For the past two posts on the voices of slaves I have been meditating on Spivak’s article “Can the Subaltern Speak?”. Today I’m going to shift my focus to the topic of the one of the panels at the recent Society for Classical Studies conference: Response and Responsibility in a postclassical World.
If you were to ask a classicist what subfield of classics the papers on that panel fell under, she would almost certainly say “reception”. Reception is a field of studies that has gained popularity in recent years, but while is pretty much an uncontested area of research in Europe and the UK, in the US there are still some scholars stodgy enough who suggest that it does not qualify as a field of study. In any case, reception, simply put, is the study of how various groups of people or individual people have read and/or used a particular ancient author or particular ideas from antiquity. So for example, one of the presenters on this panel, Phiroze Vasunia, explored the different ways that Gandhi and Derrida used Plato’s Apology.
One of the exciting things about reception is that because it is a new field, there is still the chance that it could change radically, as in new fields pretty much every aspect is up for grabs. One of the things that is up for grabs is the very name of the field itself. One of the reasons that the conveners titled the panel “Response and Responsibility” is because of their dissatisfaction with the name “reception”. For them, and I am inclined to agree with them, reception implies that the readers, such as Gandhi and Derrida in the above example, have a mostly passive relationship with the work in question. This passivity is completely incongruous with what is interesting about this field, namely the wide variety of ways that people can interpret and interact with ancient texts.
What does any of this have to do with slavery? Well first of all, one of things about ancient slavery that I am quite interested in is how modern abolitionists and slave-owners used examples and arguments from antiquity to debate why slavery was or was not essential. However, that topic is not the main thrust of my dissertation. Rather, this panel’s larger question of response and responsibility does raise a large number of issues for the study of ancient slavery, such as:
Each year, millions of high-school and college students read the Odyssey. Odysseus is a slave-owner. Indeed, Homer goes out of his way to depict Odysseus as a very good slave-owner. What are we to make of that morality? How should high-school students react to that such a morality that not only condones slavery, but has a sophisticated sense of how a slave’s character is reflected through his or her relationship with the slave-owner?
I’ll end with an even more provocative question. It is safe to say that billions of people world-wide turn to Jesus in order to create their moral systems. Any reading which says that Jesus was against slavery has to go against the grain of the text, as the text indicates that Jesus was quite concerned about the morality of divorce but was okay with slavery. I don’t mean that say that against the grain readings are bad. But such readings rely on a different responsibility than the one that we typically adopt when reading ancient texts. Such readings are usually guided by the idea that the best thing to do is to imagine how this text functioned in the world of its author.
If you were to ask a classicist what subfield of classics the papers on that panel fell under, she would almost certainly say “reception”. Reception is a field of studies that has gained popularity in recent years, but while is pretty much an uncontested area of research in Europe and the UK, in the US there are still some scholars stodgy enough who suggest that it does not qualify as a field of study. In any case, reception, simply put, is the study of how various groups of people or individual people have read and/or used a particular ancient author or particular ideas from antiquity. So for example, one of the presenters on this panel, Phiroze Vasunia, explored the different ways that Gandhi and Derrida used Plato’s Apology.
One of the exciting things about reception is that because it is a new field, there is still the chance that it could change radically, as in new fields pretty much every aspect is up for grabs. One of the things that is up for grabs is the very name of the field itself. One of the reasons that the conveners titled the panel “Response and Responsibility” is because of their dissatisfaction with the name “reception”. For them, and I am inclined to agree with them, reception implies that the readers, such as Gandhi and Derrida in the above example, have a mostly passive relationship with the work in question. This passivity is completely incongruous with what is interesting about this field, namely the wide variety of ways that people can interpret and interact with ancient texts.
What does any of this have to do with slavery? Well first of all, one of things about ancient slavery that I am quite interested in is how modern abolitionists and slave-owners used examples and arguments from antiquity to debate why slavery was or was not essential. However, that topic is not the main thrust of my dissertation. Rather, this panel’s larger question of response and responsibility does raise a large number of issues for the study of ancient slavery, such as:
- What kind of responsibility do modern readers have to look for the voices of slaves in classical texts? What are the best ways to enact this responsibility?
- What kind of responsibility do modern readers have in listening to the voices of ancient slave-owners? Can we ever not think about how they were slave-owners? How does that impact how we understand their moral character?
Each year, millions of high-school and college students read the Odyssey. Odysseus is a slave-owner. Indeed, Homer goes out of his way to depict Odysseus as a very good slave-owner. What are we to make of that morality? How should high-school students react to that such a morality that not only condones slavery, but has a sophisticated sense of how a slave’s character is reflected through his or her relationship with the slave-owner?
I’ll end with an even more provocative question. It is safe to say that billions of people world-wide turn to Jesus in order to create their moral systems. Any reading which says that Jesus was against slavery has to go against the grain of the text, as the text indicates that Jesus was quite concerned about the morality of divorce but was okay with slavery. I don’t mean that say that against the grain readings are bad. But such readings rely on a different responsibility than the one that we typically adopt when reading ancient texts. Such readings are usually guided by the idea that the best thing to do is to imagine how this text functioned in the world of its author.