[LCC] Fwd: question re postings

[kmilnor]

On behalf of Eugene O'Connor, who had some trouble with the listserv ...

Kristina

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Eugene O'Connor <eugene at osupress.org>
> Date: July 17, 2009 11:24:23 AM EDT
> To: kmilnor at barnard.edu
> Subject: question re postings
>
>
> Dear colleagues and friends,
>
> I'm interested in knowing whether you or a colleague is currently  
> working on a project that addresses classics during the colonialist  
> period of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Europe. I'm  
> reading Said's Orientalism and am fascinated by how the nineteenth- 
> century European colonialist powers "packaged" the Orient, for  
> European consumption, as an unbounded place of exoticism,  
> hypersexualism, and effeminacy, in contrast to the cool, controlled,  
> heterosexualist, hegemonic societies of western Europe. In this the  
> Oriental civilizations got "lost," swallowed up by philologists,  
> belleletrists, and others.
>
> I was wondering what connections can be made between this view and  
> the teaching of the classics during the heyday of British/European  
> colonialism. It is the same time as the cult of Wissenschaft, which  
> itself grew out of an earlier Romantic Hellenomania focused on the  
> "godlike" Greeks as the unsullied exponents of Western culture. The  
> Orient, and Africa, too, had to be defined as "other" since they  
> were sites of colonialism and therefore domination. Thus, as  
> "subject" people, the Africans had to be divorced from any  
> connection with the development of Greek (and later) Roman culture.
>
> Such a project (and I'm thinking of book projects) would include  
> discussions of racialism, homophobia, dominance, nationalism, and  
> exclusivity. I welcome book proposals dealing with this or related  
> areas of classical pedagogy. They may deal with classics broadly as  
> a discipline or the teaching of particular classical authors at this  
> time, course listings changing over time in order to suit shifting  
> racial or other ideologies. I would also welcome proposals that talk  
> about classics as performance; i.e., how rhetorical or dramatic  
> texts, or indeed classical philology itself, may be used to "act  
> out" or "resist" hegemony. I fully realize some of this has been  
> written about already, but would like to know how such ideas might  
> be developed or what new directions might be taken.
>
> All inquiries may be directed to me at the address below.
>
> Thanks. I look forward to hearing from you.
>
> Regards,
>
> Eugene
>
> Eugene O'Connor
> Managing Editor, The Ohio State University Press
> 180 Pressey Hall
> 1070 Carmack Road
> Columbus, OH 43210
> eugene at osupress.org
> www.ohiostatepress.org