Eos
A Scholarly Society Dedicated to Africana Receptions of Ancient Greece and Rome

READS

READS introduces Classicists to seminal works from the African diaspora so that they may be incorporated into course curricula. Each year READS features one work or a related set of texts for discussion at the invitation of institutions and as recurring programming at national and regional conferences.

 

2021: Toni Morrison's "Unspeakable Things Unspoken"

 
 
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READS will make its first appearance at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Classical Studies in 2021. The workshop on Toni Morrison’s “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature” (1989) will be facilitated by Yujhán Claros (Columbia) and Emily Greenwood (Yale).

We seek to continue honoring Morrison’s legacy by inviting Classicists to engage with her path-breaking work as a critic. “Unspeakable Things Unspoken” addresses not only the politics of canonicity but also the problem of making silence speak: Morrison’s project in this article is to examine how the presence of African-Americans has shaped US-American literature even when they are figured as absent or silent. She asks, “what intellectual feats had to be performed...to erase me from a society seething with my presence and what effect has that performance had on the work?” Efforts to listen to silence and to the silenced (as Emily Greenwood has noted) are central not only to the ways that Classicists engage with literary texts but to efforts to “redeem” a discipline characterized historically by racism and exclusion.

Before you join us for the conversation, you will need to do the following to prepare:

  1. Read the article.

  2. Review the discussion questions written by our facilitators. They’ve also provided a starter bibliography.

  3. Complete this form to register for the workshop.

This iteration of READS will take place on January 7th, 2021, from 2:00-5:00 pm CST. You must register for the SCS Annual Meeting in order to attend: visit the SCS website for details.

 
 
 
READSEos: Africana Receptions of Ancient Greece and Rome