It also screams lacking in critical reading and comprehension skills. Like Dunn almost gets there in the very middle: "Already, some departments in the US have embedded Classics within courses such as “Ancient Mediterranean Studies”." But then turns around next sentence...
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"(Such rethinks are, of course, unlikely to be a universal solution; Gormley, for one, is particularly upset about the British Museum’s supposed fixation with the Mediterranean.)" Departments rebranding classics as AMS will fail because of one sculptor's opinion...
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...about the British Museum? This is what I mean by white classicists getting silly and reactionary. And THEN they usually try to make some claims about race and Dunn here is no exception: her section on Herodotus and Tacitus are borderline formulaic for white classicists.
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I wonder what Dunn would have to say about one of the more popular fables of Aesop that resurfaced in the Renaissance -- "Washing the Ethiopian White" and what that means for ancient conceptualizations of race?
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"But such a history of Classics, one which highlights only the ways the discipline has been used to incite racism and prejudice, is strikingly selective." It is literally the history OF the discipline so I'm not sure how one can claim it as strikingly selective...
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...unless they are just being willfully ignorant about how much impact our field has had. And in terms of the American and British imperial projects? Our field has done a LOT. As my colleague Jermaine said yesterday:https://twitter.com/YungHumanist/status/1364679740154609670?s=20 …
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Dunn ends with "saving" vs "abandoning" the classics--but she offers no concrete steps. The one time she acknowledged any form of praxis towards doing something different, it was the rebranding of Classics into AMS and she dismissed it. So what is she adding to the discourse?
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Well seemingly nothing. Which sucks because if she actually thought about it? She might see that people are making the argument to absorb Classics into AMS PRECISELY to save it. Because it's literally a very small but very CONCRETE ting to do.
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Not to mention is way more accurate towards the broader fields of classical and ancient studies. "Classics" as a TERM is one that folks want to do away with because it has such a narrowing and limiting affect on the canon (and the idea that everything we study is a "classic").
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Ancient Mediterranean Studies is a way that we can actually quantify what we study without QUALIFYING it. But we get it! Philologists like to feel *flips hair* ~special~ and like THEY'RE the most important ones and if they lose that label how will they have self-worth????
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Feel grossed out by that whole description above^? awesome, then you agree that relabeling classics and classical studies as AMS is not only a good idea but will actually help our accuracy in the long run. Glad we came to this conclusion.
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^^^^ All of that to say (because I forgot to bring it full circle) it's disappointing how lacking in imagination and creativity white classicists can be when it comes to engaging these ideas. The only thing Dunn can think of re: exploding the canon is renaming the field?
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That is something that is already happening in some departments, as she noted, but she doesn't engage with the departments who are doing so and instead defers back to that random sculptor dude as if he had any say whatsoever about the future of classics!
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But I've gone over this before: monolithic individualism was already an issue in the NYTM article so it's unsurprising that its responses are replicating that behavior.https://twitter.com/theoctopiehole/status/1356724462629060610?s=20 …
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And like to get kinda meta with it, this has actually been helping to clarify a few points I was thinking up about White Noises vs Black Sounds (which I can't speak on without citing
@DrMaDMo's incredibly generative thinking/research) re: classicizing acoustics in the field...Show this thread -
...so there are bright-sides. Which is another critical part of critiquing! Are we just what-about-isming each other, or are we actually trying to salvage things from our debates to use in our future pedagogy?
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Anyhoo, canons are constructed, the field is inherently omni-canonical despite our best efforts, and everyone could do well to read Morrison's words on canon-fodder: https://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_documents/a-to-z/m/morrison90.pdf …
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End of conversation
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