Sasha-Mae Eccleston is the John Rowe Workman Assistant Professor of Classics at Brown University, where she also directs the Postdoctoral/MFA Fellowship in Critical Classical Studies. Her new book published this week is Epic Events - Classics and the Politics of Time in the United States since 9/11
Tell me about the book… what have Homer, Sappho and Seneca got to do with US politics over the last 20 years?
People have a fairly easy time thinking about politics and communities in terms of spaces. Democracy happens in a room. People want to have a seat at the metaphorical table. And so on. We understand how space, whether virtual or physical, shapes relationships and relationships to power. We also need to think about how time shapes relationships and relationships to power. If there is a status quo, the normative order of things, there is also a tempus quo, a normative temporal order as well.
But time presents challenges. Time is an abstract concept. For many of us it is hard to think about time without resorting to spatial metaphors or to measurements of it alone (calendar or clock time). To make it a little easier, I found the work of Sarah Sharma useful. Inspired by Sharma’s work, I endeavoured to perform a chrono-political analysis of American culture. I wanted to understand how the tempus quo structures different experiences of belonging and exercises of citizenship.
I work on ancient Greek and Roman literature and how that literature is taken up by others in their writing and thinking. In the book’s introduction, I explain why the Ancient Greek and Roman material known as the Classics might be a particularly useful archive for a chrono-political project. The ancient Greek and Roman material that has been classicized or given the status of the classic has been endowed with timelessness and a significance that allows them to be used as standards for other wheres and other whens. I found that several artists and authors have played with this material’s conspicuousness and its imputed timelessness in order to question the tempus quo. Through them I explain the differential experiences of belonging that temporal order creates and recreates and to what ends. The introduction, in particular, guides readers through a chronopolitical analysis of the presence of Roman epic poetry in the National September 11 Museum to whet their appetite for the rest of the book.
When you talk about timelessness, do you mean that the events portrayed in ancient Greece could happen any time or do you are you suggesting a kind of sense of history repeating itself and that there's a cycle?
More that they have been endowed with a validity that transcends their space-time. Because they have been classicized, the ancient Greeks and Romans have been used to set standards and are thus treated as if they should be imitated by other cultures and communities the world over. In so doing, they become above criticism and reproach. I think this timelessness does a disservice to the complexity of the numerous ancient Greek and Roman communities that we study in my discipline. More importantly, to use a simplistic, monolithic view of the Greco-Roman world to set standards for other communities can act as cover for various kinds of bias, violence, and injustice.
Why 9/11? Why is that the beginning of the period you're talking about?
The book is called Epic Events. For a lot of people with a background in literary studies, that title would signal epic poetry, the literary genre. But drawing on the etymology and semantics of the ancient Greek word from epic derives, the book uses literary texts to revisit events in recent history when the ideals of American citizenship, America’s self-image, and global reputation were at the center of the national conversation. I wanted to understand what those events and the conversations about them revealed about the temporal order.
The book is in chronological order, but chronology sits beside several other temporal concepts. The book covers events from 2001 and looks towards an event planned for 2025 by the Obama Administration. We will see whether the incoming administration follows through on that plan. A brief envoi at the end of the book ties some of the book's concerns to the coronavirus pandemic. The pandemic, like the 2001 terror attacks, was an event whose circumstances and outcomes helped me understand whose life counts in American society. So the arc between them made sense to me chronologically, but I make a point to contextualize all the events around which each chapter revolves.
Analyzing the national conversation about 9/11 and America’s global War on Terror entailed a considerable amount of attention on the rhetoric surrounding World War II and the attacks on Pearl harbour, for example. My discussion of the 2008 financial crisis in the chapter entitled “Home, Land, Futurity” revisits the American Civil War via a Suzan-Lori Parks play from 2015 that engages Homer’s Odyssey.
I am not making an argument about the uniqueness of 9/11. I am using it as inroad to a larger conversation about time and citizenship throughout American history.
Do you look at the rise of populism, which is obviously not an American-only thing, but is often exemplified by “Trump as Caesar”?
To answer this and reroute, a bit, I want to draw attention to a fabulous book that came out that really focuses on an earlier generation of this question by Maria Wyke: it's called Caesar in the USA. I admire that book and quote from it in Epic Events.
American culture loves a strong man. The Western loves the lone gunman who comes in. Something about the town's not working, there are dangerous (usually racialized) forces terrorizing people that have not (yet) been brought to heel. In the national imaginary, it takes a strong, individual (white) man to fix that predicament. That (white) man is not beholden to the rules, because the rules for everyone were never going to allow the single (white) man to do what he needed to bring peace and justice back. So that story goes, at least.
I read a wide array of texts while researching Epic Events. Of course I read ancient and contemporary literary texts. But I also re-read interviews, newspaper articles, speeches, proclamations, and transcripts of hearings. Across these texts, one of the most frequently recurring images or ideas was that of American as a beacon of democracy. In Reagan era discourse, we might point to America as a city on a shining hill, a model for other places, “yearning to breathe free”. As widespread as that appeal might be, American culture also likes this other kind of person, the maverick. So there's frequently this flirtation with Caesar as someone who, yes, has a desire for power as an individual person not beholden to the rules and ready to cross a line (culturally as much as literally or, in Caesar’s case, geographically) once viewed as sacred and inviolable. Flirtation and fear.
The appeal of a figure who disrupts thing and whose ostensible (or marketable) ambition is to check the system, I think, could be rather symptomatic of an inmportant desire. When things don’t work—you can’t provide for yourself, your family, the systems don’t seem to function as you believe they once did or should— people want answers. And they like the person that seems to have ones they can understand. Believing in things and people can feel really great.
How did you get into Classics in the first place? Isn’t teaching Latin and Greek at school relatively unusual in the US?
I began learning Latin at 13 because I went to a private high school that offered it. I wanted to be like all the Black girls I admired there who were older me; many of them had taken Ancient Greek. Beginner’s Ancient Greek wasn’t being offered that term and so I chose Latin. I only knew about “Greco-Roman myth” by accident—a teacher in my middle scholar gave me a book of myths out of his trunk. I read it and I liked it. When I started Latin, I loved it.
There's still an interest in Latin or ancient Greek in America. I think that interest might come from widely divergent quarters. There is interest often in more elite spaces, especially spaces that are marked by whiteness. There is also an interest in popular culture, especially in the YA market and in fiction that is written by and marketed to women. Names that come to mind include the Percy Jackson books and movies or Madeline Miller’s novels.
Of course in places like the UK, studying ancient Greek and Latin was a prerequisite for elite male participation in government and intellectual society. I believe that has changed and shifted, somewhat, as it has here, towards a knowledge of economics and politics/political science. In the US over the last decade, the era of classes being offered in high school and college about Western Civilization focusing on the ancient Greeks and Romans has waned a bit. Those classes used to be a primary vehicle for Classics departments to attract new students, because those Western Civilization and core courses were general education courses, ones that everyone had to take before taking more specialized coursework for their major or specialization. Western Civilization courses might be in for a wide resurgence as part of the push towards more patriotic education and the push away from social history written by and about people from marginalized communities. Again, because these cultures are often idealized and treated as if they transcend mere “identity politics”.
Is it relatively unusual to be a black professor of classics?
It is. I'm up for tenure, and if I earn tenure here, I'll be the first ever black person tenured in Classics at Brown University and amongst the few ever tenured in American History.
Do you think that gives you a different perspective of the the classics?
It's always been clear to me that the things I've been taught academically, even though I was succeeding in them, didn't take into account a whole bunch of things that I knew. Nor did they work epistemologically. They failed to take into account how I got to know what I know.
For me as a black woman who is a Professor in the Classical literature classroom, a key facet of that epistemological oversight in Classics concerns embodiment. I frequently think about how the body shows up or is not showing up is talked about as a phenomenon. This is especially the case when the body in question is not a normative body-- when it does not belong to a man; when it's not able bodied; when it's not the “right” age; when it is affected by poverty or illness, and so on. I think about and teach about that quite frequently. Our literary archive from ancient Greece and Rome comes from such a small, rather homogenous segment of the population. Who's not writing but is being written about is a gap that I'm really fond of exploring with my students and collaborators.
How did this lead up to writing the book?
After finishing my Rhodes term in Oxford, I headed off to Berkeley, to the Bay area’s version of California sunshine. I did my PhD in Classics at Berkeley. I wrote my dissertation on an author relatively new to the classics canon, Apuleius. I was supposed to be starting to turn the dissertation into my first book, but as I write in the book’s envoi, I was ruminating on a few other texts instead. Every time a new event happened, I saw the applicability of what I had been thinking about. Importantly, I didn't hear or see anyone else talking about these events in the way that I had been thinking about them. A few years later and those thoughts exist in the form of Epic Events.