Classics and the Modern Alt Right, with Curtis Dozier

Abstract

When Professor Curtis Dozier of Vassar College began documenting the appropriation of Greco-Roman antiquity by white supremacist hate groups, he realised that many aspects of the ancient past are, without distortion, congenial to contemporary white ethnonationalism. Indeed, he found that white ethnonationalists often reproduce ideas about Greco-Roman antiquity that have historically enjoyed mainstream currency, particularly where the study of Greco-Roman antiquity was associated with elite culture and politics. In this episode, Professor Dozier speaks to Shivaike Shah about his experiences documenting appropriations of ancient Greece and Rome on his website Pharos: Doing Justice to the Classics. How far are contemporary appropriations of antiquity really ‘abuses’ of the past? And how has the history of Greco-Roman antiquity being used in support of violent, oppressive politics conditioned our own formation as scholars and admirers of the Classics?

Bibliography

open-source

Rebecca Futo Kennedy, ‘We Condone it by our Silence: Confronting Classics’ Complicity in White Supremacy’, Eidolon (2017)

Denise McCoskey, ‘What Would James Baldwin Do Now? Classics and the Dream of White Europe’, Eidolon (2017)

Pharos: Doing Justice to the Classics

Donna Zuckerberg, ‘How to Be a Good Classicist Under a Bad Emperor’, Eidolon (2016)

paywalled

Johann Chapoutot, Greeks, Romans, Germans: How the Nazis Usurped Europe’s Classical Past (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016) 

Benjamin Isaac, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006)

Denise McCoskey, Race: Antiquity and its Legacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012)

Louie Dean Valencia-García, Far-Right Revisionism and the End of History: Alt/Histories (New York: Routledge, 2020)

Donna Zuckerberg, Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018)

Transcript

You can find a full transcript of the episode here.