Empire of Ruin: Black Classicism and American Imperial Culture by John Levi Barnard (review)

John Levi Barnard's Empire of Ruin fits into a discourse in the early twenty-first century of the problematizing of American exceptionalism, which has arisen in part from minority perspectives or interests (e.g., Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia [2006]). The idea that slavery is an "original sin" of American democracy is an idea now commonly articulated in public discourse. (For example, Georgetown University's President John DeGioia addresses the role of Jesuits in the slave trade [Reuters, 18 Apr. 2017].) Notwithstanding America's sullied origin story, prominent African Americans like First Lady Michelle Obama would be taken to task for her redemptive comment, that she is proud of her country, whether or not for the first time in her life (Becoming [2018]). It would seem that the paradox of America's greatness (or making it great again) is somehow of the moment, both in popular culture in the United States and at the country's highest echelons.

Within this context, Barnard argues persuasively that since America's foundation there has always been a strain, in this case among black American writers, of a counternarrative, "a critical orientation toward a hegemonic classical tradition" (6). With Empire of Ruin, Barnard steps into the scholarship on black classicism, a strand of classical reception studies, and demonstrates mastery of the field while raising broader questions about how societies, and in particular the United States, valorize their past. Among black authors, Barnard argues, the juxtaposition of a libertarian and an imperial strain in American discourse has resulted in an "affirmative appropriative relationship" (8) to the Classics and their uses.

The book begins with a skillful exegesis of the prominent quote from the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York City: "No day shall erase you from the memory of time" [Nulla dies umquam memori vos eximet aevo] (Virgil, Aeneid 9.447). Barnard argues that the quote "works against its own purpose" (1) because its original reference is to Nisus and Euryalus, who are on the hero Aeneas's side but whose midnight raid might be regarded as an act of terror. The paradox of a 9/11 memorial that inadvertently undoes its own work—Who is the citizen? Who is the terrorist?—lays the foundation for a book in which the contradictions of valorization and paradox are central.

Following a chronological organization, Barnard moves from his Introduction to Phillis Wheatley in the first chapter, and her poetry again demonstrates that "wherever freedom was invoked it carried with it the specter of its opposite" (32). Barnard gives a convincing reading of the anti-imperial strains of Wheatley's work, through a reading of Niobe, for example, alongside Icarus, a myth that can be read as a story of failure. Wheatley is an oft-covered subject within the context of classical reception. (See, for example, Tracey L. Walters, African American Literature and Classical Tradition [2007]; and William W. Cook and James Tatum, African American Writers and Classical Tradition [2010].) Barnard seeks to more fully embody Wheatley and to offer an even stronger thesis—namely, that Wheatley consciously and actively critiques the American imperial project and takes its libertarian position to task—regarding her mode of contestation than has been heretofore proffered.

In the second chapter, Barnard moves deftly from text to image, as authors in the early 1800s present a "new kind of national monument" through slavery's toll on black souls, even as the monuments to the new nation are being erected in Washington, D.C. Solomon Northup's Twelve Years a Slave (1853) and William Wells Brown's Clotel (1853) are exemplary here. Barnard demonstrates his visual aptitude with Clotel's eastward quest (to the North) for freedom juxtaposed to the idea that imperial power is verging westward, explicating such works as C. F. Volney's 1791 The Ruins, and later, Emanuel Leutze's 1861 painting Westward, at the Capitol. He argues throughout that for authors such as Northup and Brown the...