African American Literature and the Classicist Tradition: Black Women Writers from Wheatley to Morrison (review)

African American studies and literary scholars will gain entry into African American Literature and the Classicist Tradition through Tracey L. Walters’s introduction. There she summarizes relevant background in classical studies, outlining three main issues in the sub-field of Classica Africana, which originated in the 1990s to “study the contributions of African American classicists past and present” (2); to “study Blacks in antiquity” (3); and to “[concentrate] on how African American authors have adapted myths” (4). Both the aptly named introduction, “Writing the Classics Black: The Poetic and Political Function of African American Women’s Classical Revision,” and the first chapter, “Historical Overview of Ancient and Contemporary Representations of Classical Mythology,” create needed interdisciplinary connections among classics, American literature, comparative literature, and Black women’s studies. By reviewing Greco-Roman myths, as they have been interpreted differently over centuries, Walters provides a detailed foundation for her arguments about how Black women writers reconfigure these myths in culturally and historically specific ways.

Walters’ book is an exciting contribution to multiple disciplines, as the first work to focus at length on Black women writers’ use of the classics as well as the recurrent trope of motherhood in their texts. She offers thorough close readings of multiple texts, tracing this pattern from eighteenth-century writer Phillis Wheatley to living writers Toni Morrison and Rita Dove. The book’s chronological structure demonstrates both the historicity and continued relevance of specific issues like “Black female sexuality, Black female oppression, and the struggle to define a Black female identity” in Black women’s literature, as well as addressing larger social issues, such as poverty, violence, and rape (14).

Framing her analysis around the historic dehumanization, devaluation, and multiple oppressions Black women writers have faced, Walters traces writers’ similar responses to these challenges through the mastery of literary forms and the use of classical western myths to prove authorship and humanity (6). Noting that Phillis Wheatley was initially enslaved while she published poetry, Walters discusses her treatment of the Niobe myth (Niobe witnessed her children being murdered by the gods), which Walters sees as a metaphor for “the powerlessness of slaves who, like Niobe, either witnessed the murder of their children or watched their children being sold into slavery” (46). Connecting her literary analysis to social issues, Walters notes the varying political responses Wheatley’s publications caused. Abolitionists promoted her literacy as proof of slaves’ humanity and intelligence, while proslavery arguments discredited her accomplishments. One example of politicians attacking Wheatley was Thomas Jefferson’s statement: “The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism” (47–48). By reminding readers of the sociopolitical climate against which Black women wrote, Walters demonstrates why the use of classical references was an important political tool in resisting dehumanization. Although popularity of the classics waned from 1896 until 1940, when no Blacks received classics degrees and many historically Black colleges cut their classics departments, the exigency of these issues persisted (9–10). Just as Phillis Wheatley used elevated language and form, referencing classical myths “to authenticate herself as a writer” (15), so did Gwendolyn Brooks draw upon these tactics to prove her writing ability to readers via Annie Allen (1949), which won the Pulitzer prize.

Walters demonstrates both the historicity and persistence of harmful stereotypes regarding African Americans and the classics. She cites examples from turn-of-the-century scholars W. E. B. Du Bois and William Scarborough, whose knowledge of the classics addressed Senator John Calhoun’s challenge to African Americans to learn Greek to be considered human (6–7), to a disturbingly recent faculty comment the Black students do not perform well in classics courses (8). Her references to literary and political trends support the exigency of investigating the sociopolitical implications of classical revisions. Walters addresses the frequent lack of interest among scholars in two areas: the dearth of sustained treatment regarding African American authors by classicists and the...