Critical Antiquities – serie

Nine short essays exploring the K’iche’ Maya story of creation, the Popol Vuh.  Written during the lockdown in Chicago in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, these essays consider the Popol Vuh as a work that was also written during a time of feverish social, political, and epidemiological crisis as Spanish missionaries and colonial military deepened their conquest of indigenous peoples and cultures in Mesoamerica. What separates the Popol Vuh from many other creation texts is the disposition of the gods engaged in creation. Whereas the book of Genesis is declarative in telling the story of the world’s creation, the Popol Vuh is interrogative and analytical: the gods, for example, question whether people actually need to be created, given the many perfect animals they have already placed on earth.  Emergency uses the historical emergency of the Popol Vuh to frame the ongoing emergencies of colonialism that have surfaced all too clearly in the global health crisis of COVID-19. In doing so, these essays reveal how the authors of the Popol Vuh—while implicated in deep social crisis—nonetheless insisted on transforming emergency into scenes of social, political, and intellectual emergence, translating crisis into creativity and world creation.

Nine short essays exploring the K’iche’ Maya story of creation, the Popol Vuh.  Written during the lockdown in Chicago in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, these essays consider the Popol Vuh as a work that was also written during a time of feverish social, political, and epidemiological crisis as Spanish missionaries and colonial military deepened their conquest of indigenous peoples and cultures in Mesoamerica. What separates the Popol Vuh from many other creation texts is the disposition of the gods engaged in creation. Whereas the book of Genesis is declarative in telling the story of the world’s creation, the Popol Vuh is interrogative and analytical: the gods, for example, question whether people actually need to be created, given the many perfect animals they have already placed on earth.  Emergency uses the historical emergency of the Popol Vuh to frame the ongoing emergencies of colonialism that have surfaced all too clearly in the global health crisis of COVID-19. In doing so, these essays reveal how the authors of the Popol Vuh—while implicated in deep social crisis—nonetheless insisted on transforming emergency into scenes of social, political, and intellectual emergence, translating crisis into creativity and world creation.

A critical reflection on complacency and its role in the decline of classics in the academy.  In response to philosopher Simon Blackburn’s portrayal of complacency as a vice that impairs university study at its core, John T. Hamilton examines the history of complacency in classics and its implications for our contemporary moment.  The subjects, philosophies, and literatures of ancient Greece and Rome were once treated as the foundation of learning, with everything else devolving from them. Hamilton investigates what this model of superiority, derived from the golden age of the classical tradition, shares with the current hegemony of mathematics and the natural sciences. He considers how the qualitative methods of classics relate to the quantitative positivism of big data, statistical reasoning, and presumably neutral abstraction, which often dismiss humanist subjectivity, legitimize self-sufficiency, and promote a fresh brand of academic complacency. In acknowledging the reduced status of classics in higher education today, he questions how scholarly striation and stagnation continue to bolster personal, ethical, and political complacency in our present era.

A critical reflection on complacency and its role in the decline of classics in the academy.  In response to philosopher Simon Blackburn’s portrayal of complacency as a vice that impairs university study at its core, John T. Hamilton examines the history of complacency in classics and its implications for our contemporary moment.  The subjects, philosophies, and literatures of ancient Greece and Rome were once treated as the foundation of learning, with everything else devolving from them. Hamilton investigates what this model of superiority, derived from the golden age of the classical tradition, shares with the current hegemony of mathematics and the natural sciences. He considers how the qualitative methods of classics relate to the quantitative positivism of big data, statistical reasoning, and presumably neutral abstraction, which often dismiss humanist subjectivity, legitimize self-sufficiency, and promote a fresh brand of academic complacency. In acknowledging the reduced status of classics in higher education today, he questions how scholarly striation and stagnation continue to bolster personal, ethical, and political complacency in our present era.

A consideration of how modern revolutions have employed tropes of classical antiquity.  Despite its Latin etymology, “revolution” in its modern understanding arguably did not exist in antiquity, and revolution as we know it today is considered by many theorists to be a term born in modernity. While they certainly had times of momentous political upheaval, the Greeks and Romans tended to understand such events as part of a narrative of political continuity rather than novelty or rupture. Nevertheless, modern revolutions have repeatedly appropriated tropes of classical discourse, such as freedom, tyranny, tragedy, and fraternity.  With this book, Miriam Leonard offers a conceptual history of revolution, unraveling modernity’s yearning for the new and questioning why ancient concepts continue to play such an important role in political uprisings. Leonard looks at examples of appeals to antiquity during the French and Haitian Revolutions, in anticolonial struggles, and feminist and queer movements and considers works of theorists such as Karl Marx, Hannah Arendt, and Sigmund Freud that foreground an engagement with antiquity.

A consideration of how modern revolutions have employed tropes of classical antiquity.  Despite its Latin etymology, “revolution” in its modern understanding arguably did not exist in antiquity, and revolution as we know it today is considered by many theorists to be a term born in modernity. While they certainly had times of momentous political upheaval, the Greeks and Romans tended to understand such events as part of a narrative of political continuity rather than novelty or rupture. Nevertheless, modern revolutions have repeatedly appropriated tropes of classical discourse, such as freedom, tyranny, tragedy, and fraternity.  With this book, Miriam Leonard offers a conceptual history of revolution, unraveling modernity’s yearning for the new and questioning why ancient concepts continue to play such an important role in political uprisings. Leonard looks at examples of appeals to antiquity during the French and Haitian Revolutions, in anticolonial struggles, and feminist and queer movements and considers works of theorists such as Karl Marx, Hannah Arendt, and Sigmund Freud that foreground an engagement with antiquity.

Acclaimed author and translator Sophus Helle considers an ancient creation story with themes of humanity, class warfare, and catastrophic climate change.  The Babylonian poem Atra-hasis is a forgotten masterpiece of political thought. Written in Akkadian in what is now southern Iraq during the early second millennium BCE, Atra-hasis gives us a glimpse of how ancient poets understood the society growing around them. This radical history of the world told from the perspective of the mother goddess conveys the complexity and contradictions that lie at the heart of the human experience. Atra-hasis tells how humanity was created as part of a bargain to resolve the world’s first labor strike, in which the lower gods rebelled against the excessive work imposed on them by the higher gods. It depicts humans as workers endowed with defiant intelligence. They multiply and become too loud, so the gods decide to quiet them with a cataclysmic flood.  Looking to Atra-hasis, Sophus Helle reveals an ancient story with reflections on power and history that invite comparison to topics of contemporary relevance, including labor, inequality, climate change, artificial intelligence, threats to democracy, disability, care work, sexual consent, and more. Helle considers Atra-hasis as a foundational document of “pasthumanism,” a term he uses to describe the study of how cultural conceptions of humanity have changed across centuries. He argues that ancient and non-Western texts remind us that cultural assumptions we now take for granted are neither natural nor necessary.

How an ancient Indigenous earthwork traveled from Ohio to Washington state in the mid-1970s.  In Transit, Chadwick Allen chronicles the surprising history of how the ancient snake effigy known as Serpent Mound, located in what is now southern Ohio, traveled to Seattle, Washington in the 1970s, at the height of American Indian activism associated with the Red Power movement. Allen considers Indigenous earthworks built for thousands of years across the eastern half of the North American continent, questioning what it would mean if they were understood not as static entities fixed in space and time, but as animate forces with the ability to travel. Allen also looks at the origins of the “modern” effigy in the nineteenth century, when archaeologists reconstructed Serpent Mound’s deteriorating form to create a static icon suitable for touristic display within the confines of a settler state memorial.  Drawing from archival research, interviews, and site-specific encounters, Transit meditates on the significance of building an earthen effigy in the Pacific Northwest, as part of what became the Daybreak Star Indian Cultural Center, and on the complexity of the mound’s generative contexts. Allen’s research intersects the mid-twentieth century, when artist Robert Smithson created his iconic Spiral Jetty earth sculpture and when the Muscogee (Creek) Nation designed its innovative Mound Building. The story remains ongoing in the twenty-first century, as new mounds are rising in Oklahoma and artists, activists, and intellectuals are again asserting the power of Indigenous design.