus post quem of 1952. The article raises tantalizing questions about the provenance and validation of the whole collection. Although Valdivieso is not the first scholar to claim that the letter is a forgery, she is the first to pay close attention to the Latin. If authentic, the letter would provide otherwise unattested information about the textual transmission of Petronius and Dante as well as Valera’s life and works. The letter also makes claims that subordinate indigenous accounts to Valera’s own and alter what we know about the Incas and the Spanish conquest of Peru. Valdivieso demonstrates masterful control of different fields of study while captivating and educating the reader at every stage. With its acute and highly engaging philological detective work, clarity, and critical service to other disciplines, Valdivieso’s article is a prime example of the vitality of new directions in classical philology. Rigorous and compelling, the article not only definitively settles an ongoing debate but also brings excitement and distinction to known methods.","PeriodicalId":46128,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHILOLOGY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47758184","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}