Classics in African Diasporic Writing, with Justine McConnell

Abstract

Wole Soyinka in Nigeria, Toni Morrison in the United States, Derek Walcott in the Caribbean, and Bernardine Evaristo in the UK are just a few of the contemporary Black writers who have engaged with Graeco-Roman antiquity in their writing. In this podcast, Shivaike Shah speaks to Justine McConnell, Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature at King’s College London, about why ancient Greece and Rome hold such a prominent place in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature by African and African diaspora writers. How do we explore the classical influence on works such as Toni Morrison’s Sula and Bernadine Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe without overemphasising it?

Bibliography

Opensource

Bernard W. Bell, ‘Women and Literature: the Dual Tradition of African American Fiction’ (reproduced on Oxford University Press blog, 2006)

Bernardine Evaristo, ‘Great Writers Inspire At Home’ (2017)

Justine McConnell, Short Guide to Classics and Postcolonialism, APGRD (Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama)

Paywalled

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014)

Barbara Goff (ed.), Classics and Colonialism (London: Duckworth, 2005)

Emily Greenwood, Afro-Greeks: Dialogues between Classics and Anglophone Caribbean Literature in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)

Emily Greenwood, ‘Classics and the Atlantic Triangle: Caribbean Readings of Greece and Rome via Africa’, Forum of Modern Language Studies 40.4 (2004), 365-376

Lorna Hardwick & Carol Gillespie (eds.), Classics in Post-Colonial Worlds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)

Justine McConnell, Black Odysseys: The Homeric Odyssey in the African Diaspora since 1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)

Ian Moyer, Adam Lecznar, & Heidi Morse (eds.), Classicisms in the Black Atlantic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020)

Olakunbi Olasope (ed.), Black Dionysos: Conversations with Femi Osofisan (Ibadan: Kraft Books, 2013)

Patrice D. Rankine (2006), Ulysses in Black: Ralph Ellison, Classicism, and African American Literature (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006)

Tessa Roynon, Toni Morrison and the Classical Tradition: Transforming American Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)

Transcript

You can find a full transcript of the episode here.