GESM 120g/121g: Social Justice and Classical Antiquity in the United States Units: 4 Fall 2019—TR—12:30-1:50pm Location: LV L 3 V Instructor: Prof. Brandon Bourgeois (Assistant Professor, Department of Classics) Office: PED 132F Office Hours: TR 2-3pm Contact Info:
[email protected] I will typically reply to emails within 24 hours. Ewol Erizku, Their Eyes Were Watching God, 2017 (Exhibit: “Make America Great Again,” 20 April-2 July 2017, Ben Brown Fine Arts, London) Painted plaster and silkscreen on photographic light reflector Revised Fri., August 16, 2019 (tentative syllabus) Course Description It is nothing new to say that conceptions of the ‘classical’ have been deeply complicit in the creation and perpetuation of modern structures of violence and oppression (‘-isms’ such as colonialism, nationalism, racism, sexism, etc.). So what does classics (traditionally, the study and promotion of ‘Graeco-Roman’ and—at times—Egyptian antiquity) have to do with intersectionality, the understanding that we simultaneously occupy multiple, overlapping, and complexly-interacting social positions? What relation does Plato, ancient Greek drama, and early-Christian asceticism have with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Huey Newton, Womanism, LGBTQ rights, the Chicanx movement, and Black Lives Matter? This course introduces students to a critical social-justice approach to modern classical reception. By using a variety of media and disciplinary approaches, we will study the little-publicized history of how classical antiquity has been received among structurally oppressed and marginalized peoples in the United States, from the country’s founding to the present day. Along this timeline, we will see how the classics has perennially served as a site of political contestation: how normative conceptions of the ‘classical’ have been used to underwrite exclusion and oppression; and how a variety of progressive and radical U.S.