Khameleon Classics

In the final episode of Khameleon Classics, host Shivaike Shah and assistant producer Malin Hay look behind the scenes at the making of the show, and discuss how a project that was conceived as a five-episode miniseries on Medea ended up becoming thirty episodes covering everything from ancient Egypt to Reconstruction-era America and beyond.

In the last decade, public statues have become a focal point for debates about the remembrance and commemoration of history. Robert E. Lee in Richmond, Virginia, Edward Colston in Bristol, and Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College, Oxford: do statues of these figures remind us of their harmful legacies, or valorise them in spite of them? And how do our interpretations and misinterpretations of classical sculpture inform the style and significance of public statuary in the modern day? Shivaike Shah speaks to Verity Platt, Professor of Classics and History of Art at Cornell University, about what we get wrong about classical statues, and about the history of iconoclasm in Ancient Greece and Rome.To find out more about this topic, check out the reading list on our website: https://www.khameleonproductions.org/statues-then-and-now

W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) was one of the foremost thinkers and writers about race in the period directly after Reconstruction. He was also a professor of Classics who engaged closely with a number of Greek and Roman writers, including Cicero, Aristotle and Plato. Shivaike Shah speaks to Dr Mathias Hanses, Associate Professor of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies and African Studies at Pennsylvania State University, about his characterisation of Du Bois as a ‘Black Cicero’. What light does Du Bois shed on Cicero’s relationship with race in orations like Pro Archia Poeta? And how does an acknowledgement of Du Bois’s engagement with the Classics – and of the limitations of his approach to Black empowerment – reposition us in relation to the field today?To find out more about this topic, check out the reading list on our website: https://www.khameleonproductions.org/khameleon-classics/classics-and-dubois

Throughout the Reconstruction era, from the end of the American Civil War in 1865 to the start of the Jim Crow era at the end of the nineteenth century, both Black activists and white supremacists used their classical education in service of their political ideals. Shivaike Shah talks to Jackie Murray, professor of Classics at the University of Kentucky, about the ways that writers engaged in dialogue with one another about the merits of Reconstruction, the status of classical education at this time, and the assumptions that such an education produced in its pupils about the inherent value of empire - irrespective of which side of the debate they were on.To find out more about this topic, check out the reading list on our website: https://www.khameleonproductions.org/khameleon-classics/classics-and-the-reconstruction

What happens when, in the wake of worldwide upheaval, a Classics department decides to put into practice the principles of anti-racism and social justice in the classroom? Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina is now the first department of Classics in the world to require coursework in critical race theory for all majors and minors. Shivaike Shah talks to the founding teachers, THM Gellar-Goad (Associate Professor at Wake Forest) and Caitlin Hines (Assistant Professor at the University of Cincinnati), about the impetus for the project, the impact it has had on the faculty, and the importance of destabilising assumptions about what ‘core’ Classics curricula should contain.To find out more about this topic, check out the reading list on our website: https://www.khameleonproductions.org/khameleon-classics/classics-beyond-whiteness

What can reading classical political texts teach us about our own politics? This is the question that Demetra Kasimis, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, is answering with her work, which looks at democracy and its dilemmas in the context of Ancient Greece. Her article ‘Medea the Refugee’ places Medea’s status as an immigrant in the centre of her reading of the play. Shivaike and Demetra discuss the slipperiness of political definitions and terms, both in Ancient Greece and today, and reflect on the desire, constant across space and time, for dominant powers to define political in-groups in relation to a perceived other.To find out more about this topic, check out the reading list on our website: https://www.khameleonproductions.org/khameleon-classics/classics-and-politics-of-migration

The role of Latin in Britain’s eighteenth-century Caribbean colonies was multifaceted. The ability to speak the language was a status symbol for the colonial elite, and Latin texts often served as attempted validations of the colonial project; for example, John Maynard wrote a lengthy Latin poem aiming to justify the slave trade in Barbados. But there was also the Jamaican poet Francis Williams, who achieved international fame as a writer of Latin verse and used his work to defend his right to be taken seriously as a Black poet. In this week’s episode, Dr John Gilmore of the University of Warwick speaks to Shivaike Shah about the light Francis Williams’s one surviving poem sheds on the lesser-known functions of Latin in the British colonies. He shares how Latin poetry became a conduit for arguments about the intellectual capacity of people of African descent and, by extension, about the illegitimacy of the slave trade.To find out more about this topic, check out the reading list on our website: www.khameleonproductions.org/khameleon-classics/latin-poetry-in-the-caribbean

For generations, the Classical discipline’s exclusive study of Greece and Rome went unquestioned, as did its position at the heart of the humanities. Greece and Rome’s literature, art and intellectual legacy were seen not only as formative to modern culture, but as emblematic of universal value, and Classicists studied, by their own reckoning, the peak of human achievement. The emergent field of Classical Reception Studies has challenged many of these assumptions. Scholars who wish not simply to study the ancient past but rather to study the study of the ancient past have asked, why Greece and Rome? Why no other culture? And what does this act of choosing ultimately reveal? Yet even as these questions have been formulated, the response inside modern Classics has been lukewarm at best. In this podcast, Shivaike Shah is joined by Luke Richardson, formerly postgraduate teaching assistant at University College London, who researches the intellectual impact of the ongoing obsession with Greece and Rome. They discuss the seeming inability of modern Classics to come to terms with essential questions about itself and the languages of Western supremacy it represents.To find out more about this topic, check out the reading list on our website: https://www.khameleonproductions.org/khameleon-classics/classical-reception-a-failed-revolution

When we imagine the curation of antiquities, especially classical antiquities, we usually think of preserving the past within museums and other cultural institutions. But we rarely ask what we are preserving, and why, and for whom. The language of the classical has value built into it, so what would it mean to take our relationship with ‘classical’ antiquity as itself an object of curation? And in rethinking how communities have taken shape around the valuation of antiquity, how might we recognise and sustain new communities around the critical and creative engagement with the ancient Greco-Roman world? In this episode, Shivaike Shah speaks to Professor Brooke Holmes of Princeton University about the exhibition project Liquid Antiquity, on which she collaborated with Polina Kosmadaki and Yorgos Tzirtzilakis for the DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art in 2017. Shivaike and Brooke discuss the exhibition’s driving questions and examine the fundamental issue of how we may relate to a past that, by its nature, does not survive.To find out more about this topic, check out the reading list on our website: https://www.khameleonproductions.org/khameleon-classics/liquid-antiquity

What makes Medea a perennial figure of feminist fascination? Why was the mythological heroine marked as an icon of defiance in feminist movements throughout the twentieth century? In this week’s episode, we hear from Dr Chiara Sulprizio, a Senior Lecturer in Classical and Mediterranean Studies at Vanderbilt University. Shivaike Shah and Dr Sulprizio explore how Medea’s story of rage and otherness fed into many of the issues that were paramount to the feminist movements of the twentieth century, and consider how her unspeakable act of violence and her rejection of the roles of traditional wife and mother made themselves manifest in the theatrical productions of Euripides’s Medea from 1900 to 2000 and beyond. In doing so, they pay particular attention to how the different exigencies of successive ‘waves’ of feminism — the need by turns for political agency, liberation and recognition — created different, but linked, responses to this polarising figure.To find out more about this topic, check out the reading list on our website: https://www.khameleonproductions.org/khameleon-classics/medea-and-twentieth-century-feminism