Classica Africana: Black Classicism and the Ownership of Narrative

Within the previous decade, the burgeoning re-imagination of the Greco-Roman canon in an African American context, presently referred to as “Black classicism,” has traversed artistic mediums not only as a cultural transliteration but an active subversion, rejection, and reclamation of the sociological underpinnings of a historically eurocentric area of study. Though modern reception studies are fraught with racial prejudice accusing Black authors of passively imitating—or merely deriving influence from—antiquity, I argue that the neoclassical inventions of Phillis Wheatley, W.E.B. Du Bois, Rita Dove, and Robert Hayden have transposed myth’s most defining elements onto two prominent social narratives: the public reception of African American scholarship and the collective female consciousness. Of these elements, imagery invoking the movement across transitory ‘liminal’ states has been enfranchised to actively subvert the traditionally-eurocentric classical canon while transferring intellectual ownership to African American authorship. Visualizations of the cyclicality of the rhapsodic oral tradition have further been harnessed to defend the female canon, translating myth’s cyclicality onto contemporaneous social dilemmas.