[FOOTSTEPS]
DAN-EL PADILLA PERALTA: Hi, morning.
How y'all doing?
[PIANO MUSIC]
Western civilization, as a construct,
is a system of power.
Classics is important, because it has mattered
to people who hold power.
My name is Dan-el Padilla Peralta,
and I'm a Roman historian.
Classics remains important today,
to the extent that it can give us
a vocabulary and a set of practices
for not just making sense of our world,
but empowering communities that have
been subject to historic and contemporary forms
of oppression.
By the classics, I mean the study
of ancient Greek and Roman communities
and the ancient Greco-Roman Mediterranean, more broadly.
The study of classics was formerly
thought to be important because it
was seen as central to the rise of Western civilization.
I do not see the study of classics in this way.
I see classics as being a project of stewardship.
I see it as part of a responsibility
we have to maintaining a sustainable
infrastructure of knowledge.
But it is in the practice of that stewardship that we become
more responsible, not just to the distant past,
but to the contemporary moment as well.
When I think about classics as a label,
as a descriptor of value, I reflect on the fact
that there are many practices associated
with historically underrepresented and
minoritized groups that are not given
the designation of classical.
And so one of the questions I ask myself is why?
Why is that?
One of these answers is that white supremacy
has coalesced around an idea of classics
that is rooted in the assumption that ancient Greece
and Rome are transmitted via some kind of unmediated process
to Euro-Americans of early modernity and modernity.
But what matters to me now is how
we move from a space that has canonized certain experiences
and literatures to a more ecumenical understanding of how
to make classicism an option for all communities.
What does it mean to entertain a classicism of Native American
and Indigenous experiences, for example.
Or what does it mean to think about classicism in the context
of Afro-diasporic communities.
How do different communities make and receive authority
to make, the classical their own, in as broad a sense as
possible.
That's what I think classics, in its current iteration,
is useful for helping us think through.
They're all these classicists from
the 19th and early 20th centuries
who are African American.
Why aren't they studied?
That's something that really matters to my work.
And I think studying that, and figuring out
why they're not part of the history of the discipline,
is as important to understanding the present composition
of the discipline, as it is to understanding
how the discipline might become a more inclusive space one day.
Classics, as I see it, has a special set
of ethical responsibilities to ensuring equity and inclusion.
And these ethical responsibilities
flow from the history of the weaponization of classics.
The more representation there is,
the greater the range of life and analytic perspectives
that can be brought to bear on the discipline.
What I hope for in classics and humanities
of the future is the cultivation of reading,
writing, art, understood not as peripheral to the project
of political governance or to the maintenance
of civil society, but as absolutely
central to political governance and to the maintenance
of civil society -- so central, in fact,
that we could not conceive of our economy.
We could not conceive of how we interchange and exchange
with each other, without reference to the humanities
and to their importance.
But that would further entail, then,
a radical realignment of our political and economic
structures to facilitate a fully encompassing embrace
of the humanities and arts essential to every facet
of our lives.
My name is Dan-el Padilla Peralta,
and I am a forward thinker.
[PIANO MUSIC]