Classicism and Other Phobias, Dan-el Padilla Peralta, Princeton University Press, £22

For a decade, Dan-el Padilla Peralta has been one of the best-known classicists in America, thanks to his 2015 memoir Undocumented: A Dominican Boy’s Odyssey from a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League. Born in the Dominican Republic, Padilla arrived in the United States as what Democrats call an ‘undocumented person’ and Republicans refer to as an ‘illegal alien’. He spent most of his formative years living in government-subsidised housing in New York.

At the age of nine, Padilla ended up in a shelter for homeless families, where, in the top-floor lending library, he came across a book entitled How People Lived in Ancient Greece and Rome. The opening sentences fascinated him:

Western civilisation was formed from the union of early Greek wisdom and the highly organised legal minds of early Rome. The Greek belief in a person’s ability to use his powers of reason, coupled with a Roman faith in military strength, produced a result that has come to us as a legacy, or gift from the past. This legacy has grown and blossomed into a smooth, colourful way of life – covering equally the arts and the sciences, the one and the many.

He re-read the book obsessively; when his family moved to another shelter, he took it with him. How People Lived in Ancient Greece and Rome had a deeper impact on his life than any other work of literature. Indeed, he would later devote his career to attacking its vision of classicism.

The contemporary artist Jeff Cowen, who worked in the 1990s as an art teacher for the Bushwick Family Shelter, was so impressed by the ten-year-old Padilla’s thirst for knowledge that he decided to arrange a scholarship for the child at his own alma mater, the Collegiate School. He became close to Padilla’s family, and even agreed to serve as godfather when Padilla and his brother were baptised into the Catholic Church. Cowen would be the first in a long line of benefactors who helped see Padilla through full scholarships, first to the Collegiate School, then to Princeton and beyond.

Padilla felt acutely self-conscious about his home life. In his family, Dominican Spanish was the dominant language, not English. For a few years, he, his mother and younger brother shared a two-bedroom flat with a santero named Esteban, his wife Olga, and their five children (a santero is a minister of Santería, an Afro-Caribbean religion that is sometimes confused with Haitian Vodou, or the Voodoo of Louisiana). Esteban claimed he could channel the spirit of El Muerto. The teenaged Padilla dismissed Esteban’s fortnightly séances as an obvious fraud until one Saturday afternoon, when the spirit of El Muerto, speaking through the mouth of Esteban, revealed his knowledge that Padilla was fond of masturbating.

In the English-speaking world, Padilla found his superiors to be generous and forgiving, even when he was caught shoplifting CDs at Tower Records. Chapter 13 of Undocumented includes details of Padilla’s friendly relationship at Princeton with Professor Joshua Katz, who was then Faculty Adviser for Classics undergraduates. Katz thought that Padilla should take advantage of a postgraduate fellowship to study abroad. But Padilla did not hold a passport. This meant that he was ineligible to apply for the most prestigious awards, including the Rhodes Scholarship for Oxford. Indeed, he was afraid that he would not be allowed back into the United States if he left the country. Katz was indignant:

‘These laws make absolutely no sense! This situation must be so stressful for you. There has to be something the university can do for you! Do Dean [Nancy Weiss] Malkiel or President [Shirley] Tilghman know? They’re big fans of yours.’

Professor Katz, Dean Malkiel and President Tilghman were not his only ‘big fans’. When Padilla was awarded a scholarship for two years’ study at Worcester College, Oxford, supporters of his application for an F-1 visa included Senators Chuck Schumer, Hillary Clinton and Ted Kennedy. He also received a handwritten note from President Bill Clinton assuring him that then-President George W. Bush had been contacted on his behalf. President Bush’s Senior Advisor and Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, Karl Rove, had also brought up the details of Padilla’s case at a private White House briefing.

The visa was secured. In summer 2006, shortly before leaving for England to take up his scholarship, he met with Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, and then-Senator Barack Obama. But despite all this high-level support, Padilla’s application for a B-1 visa was rejected. He was worried he would be unable to return to American soil for ten years. Luckily, he succeeded in obtaining an H1-B visa to work as a research assistant at Princeton. He returned to the United States, earned a doctorate at Stanford, won a two-year fellowship at the Columbia University Society of Fellows, and ended up with a tenure-track position in Classics back at Princeton.

Padilla’s doctoral dissertation was transformed into a book published in 2020. Divine Institutions: Religions and Community in the Middle Roman Republic is unexpectedly personal in tone. His interest in ancient religion seems to originate in an attempt to understand how his mother’s devout Catholicism coheres with her adherence to the Santería tradition. Most of Padilla’s professional publications have nothing to do with religion, and will mystify outsiders to modern universities. Instead of engaging first-hand with Greek or Latin texts, or otherwise devoting close attention to ancient materials, Padilla prefers to concentrate on analysing academic articles, to the point where he now seems interested mainly in producing a kind of meta-criticism on the scholarship of other classicists.

Of course, he is no less competent at producing conventional scholarship than others who hold doctorates from Stanford, as is evident from Divine Institutions, or his chapter ‘Monument Men: Buildings, Inscriptions and Lexicographers in the Creation of Ancient Rome’ in the 2019 collection The Cultural History of Augustan Rome. All the same, his heart seems to have gone out of the subject. So much is clear from the essays he published on the now-defunct Classics blog Eidolon (for example, ‘Classics Beyond the Pale’, in 2017).

Latterly, Padilla has focused on ‘asymmetries of knowledge production’. In a talk that has become famous among classicists, he expressed his fury that ‘the hegemony of whiteness is everywhere in evidence across…  three [major academic] journals’, alleging that between 91 and 98 per cent of contributors turned out to be white:

These percentages remind me of nothing so much as the figures for those intensely segregated suburbs that define the childhood and adolescence of my partner; publication in elite journals is a whites-only neighbourhood.

To remedy this situation, he called for ‘reparative epistemic justice’, asking holders of ‘white privilege’ to ‘surrender their privilege’:

… this is an economy of scarcity that, at the level of journal publication, will remain to a degree zero-sum. Until and unless this system of publication is dismantled – which will be fine by me – every person of colour who is to be published will take the place of a white man whose words could have or had already appeared in the pages of that journal. And that would be a future worth striving for.

This position, hardly uncommon in major American universities, came to widespread public attention in 2019, after an incident at the annual meeting of the Society for Classical Studies that was described in a Quillette article by Mary Frances Williams, ‘How I Was Kicked Out of the Society for Classical Studies Annual Meeting’. A more selective account was provided by Rachel Poser in her New York Times profile of Padilla: ‘He Wants to Save Classics from Whiteness. Can the Field Survive?’. Padilla’s own account was published on Eidolon, ‘Some Thoughts on AIA-SCS’.

At a panel discussion on 5 January 2019 entitled ‘The Future of Classics’, Padilla and his fellow-classicists Joy Connolly and Sarah Bond had an unexpected confrontation with Williams, who held a doctorate in Classics from the University of Texas at Austin, but was precariously employed as a freelance proofreader and scholarly editor. During her intervention in the discussion, she uttered the words: ‘You may have got your job because you’re black, but I’d prefer to think you got your job because of merit.’ Far from appearing offended, Padilla took visible pleasure in replying:

I did not interrupt you once, so you are going to let me talk. You are going to let someone who has been historically marginalised from the production of knowledge in the Classics, talk. And here’s what I have to say about the vision of classics that you’ve outlined: If that is in fact a vision that affirms you in your white supremacy, I want nothing to do with it. I hope the field dies, that [what] you’ve outlined dies, and that it dies as swiftly as possible!

Williams was asked to leave the conference on grounds of harassment, and banned from future events and panels at Society for Classical Studies conferences, and fired from her job with the Association of Ancient Historians. As a result of this incident, Padilla’s profile rose higher than ever.

His new book Classicism and Other Phobias  explicitly calls for revolution. Indeed, he calls for an approach to classicism that is explicitly grounded in ‘the spirits of black liberation’ as manifest in the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804). Although it was one of the bloodiest, most destructive political upheavals in modern history, Padilla is keen to emphasise its virtues:

The Haitian Revolution was more genuinely universalist, more consistently a realisation of (ostensible) Enlightenment values, than either the American or French Revolutions, and precisely for that reason it has generally been written out of the European Enlightenment narrative.

Yet the purpose of Padilla’s revolution is not to realise some abstract notion of liberation or freedom. Rather, its aim is to gain control of material resources, and redistribute them.

According to Padilla, Classics is implicated in, among other things, ‘the hegemonic projections of North Atlantic liberalism as white-supremacist and settler-colonialist structures of exploitation increasingly capitalised on their ideological and semiotic potency’. Therefore, an inevitable consequence of the ‘decolonisation of Classics’ is the death of Latin and classical Greek:

Regarding the ancient languages that have traditionally constituted the foundation for Classics as the most privileged classicism, I am not sure if ancient Greek or Latin instruction will survive into the Great Beyond, no matter the amount of pleasure that immersion in these languages affords me and other minoritised scholars. The resistance of many coworkers in the kingdom of their study to recognising the existence of a political economy of pleasure, one that has been and remains unavoidably racialised, does not bode well for the pedagogical and institutional viability of ancient language study in the long term.

As Padilla’s mother might have reminded him, the reason Christians have an interest in the classical languages has nothing to do with pleasure. Rather, these languages are quite literally sacred, to Christians at least, by virtue of their presence when Jesus was crucified: the sign that Pontius Pilate affixed to the Cross read ‘Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews’ in Latin, Greek and Hebrew. But Padilla has other ideas of what is sacred:

The study of Greek and Latin languages and literatures has been and continues to be an incubator for modern and contemporary subjectivities whose affective attachment to Mediterranean antiquity veers into uncritical fandom. In principle it is certainly possible… to fashion critically self-distancing pedagogies that deny exemplary authority to ancient authors and their texts. But this work is hard to execute consistently, and at the end of the day a collective emancipation from ‘textual bondage… to the texts that benefit the powerful’ will require purposefully aggressive and iconoclastic modes of interrogation and dethronement.

In other words, decolonising Classics involves ‘emancipating’ white classicists from their positions, revenues and control over (or access to) resources, and reallocating all of these to non-white scholars for the sake of their ‘hermeneutic visibility and professional legitimacy’.

According to the acknowledgements for Classicism and Other Phobias, Padilla spent a decade and a half mulling over elements of his project to decolonise Classics; the manuscript was completed with the aid of a three-week-long residency at the American Academy in Rome. Padilla thanks a long list of mentors, colleagues and well-wishers who have encouraged this project during its long gestation. Indeed, the most attractive sections in Classicism and Other Phobias  are the autobiographical interludes. Padilla claims some reluctance to include them in the text:

‘The dive into autobiography does not always win friends among scholars professionalised against mesearch, and it may not at first glance seem propitious for or maximally conducive to the revisioning of classicism as a historical and supra-individual process.’

Despite these reservations, it seems clear that his own experience fascinates him far more than the ancient world does, although his main interest really is his mother’s ‘world of ancestral knowledge, and of a wisdom that exceeded merely mortal sense’:

To understand this world, forged across many centuries of indigenous and Afro-diasporic entanglements in Hispaniola and the greater Caribbean, required immersion and care. This was a cultural system of resonant and vibrant potencies, the study of any one of which could easily occupy a lifetime of practice and scholarship. My intellectual formation within a certain tradition of humanistic inquiry, the one that had overrepresented itself as the primary mode of classicism, left me ill-equipped to pursue this work. I joke sometimes to colleagues and students that in another life (or perhaps this one) I will retrain as a Caribbeanist. That joke conceals a more complicated bundle of emotions than simple regret.

Much of Classicism and Other Phobias  reads as a series of ruminations on books that Padilla might like to write in the future. He appears not to have enjoyed writing this one, after 15 years of thinking about it. It is difficult to discern any coherent vision for the future of Classics or classicism here, beyond the redistribution of resources to non-white scholars. The project of decolonising Classics is conceived on such a grand scale that it loses focus.

Ultimately, Classicism and Other Phobias  is deeply pessimistic to the point of defeatism:

We may be in disarray and disagreement about what to do about it, but at least Black Studies takes as its premise that our society is in a terminal emergency. If, following the lead of Black Studies, Classics in its current disciplinary incarnation were to recognise that society at large is in emergency – instead of bemoaning its own crisis, or playing the short and losing game of striving to ward off its own demise with no or only token regard for the ravaging of historically minoritised communities – we could go some places. There is strength in moving away from a Classics that markets itself as a sui generis discipline, and toward a more expansive classicism that, taking the machinery of Classics as just that (a machinery, a technology), redistributes the power to classicise to a much wider range of communities. There is strength, too, in making kin with fields – Black Studies, Critical Native/Indigenous Studies, Queer Studies, Disability Studies – not in order to raid theory, but to forge solidarity, in realisation of the mission proposed by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang in a recent issue of ‘Critical Ethnic Studies’: ‘building things not to last forever’.

Padilla recognises that universities will not last much longer in their current form. Nor will their sources of funding. The goal must therefore be to collect as many material resources as possible before these institutions collapse. Classicism and Other Phobias  is written for those who can see this reality, and wish to begin strategising how to take as much as possible while the buildings are still standing.

It may have been unwise to reveal this strategy. Many university academics expect to be paid to indulge their personal fantasies and lick their psychic wounds in private. Nothing matters more to them than their personal comfort, and they will stop at nothing to protect it. At the slightest change in the wind, they will turn on former allies without ever feeling a twinge of guilt. If the comfort in which academics are ‘left alone to do their research’ is seriously threatened, they will muster just enough courage to ensure their own survival, along with everything to which they feel entitled for the preservation of their fragile self-respect. In this light, Classicism and Other Phobias  may have been a tactical mistake.