| African-American writers confronted numerous attacks on black intelligence, rights, and humanity from the Colonial period onward. They responded with varied strategies, of which the Protestant evangelical and slave narrative traditions have been most routinely articulated and celebrated. African Americans also deployed Greek, Roman, and periodically, Egyptian classical authors, subjects, and literature in their literary productions. Sadly, years of critical inquiry into American literature have failed to produce thoroughgoing analyses of African-American writers' relationships with the classical tradition.;This project explores selected classical elements in African-American literature between 1772 and 1910. These years are critical because they contain the beginning of African-Americans' intellectual investigations of the classics, the first discernable educational and political deployments of classical elements by African Americans, and eventually the clear theoretical articulation of classics as essential cultural tools for African America, all in an era of concentrated efforts to shape, construct, and uplift African-American civilization.;Rather than reduce the classics to their many literary genres---mythology, elegies, encomia, epics, philosophical treatises, rhetorical manuals, or histories---I have evaluated them in terms of their integrated, enduring power to transmit cultural values. I am particularly concerned with how these classical genres, which addressed and facilitated the definition, production, and dissemination of knowledge and civic, moral, and martial virtue in the Mediterranean civilizations of Antiquity, helped African Americans envision a renewed civilization. Furthermore, I am concerned with how African Americans discovered, acquired, and used the classics to demonstrate their humanity, agitate for their rightful place in American civic culture, and shape the virtue and intellect of African Americans from Phillis Wheatley to W. E. B. DuBois.;Recent commentary on the classics and race has been characterized by frequent and provocative, if sometimes unpleasant and unproductive, brawls over the integrity of historical models of Antiquity and translations of primary texts. My examination avoids the Medusa of these recent forays into the classics by concentrating on how African Americans used the existing classical source material, their own education, and independent scholarship to quarry an ebony column of classical support for their project of rebuilding black civilization in America. |
