CONSTRUCTING SELFHOOD THROUGH RE-VOICING THE CLASSICAL PAST

Abstract

This essay examines three works by three women writers whose strategies for rewriting the past include a revisionary engagement with the cultural legacies of Ancient Greece and Rome: The Emperor’s Babe: A Novel (Bernardine Evaristo, 2001), Looking for Livingstone: An Odyssey of Silence (Marlene NourbeSe Philip, 1991), and Voyage of the Sable Venus (Robin Coste Lewis, 2015). It argues that each embodies a mode of resistance that both protests the historic oppression of women of colour and asserts a black female agency, insisting on an empowered present and future. In achieving this, all three transgress or subvert conventional generic distinctions between verse and prose, and, in Lewis’s case, between the cultural forms and academic disciplines of art, art history and literature. Each work insists on a transnational conception of black identity, implicitly tracing black diasporic experience through Africa, Europe and the Americas, and asserting the continued interconnections between these three. And, in their confrontations with the histories of colonialism, empire and slavery, each invokes not just the history of the seventeenth to twenty-first centuries ce but also the cultures of Ancient Greece and Rome, the legacies of which underpinned these modern European processes of domination. Of the three works discussed here, those by Evaristo and Lewis (in part through their strategy of engaging with the traditions of Ancient Egypt, Nubia and Sudan) ultimately constitute works of greater subversive power than does that of Philip.

Keywords:

• Bernardine Evaristo
• Marlene NourbeSe Philip
• Robin Coste Lewis
• black classicism
• female
• African Athena
• Toni Morrison

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Much scholarship on Evaristo is in the form of interviews, such as those with Hooper; Niven; or Collins. Key essays on The Emperor's Babe include Barchiesi; Burkitt; and McConnell, “Crossing.”

2 See McConnell, Black Odysseys, for a study of African diasporic literary engagements with Homer's Odyssey.

3 Claudia Rankine includes reproductions of Turner's “The Slave Ship” (c.1840) and “Detail of Fish Attacking Slave” from “The Slave Ship” in Citizen 160–61. During her guest curatorship at the Louvre in 2005–06, Morrison wrote a lecture and essay inspired by Géricault's “The Raft of the Medusa” (1819), later published in her thematic collection Etranger chez soi.

4 I discuss Morrison's strategic juxtaposition of sexual violence against women with autonomous female erotic pleasure in these two novels in my 2010 article “Sabotaging the Language of Pride.”

5 As with Evaristo, significant scholarly responses to Philip take the form of interviews; see, for example, Saunders, “Trying”; idem, “Defending.”

6 As Hall writes, the Teale/Stothard poem/engraving constitutes an “obscene travesty of what Africans really experienced on the Middle Passage,” one that also serves “to illustrate and legitimize white female fantasies about the black women in their possession,” in a way that “effaces all anxiety, violence and coercion from the relationship” (10).

7 On “black classicism” see, for example, Greenwood; Rankine, Ulysses; and Cook and Tatum, besides McConnell, Black Odysseys; and Orrells, Bhambra, and Roynon.

8 See <http://clarissasligh.com/themes/identity/reading-dick-jane/> (accessed 22 Mar. 2016).

9 See <http://clarissasligh.com/themes/identity/reframing-past/> (accessed 22 Mar. 2016).