Nicole (Nikki) Spigner
Eos interviewed Dr. Spigner in December 2021.
Please tell us about your work (scholarship, teaching, artistic work, public engagement, etc.)
I am currently an Assistant Professor of African American Studies and English at Northwestern University, where I teach Black Literature. I was trained as a student of nineteenth-century American literature, and along the way, I bumped into Black Classicism and haven't been able to look away ever since. Black Classicism, labeled Classica Africana by Michelle Valerie Ronnick in 1996, includes persons like myself, Black persons studying classics and their critical and theoretical production, and the neoclassical art and literature of Black folx. I got here quite by accident. And, because of my journey, I always encourage students to follow the intellectual breadcrumbs because one never knows where it will lead.
My current book project, which is very tentatively called Niobe Repeating: Black New Women Rewrite Ovid, looks at motherhood in the Black Classicist writing of Pauline E. Hopkins, H. Cordelia Ray, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson. I am thinking about why these formally educated US Black women who were not mothers (and would not be) wrote stories of mothering that do not fit into [white] Victorian mores and reference classical stories of motherhood and transformation. Through the lens of my central figure, Niobe, I engage stories of Black mothers who lose children, never become mothers despite their desire, and whose social circumstances and histories do not allow them to identify with popular contemporary US models of mothering. I consider the capaciousness of mothering as a means of reconsidering how Black women navigated and then redefined their overly determined roles as "precarious mothers."
How did you become interested in your field?
When I entered Vanderbilt's doctoral program in English, I imagined exploring the world of conjuring and syncretic religion in twentieth-century Black literature and through a Black Feminist lens. I knew that I wanted to be the student of Hortense J. Spillers and Colin Dayan, whose work had influenced me to consider academia long before matriculating in 2009. I was dedicated, personally as/and politically, to Black Feminism, and was encouraged by my chair, Spillers, to explore any number of investigative pathways towards theories of what I think of as alternative Black feminine identity formations. In this, I was interested in conjure women and witches as ways to think about Black women who built and lived outside of normative social worlds. I have always been interested in legacies and histories that have led us to where we are, and I was curious about the women who went against the grain and made way for others to do the same. However, the questions I wanted to ask were not answerable through that line of inquiry.
I was strongly encouraged by Ifeoma Nwankwo, one of my closest faculty members, to take my Black feminine identity formation questions to the nineteenth century. My work with Dayan and the gothic made this an even easier transition than I expected, and like many other grad students, I discovered that what I thought I wanted to study would not be my focus, after all. When my master's thesis came around at the end of that year, I had all of these questions about the epistle and women’s writing, but I was still determined to ground myself in the twentieth century. Someone suggested I talk with Lynn Enterline who introduced me to Ovid’s Amores. I had thought of Enterline as an Early Modernist, primarily, and had not understood the clear and obvious classicism in early modern work before her. As I read Ovid again for the first time since high school, something in me changed. Nwankwo was directing my thesis on Gayl Jones’s The Healing (1998), in which I argued through the epistle, and more specifically Dido's letter, that Jones' entire novel is set in the mind of the narrator. I was so excited that a novel from 1998 could show the traces of such a long literary history and reference the classical Latin tradition. More than that, I became interested in how Black letters, particularly in the US, have been situated in this legacy.
Anyone who studies literatures of the Black Diaspora seems very ill-advised to skip Atlantic Slavery in their inquiry. Not that everything starts with slavery—because, in fact, one of the many things that author Pauline E. Hopkins argues in her 1903 serial novel, Of One Blood, is that not only is there Black history before slavery, but there is Black history before what the academic and popular worlds identify as the "classics." And so began my inquiry. With the full encouragement of my committee, I ended up creating lists for my qualifying exams that read through the still too-slim catalog of Black Classicist scholarship along with nineteenth-century African American and Caribbean literature, Greek and Roman classics in translation, and classical reception.
At the time, I was not sure what I would find or how to access clear patterns of Black Classicism published in the US. The constellations that emerged through my slave narrative, poetry, fiction, and essay reading, as well as the contemporary scholarship of Shelley P. Haley, Patrice Rankine, Tracey L. Walters, Michele Valerie Ronnick, and James Cook & William Tatum led me to write about a small group of Black women at the turn of the 20th century who rewrote parts of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Quite fortunately, my committee was more than willing to let me explore, and they encouraged my study, even though only my outside reader was a Black Classicist. Once I got started, a new world opened up to me; I was so glad to come out of my program in 2015, just as some other scholars were emerging and demonstrating critical growth in the field.
What do you find most exciting about teaching classics and/or classical receptions? What challenges have you faced in teaching in this field?
It is so much fun to explore with students how Black Classicism has always been present in US Black letters. Perhaps we aren’t supposed to say how much fun we have nerding out with students, but I thoroughly enjoy it—even though my classroom consistently engages very difficult material. Students and I bring assumptions about what we will do during the course and what we expect from our work. We have to attend to the many ways that a Black Classicist lens can change how we understand Black political projects—especially in the nineteenth-century US.
We all know that most US educational programs are mostly devoid of Black literature studies but replete with classical literature and history. Even if they don’t recognize the Greek and Roman literature that we read in translation, they will often recognize the storylines from Shakespeare and the variety of classical references and retellings that remain a part of the popular sphere. I love it when they begin to identify contemporary Black Classicist material that they know. Works like Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Spike Lee’s Chi-raq, Lee Daniels’s Empire, and most recently Lizzo’s "Rumors," which features Cardi B, help students understand that Black folx engagements with the classics still circulate; these works also help us better understand the ur texts from which they derive.
However, it is difficult to bring two seemingly disparate fields together—says every comparativist ever—and often, my students walk into the room without the US history that they need to engage the material. It is rare for students to enter a Black literature classroom and be well equipped for the work that we are trying to do—says every Black Studies professor ever. We do not have the benefit of robust high school educations grounded in Black Diaspora culture and history. We often conduct classes that students believe they can coast through because of the negative assumptions about our rigor (this is also regularly both passively and plainly expressed by white colleagues). I end up teaching a lot of Black history in my literature classes so that students can not only understand the context in which different writers created their works, but also so they can identify traces of or unchanged critiques of US culture and society. While I’m happy to supplement my students’ historical knowledge and teach them new historical methodologies, that time must be extracted from a classroom that could experience deeper literary analysis if the students were previously and adequately prepared. Requiring prerequisites in a class called “Black Classicism" demotivates students to enroll, as they most often have no idea how to define the class subject matter until they are already through my first class. But honestly, the frustration around class preparedness is something that reaches far beyond my Black Classicism classroom and spills into all of my Black Lit classes. We are woefully undereducated in Black history and literature, domestic and global—says every person with sense. This is a larger and critical issue upon which I hope the current political climate puts much pressure.
Tell us about a junior scholar or teacher whose work (in research, teaching, or beyond) inspires you.
I am excited by the work of Sarah Derbew from Stanford University. Derbew’s Getty blog post on Africans in Ancient Greek art challenges the slipperiness of casting our contemporary notions of geography and race onto the ancient world while also dispelling the notion that [who we call] Black folk were considered only slaves and less significant in ancient Greece. Additionally, Derbew’s consideration of Sara Baartman in Suzan Lori-Parks’ Venus is one of the most thoughtful engagements with the figurative imagery most associated with Baartman. She carefully treats Parks' play Venus while considering the historical contexts for Baartman, who donned the moniker “The Sable Venus,” and the figure of "The Black Venus” more broadly.
I am also keeping my eye on Grace B. McGowan, still a graduate student at Boston University. While she is just starting her Black Classicism journey, she has already published an analysis of the video for Lizzo’s “Rumors.” I appreciate her putting this out in the [semi-]popular world through The Conversation.
What advice do you have for students or scholars interested in working in your field?
Firstly, do more than just your work. I suggest that folks from the classics side make sure that they have done extremely deep dives into the “Black” part of Black Classicism. Colleagues are [rightly] pressured to teach more “diverse” syllabi. But, this does not take into account that all of the texts that we teach should be treated with seriousness and rigor. The disappointing reality is that if someone was not interested in teaching Black texts before, pressuring them to include these works puts the Black texts in jeopardy of being mishandled and taught through the racist frameworks. We are asked to call ourselves experts in what we teach. Therefore, please honestly assess your expertise before embarking on a Black Classicism project. Please do not just grab Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man because of its relationship to The Odyssey without understanding in great detail the contexts into which Ellison was writing. And while you should absolutely read all of Patrice Rankine’s seminal Ulysses in Black to prepare you to put Ellison in conversation with Homer, knowing one study and all of Homer isn’t going to support a fair Black Classical analysis of Invisible Man.
Secondly, collaborate. If you are struggling with your positioning in the Black Classicism context—meaning if you feel too "Black studies" or too "classics" for Black Classicism—make some friends across the field aisle. Engage with folks who are Black Classicists, yes, but not only. Also, actively seek out experts outside of your home field. Yes: make friends. Some of my best friends are classicists (har har). Really though, I could not do this work without collaboration with my fellow Black Classicists, sure, but also the classicists who have helped train me and those with whom I’ve become friends along the way. For instance, as an English-trained, 19th-century Black literature scholar (my primary field home), I do not have the strongest training or practice in Latin. Therefore, translations are extremely laborious for me. And yet, I do them because, just like I don’t want others to shortcut Black Studies, I do not want to shortcut classics. But, without friends, colleagues, and collaborators who have read my work and offered me feedback like the wonderful philologist Angelo O. Mercado from Grinnell College, I could not feel confident to release my translations into public.
Lastly, quote Black people and quote them often. Let your references, even and especially by classicist scholars, include Black people. There is no excuse to publish a Black Classicism book or article or even give a conference paper without copious references to Black people's intellectual production. Again, your attention to the experts in the various fields that you are engaging must include Black folx if you plan to talk about Black literatures and visual art (really, Black anything)—because, Black folx are the intellectual leaders of and experts in Black Studies [and more importantly of/in Blackness] and have been, always. Always. If you do not quote Black people, you suggest that there are no Black people that you recognize as experts. If you feel like that, please leave the work to those interested in treating this work with rigor and seriousness.
How has your field changed since you started working in it? Where do you think it needs to go next?
Since I first began studying Black Classicism in graduate school, the field has broadened some. Most notably, the number of Black Classicism scholars is increasing. Additionally, the academic area of classics seems to want to join the rest of us in the 21st century around questions of race. This latter point seems a never-ending uphill battle. I'm hoping that, as Hopkins reminded us all those years ago, European history and civilization entered global civilization in medias res. In other words, the idea of Europe as the center of this world is preposterous, and conversations around race (bolstered by existing conversations of gender) help to contextualize the area of classics as it should be—not as the center, but as part of a flow of global history and cultural development. More than that, it's time for classics scholars to understand that just as Shakespeare and Marlowe help them better understand Homer, Virgil, and Ovid, so do Wheatley, Scarborough, Cooper, DuBois, Hopkins, Ray, C. Chesnutt, Dunbar-Nelson, Menkens, H.M. Chesnutt, Cullen, Hurston, Wright, Ellison, Bearden, Brooks, Dove, Morrison… (there are far, far more).
On the Black Studies side, it is so exciting to see room for conversations that don't immediately seem as politically fruitful as they actually are. Looking at the influence of European culture on Black folx has not always been politically safe or generative. So, in other words, critics once erroneously critiqued Phillis Wheatley for seeming supportive of her position as enslaved because they didn't read the irony, criticism, and sarcastic tones in her work. Black Classicism is an additional doorway into the creative and intellectual production of Black peoples internationally. It is exciting to walk through that door more and more frequently.