Ulysses in Black: Ralph Ellison, Classicism, and African American Literature

3. Ulysses Lost on Racial Frontiers: The Limits of Classicism in the Modern World

Race complicates the issue of classical reception more than any other ideological prism, including class, nationalism, or gender and sexuality. Given this hypothesis, the silence within the academic field of classical studies on questions of race and racism (excepting Frank Snowden) until relatively recent years (post–Black Athena) is curious and more than deafening.1 Snowden raised the topic of race and the classics in the 1970s,2 and his works are reflective of efforts in education and the broader culture to implement the political, social, and legal gains of the Civil Rights movement.3 In this chapter, I am concerned with a genealogy of classical reception as it pertains to race. My genealogy is not exhaustive but rather indicative of the diversity of approaches to antiquity throughout the two millennia or so of the reception of the classical age, and Hellenism, in the West. A genealogy of classical reception might seem misguided because no one chapter, no one book, can cover the topic.4 My aim here, however, is 66  3  Ulysses Lost on Racial Frontiers The Limits of Classicism in the Modern World The notion that black people are human beings is a relatively new discovery in the modern West. —cornel west, The Cornel West Reader “If you’re white, you’re right,” I said. —Invisible Man (Protagonist riffing on the well known signification: “If you’re white, you’re right, if you’re brown, stick around, if you’re black, stay back.”) narrower and simpler than a history of classical reception. I would like, simply, to complicate the idea of a monolith of “the classics” by pointing to the diversity of approaches to the classicism, and here philhellenism in particular, since antiquity. (Here again, Ulysses is emblematic.) Throughout the chapter, I highlight “ruptures and breaks” in the Western narrative of the classics. I hope to invite readers accustomed to viewing the classics in terms of canon, hegemony, and resistance to these to consider alternative takes. As it pertains to the black reception of the classics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, I raise questions about the social framework and the literary esthetics that caused African American writers to resist classical influence. Finally, I want to make troublesome the easy dismissal of “black classicism” as conservatism or as a rejection of black esthetics. It might be necessary, before continuing, to emphasize here that I am not suggesting that race-thinking and hegemony did not exist both in antiquity and in later European society, or that the classics were not used to promote Eurocentrism and racism. The use of the classics to promote “the West,” in opposition to the “Orient” and the “dark continent,” is irrefutable, and history did not need Martin Bernal to prove the thesis.5 Yet the sweeping indictment of the classics by Bernal, to whom I shall return later, does not tell the whole story any more than does the raceinfused response of his main combatant, Mary Lefkowitz. European classicists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were oftentimes racist, as Bernal suggests, and the classics did at times become a way of promoting a Eurocentric worldview.6 Yet rejecting the classics as an intrinsically racist monolith is an evasion that misreads Western history by ignoring the ruptures and breaks in the narrative. Martin Bernal’s idea of “models ” of viewing the reception of the classics in the Black Athena volumes obscured alternative takes, as Jacques Berlinerblau’s (1999) arguments suggest . Bernal in essence defined the classics as a Eurocentric and racist ideology. Ideologies, however, are not fixed but grow and change as they interact with new environments, cultures, and values. As an ideology that might at once be modern and, on a certain level, racist, the classics did not spring up fully formed, but the discourse became racialized as Europe developed. Rather than a conservative acceptance of the status quo, the black reception of the classics might be seen as a co-optation that forces the discourse to expand beyond its role in racism at certain junctures in Western history. Ulysses Lost on Racial Frontiers 67 A brief genealogy of the classics shows the extent to which views of classical antiquity have changed from the Hellenistic period to the present. The narrative in this chapter begins with antiquity, moves briefly through the Europeanization of the classics, and ends in the world of modern race...