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TAPA

Due Date: 01-01-2022

This issue of TAPA intends to be a catalyst for transformative ideas regarding the reality of race and racism within all aspects of Greek and Roman studies. We seek contributions that analyze and critically engage phenomena which have been considered unrelated to race, have been so familiar as to remain un-critiqued as spectacular, have not yet been brought to light, or have tended to be avoided for being too disruptive of the disciplinary status quo. Rather than cordon off advances from other branches of scholarship, this issue welcomes reflections on classical studies from other disciplines. We remain attentive to the discipline’s self-declared roots in philology. But the scope of this endeavor demands that we also open ourselves up to other models of critique and to the insights that those models produce. To that end, scholars from fields with similar disciplinary trajectories, with research interests that dovetail with classics, or whose work is assumed to have no relationship to race and or in the classics are especially encouraged to submit abstracts.

We offer the following clusters of questions as non-exhaustive entry points into a longer conversation:

What, if any, is the semantic force of the term classical studies, as opposed to other potential rubrics (e.g., Greek and Roman studies, Mediterranean studies, etc.)? What is the force of classical studies in relation to Indigenous studies, Asian American studies, Arab American studies, Latinx studies, and so on?

Are there disciplinary transformations we might use as guides for an antiracist restructuring of the field?

Though it is often posited as objective and therefore outside of or resistant to so-called cultural difference, how can philology and other formalisms shed the garb of objectivity to operationalize racial competence?

How has the elasticity of whiteness manifested in periods when the discipline of classical studies has been most self-conscious? Has the warm reception of postcolonial studies within the field obscured the relationship between classical studies and contemporary forms of imperial conquest (e.g., global markets, philanthropy and humanitarian relief in the Global South, and American educational expansionism)?

How can critical approaches to work and other institutions—universities, prisons, the healthcare industry, and so on—inform our understanding of the entanglements of our field and its practitioners? What coalitions does such an approach make possible, perhaps at both the local or regional and national levels?

Submission deadlines and instructions:
Articles for this issue should be submitted between 1 August 2021 and 1 January 2022. For submission guidelines, see https://classicalstudies.org/scs-news/race-and-racism-beyond-spectacular-authors-may-submit-papers-august-1-2021.