The Racism of Classics…in Croatia?
What follows is an English translation of my article that appeared in the Feb 20, 2021 edition of the Jutarnji list newspaper.
In the February 13 edition of Jutarnji List, the esteemed prof. Trkanjec presented an intellectual debate on the future of classical philology and the valorization of antiquity [in an article titled “No, professor Peralta, you are wrong, the classical world was not a world of racism”]. I would like unpack some of his surprising omissions and interpretations that I think have failed, and which are important to point out as just one of the reasons why I think it is not ideal for a classical philologist from Croatia, no matter how renowned, to superficially present debates happening at the other end of the world, in a socio-economic context that is hardly applicable to one’s experience in Zagreb’s classical grammar school. Unfortunately, unlike prof. Trkanjec, I have witnessed the shameful events he is talking about, and I thus feel called to address the issue.
Let’s start with the biggest omission. At the 2019 SCS conference, where the major incident that kick-started this great debate within classical philology occurred, the problem was not, as prof. Trkanjec said, that Mary Frances Williams argued that antiquity should be defended. As can be seen from the video of the event itself, the chaos arose at the moment when Williams told to prof. Padilla Peralta’s face: “You may have got your job because you’re black, but I would prefer to think you got your job because of merit.” This embarrassing comment, to a respected professor, reveals a deep-seated prejudice among right-wing Americans that Black people reach high positions only because of affirmative action laws, and has nothing to do with how much antiquity itself is worth studying.
Without stating this fact, and on the other hand listing a number of praiseworthy aspects of ancient culture, prof. Trkanjec, already at the beginning of the article, misrepresents the problem as a clash between minority representatives of the field and antiquity itself. The clash is not (and, by the logic of things, cannot be) with antiquity itself, but with the flesh-and-blood individuals who study that antiquity today. Namely, as is well known to those involved in the field on this side of the Atlantic, Peralta’s view is not that classical philology should be abolished because ancient history itself is full of discrimination. Prof. Trkanjec, who presents it as such, is “obviously unfamiliar” with the facts and distorts the picture of things “without (hopefully) being aware of it” — and here I deliberately use the same terms used by Prof. Trkanjec in his article to refer to a professor at one of the world’s most respected universities. I do this solely to show how unnecessary such a condescending tone is.
In order to present the essence of the current debate more correctly, it is necessary to unravel three different problems. The first problem is the closed-off nature of the profession. Namely, when we talk about the fact that the profession should be “canceled”, what we are actually talking about is, in part, the fact that the academic discipline of classical philology in the West currently has completely arbitrary and outdated boundaries. Why, for example, do Western universities separate the department of Classical (i.e., Greek and Roman) archeology from the department that encompasses all other forms of archeology, regardless of the geographical area of research? Why do art historians of antiquity have to take the same philological exams as classical philologists, while experts dealing with, say, the art of the German Baroque do not have to reach the same level of language knowledge as those who study German language history? These are just some of the very key, but to the public very unimportant problems. Unfortunately, these problems are so deeply institutionalized that their solution would require a complete reorganization of the field.
The second, closely related problem is clearly recognizable in the insult from the 2019 conference. Namely, as the testimonies of non-white classicists have been showing for decades, there is still doubt among the practitioners of the field in the West about who Antiquity really belongs to. When prof. Trkanjec sums up the problem as “the closedness of the field to non-white scholars,” he does not even scratch the surface of the true state of affairs. How is it possible, for example, that an association of Latin and Greek high school teachers can still hold fundraising events featuring jokey “slave auctions,” in which students can be “bought” by guests for one night in return for a donation to the cause? Can you imagine a sixteen-year-old whose ancestors were truly sold as slaves being appalled by something like that? Of course, she would not be wrong to conclude afterwards that these people live in a world so disconnected from the political reality that they think that a humorous slave auction could be a harmless thing, and that remaining in such a discipline would be tantamount to masochism. At the end of the day, the figures confirm this — a recent study by Scientific American found no social or humanistic discipline with fewer African American PhDs — while in sociology, for example, they make up nearly 10%, in classical philology their number is, statistically speaking, practically 0%.
However, does this mean that an almost identical charity auction of classical students in which I personally participated as a 13-year-old in Zagreb is equally problematic? No, it doesn’t. Because different cultures have different levels of awareness of particular problems at different stages. In Zagreb, slavery is thought of as something that happens elsewhere and concerns others; the same is not true in London or Alabama. On the other hand, our domestic context is much more sensitive to some other topics — for example, I cannot imagine that a Zagreb middle school, wanting to raise awareness of the rich history of the Early Middle Ages, would organize a humorous “Christening of the Croats” over students who come from Bosniak Muslim or Serb Orthodox families [given Catholic Croatia’s atrocious WW2 history as a Nazi puppet state and its related legacy of forced conversions of non-Catholics].
The third problem, barely discernible in the text of prof. Trkanjec, is the issue of the intertwining of classical history and white supremacy. While this problem is simply not that visible in Croatia, American and Western European societies have long recognized the growing number of right-wing extremists who have embraced a distorted version of antiquity as a goal of a racially and religiously pure Western civilization. It is sufficient merely to refer to the racist movement Identity Europa, which literally portrays antiquity as the ideal of white supremacy. Unfortunately, this is not just an interpretation of those who disagree with them — they themselves explicitly claim this. Online communities of misogynistic “incels” simplistically reduce Stoics like Marcus Aurelius and Seneca as paragons of “real masculinity,” using choice quotes to confirm their stance that feminism is destroying the world. For this they take advantage of the same Seneca through whose works prof. Trkanjec learned that slavery is bad — or at least, judging by the letter he quotes in the article, that slavery…is less problematic if we treat slaves with respect? [The original article claimed that Peralta must not be aware of Seneca’s writings, because in his Letter 47 Seneca says “I am glad to learn, through those who come from you, that you live on friendly terms with your slaves. This befits a sensible and well-educated man like yourself. “They are slaves,” people declare. Nay, rather they are men. “Slaves!” No, comrades. “Slaves!” No, they are unpretentious friends. “Slaves!” No, they are our fellow-slaves, if one reflects that Fortune has equal rights over slaves and free men alike.”] In other words, both philologists and racists see enormous value in antiquity, but that doesn’t mean at all that a love of antiquity makes someone a racist.
I really appreciate prof. Trkanjac, as a scholar and an intellectual. With these remarks, I do not want to quash his interest in this issue, but to point out how relevant the topic of the attitude towards antiquity is for regions much closer to him than distant America. These more familiar forms of manipulation of the ancient past for political needs are, as usual, easier to see in others — from the sad Potemkin’s Greek temples that adorned Skopje in 2014 to the continuous glorification of medieval kings in Serbia. However, even in post-war Croatia, the ancient past is used as a weapon, and this is not often discussed in public.
Namely, as much as we might consider the values of Greco-Roman culture to be universal, public valorization of antiquity is rarely politically neutral in Croatia. A series of academic studies, in fact, highlighted the steep rhetorical turn in how Croatia presented itself to the world before and after the Homeland War of the 1990s, and the major role ancient heritage played in that turn. By analyzing the brochures of the Croatian National Tourist Board, Harvard scientist Lauren Rivera has shown, for example, that before the war mentions of ancient history made up a little less than 20% of the published promotional material about Croatia; after the war that figure jumped to more than 50%. After the war, “cultural diversity” as the main distinguishing feature of Croatia’s brand recorded a decline of 60%, while “belonging to European heritage and history” became mentioned 60% more often. What is surprising, says Rivera, is the extent to which Croatia insists on its indelible connection with Europe’s past, as if the country owes everything to that heritage. And therein lies part of the anxiety that bubbling up from the text of prof. Trkanjec: if someone out there in far-away America cancels antiquity, how will we be able to explain who we are? Is a country which emerged from a disastrous war with an identity built on being “Croatia, the Mediterranean as it once was,” ever truly capable of confronting what the Mediterranean was really like?
