I have rarely been so engaged by a book as I was by Classicism and Other Phobias. I was engaged in part by its emotional range (and if you find this a strange criterion for judging an academic book, that is another compelling reason for you to read it). In contrast with so many recent books on the state of our field, which feel like being shouted at by smug, authoritative men who think that the only good work in classics looks just like their own, the prose here is vibrant with passion and anger, with vulnerability and excess, with critical energy and reflective self-awareness. When I was exasperated by an argument or claim, my feelings were quickly tempered by a recognition of how careful and complex any retort would have to be, if it were not simply to reproduce the conditions Padilla Peralta was himself exasperated by. That is, this book opens a conversation rather than delivering a dictat. Anyone who agrees with everything in it is probably not critical enough; anyone who dismisses it for its politics or its emotion, is certainly not critical enough. It is, precisely, an essay to open a conversation, a conversation that is pressing, timely, and important.
So let us continue the conversation. The book has four essays, set between an introduction and a conclusion. The subject is stated to be classicism, and, indeed, there is very little in it about the ancient world or even the discipline of classics, but a great deal about the valuing of the ancient world that goes hand in hand with classicizing aesthetics—that is, the perspective that sets ancient Greece and Rome as the hierarchically privileged past. Classicizing, as William Fitzgerald has also recently and beautifully analysed,[1] does indeed tend to fantasize and idealise the ancient world as a lost home of value and, specifically, western cultural and political value. The central case of Padilla Peralta is that this classicizing aesthetic has intellectually, socially and culturally excluded not just black people but Blackness in the very core of its political impact. For decades, responsible scholars have noted that slavery, the treatment of women, violent military imperialism, sully “the glory that was Greece.” But—usually, a “but” has followed this recognition—such demurrals have not stopped classicizing from sitting at the heart of many a classics programme as well as the history of western culture’s self-representation. (Although there is not much in this book about classics as it is taught, it is clear that few departments resist the temptations of classicizing idealisation, especially when selling the subject to future students or donors. Business as usual…) But, argues Padilla Peralta, this classicizing comes with an unbearable cost. It values whiteness over other identifications, domination of other identifications through whiteness, and a corresponding devaluation of other cultural, political and aesthetic paradigms. He quotes the pithy summary of Lyra Monteiro several times “White columns, white marble, white supremacy.”[2] Padilla Peralta makes this case sharply and shortly, but, as his extensive footnotes also indicate, it would not be hard—though it would be depressing—to articulate at great length and over a long historical range how across institutional forms, intellectual arguments, and social status, this classicizing aesthetic with all its damaging consequences has indeed informed western thinking, at least since the Renaissance’s enshrining of classicizing as the necessary perspective on the past and its importance for the future. Yes, there are other trajectories—classicizing has also fuelled political revolution and sexual revolution and many classicists have been self-consciously radical or from a marginalized social status—but, argues Padilla Peralta, the dominant and systematic paradigm has been to establish a model of a dominant hierarchy of value.
Padilla Peralta follows through his case as befits the essay form in four short but varied and rich essays: his detailed examples include early modern Spanish epic, the art of Kehinde Wiley, via Kara Walker and Harmonia Rosales (on whom Helen Morales’ book is eagerly awaited[3]), and the Haitian revolution (also discussed by Miriam Leonard’s recent book[4]). Greece and Rome, he repeats, are “overrepresented” in the imaginary (how much is enough?). He argues that he does not want simply to broaden the curriculum, but to establish a model for questioning classicizing itself—though when he also argues for the classical status of his examples, it does feel like a transvaluation of undervalued cultural achievements rather than a questioning of how social value is formed. (It is hard to talk about cultural value without mobilizing hierarchical judgment. He happily quotes an epigram that places the sixteenth-century Spanish epic writer Castellanos above Homer and Virgil.) The overall thrust of the book, often elegantly demonstrated and powerfully articulated, is that classicizing in its traditional form is grounded in a set of strategic and systematic exclusions of Blackness and black people, and thus cannot deal with the different range of experience—a different aesthetics and politics—captured in the term Blackness. Part of the attraction of the book is the personal and emotive narration that he traces in making his case.
As I said, this is a very engaging book with a set of very engaging arguments and analyses. What it has at its core is a necessary question that is not just at the heart of classics as a discipline with its classicizing drive, but also at the heart of our very understanding of social life and its (urban) politics, as a string of urban anthropologists are currently arguing with purposive clarity. Padilla Peralta’s analysis sets this question in a particularly rich network of scholarship, artistic and political response, and intellectual commitment. The central point that the classicizing aesthetic has damagingly excluded a Blackness it cannot deal with seems to me to be right and important. But, as a good essay does, it also left me with some questions to continue the conversation.
The first question is really to continue his very complex and difficult discussion about Blackness. Sometimes Blackness appears here, as it does in urban anthropology under the name of “black urbanism” or “black urban ecologies,” as a name for structural immiseration and domination, which can be separate from skin colour, though in America for obvious historical and empirical reasons it tends to focus on skin colour as determinative. By contrast, there is plenty of racism in Arab-speaking lands but it rarely focuses on skin colour. My friend, who escaped Syria as a refugee, was confused when he was asked by the British authorities what colour he was: he just pointed at his arm. The category was meaningless to him. Similarly, there is plenty of anti-black prejudice in China or Japan but no corresponding privilege of whiteness. How African countries hear American arguments about “Blackness” is what Padilla Peralta, following Imani Perry, would call a “vexy business.”[5] (The art of Sanford Biggers, and specifically works such as ‘Oracle,’ first displayed outside Rockefeller Center in 2021, would have been a fascinating case for Padilla Peralta’s argument.) Mexican left-wing opponents of gentrification in Mexico City despise African Americans as agents of colonialism. It is interesting that while he admits that his focus is America, he writes often about “Euro-American” qualities, but only decries “Eurocentric” faults. It would help if there could be a little more reflection on the profound Americano-centric assumption that his version of Blackness enshrines.
The second question concerns the Church. Classicizing played a role in how western imperialism was imagined and enacted, but one driving force, perhaps the dominant ideological motivation, came from Christianity. It was Christian theologians who debated whether South American indigenous people had souls or not—which would determine how brutally they were treated (as Anthony Pagden brilliantly detailed decades ago[6]). Why is it the arguments about classics and Blackness have repeatedly and systematically avoided the deep complicity of Christianity with the vilest imperial projects? Could it be because recognizing the Church’s dominant instrumental role in this long history of violent settler-colonialism and genocide, granted the continuing place of the church in black communities, would trouble the claim that today’s classicists by virtue of studying classics are complicit with such imperialism? This silence about Christianity and its complicit role is a marked gap in the narrative.
The third question is connected to the second but takes a different historicizing track. Classics as a discipline takes its modern shape in the nineteenth century with the formation of the modern research university. Padilla Peralta is content to follow Johanna Hanink and dismiss such a focus on the nineteenth century as the same old “class civ” story of the triumph of classics. There is some force to this complaint if the story is told uncritically. But, with regard to the central thesis of this book, it is particularly relevant that it is in this period that a great deal of modern racial thinking is established within the discipline, as, indeed, an academically respectable subject, which also had huge social consequences—and that is one reason why it is worth understanding. But it is also striking that the really anxious discussions about racism in the nineteenth-century academy are not about Blackness. It is standardly taken for granted, for sure, that black Africans are at the bottom of the racial hierarchy (with idealised Greek men at the top), but it is rarely thought worth arguing such a case. Where a huge amount of heat and anguish was expended was on separating classicized antiquity from ancient Judaism (and modern society from modern Jews).[7] Anti-Semitism in multiple guises was debated actively and mobilized freely by classicists, almost all of whom were Christians. “Judaizing” was an insult to throw at enemies. The story of the anti-Semitism of classics as a discipline is fundamental to the formation of the discipline and is still evident in every department of classics in America and England where Jewish Greek texts—the Septuagint, Philo, Josephus, the Gospels—are rarely if ever taught, even when they are the most influential writing to have come down from their period. Classicizing has always dismissed Jews from its halls. Let me be clear. I have no interest whatsoever in comparative victimage or in the “what about?”-ism that runs through so many contemporary arguments about conflict and race. There is enough suffering to go round. My point is rather that the narrative of Blackness in classicizing would be all the richer for seeing how it has been shaped in and against other racisms over time. I understand fully that there are strategic arguments that need to be made at particular times and places. But such strategic oversimplifications always have costs and can only be temporary. I hope Padilla Peralta’s work will prove to be a propitious start to this fuller critical history of classicizing.
My final question concerns the erotics of scholarship, and provides an example of when I became exasperated. Several fine books of late have discussed how scholars have an affective tie, often disavowed, to the object of their work—Constanze Güthenke and Lorraine Daston are Padilla Peralta’s suitable headlines here[8]—but he wants to distance himself and us from such erotics. His specific arguments on this topic, however, are deeply unsatisfying. First—and he calls this “obvious”—loving what and how you study “is routinely implicated in the enabling and justification of the predatory behavior that directly confronts women and people of other marginalized gender identities in the academy.” What on earth does “implicated” mean here? If you love the Iliad, you are implicated in sexual harassment? If you do sexually harass someone, you typically defend yourself because you love the Iliad? Don’t love your work as it may lead you to sexually harass someone?! “Routinely?!” What seems to me important for the whole tenor of the book is the extremely dodgy work that the verb “implicate” is made to do: there is no demonstrable complicity or necessary causation between loving “disciplinary practices” and predatory sexuality—and the very vagueness of “implicate” is designed to veil the vapidity of the claim. The second argument is no better. Loving your subject “objectifies the site and subject of study, and in the process denies those with whom we engage their rights.” There may be a case to wonder about epistemic extractivism in some contemporary circumstances. But if I love studying the Iliad and treat the text as my object of study, whose rights have been damaged by such a process? Homer’s? The oral tradition’s? The Iliad’s? We do have a responsibility to the objects we study, but it is far from clear what rights are invested in the objects or subjects of antiquity or how they are damaged by our study. Padilla Peralta’s polemical and ill-considered phrasing here distracts from the serious issues both of how scholars cathect to their work and of abuse in institutions (and there are several occasions in the book of such polemical distractions that are easy for critics to pick up on, rather than focus on the book’s main case). A more interesting argument, stimulated by Padilla Peralta, would have been to explore how everyone who studies classics deeply, does it in the first instance out of fascination and curiosity, which becomes an affective tie; but when it is realised how the history of classics, our love, has been mired in some very unsavoury practices and ideologies, the love affair may feel abusive or like gaslighting. Indeed, such disaffected feelings are likely to explain the anger and dismay with which some scholars respond, when those unsavoury practices and ideologies are realised. Betrayed in love. As ever, some will want to break off the relationship, others will want to work at it to make it better, to look for reparative strategies. Some will recognize painful error but move on in productive hope; others will not be able to let it go.
Exasperated, and exhilarated in debate with it, as much as in learning from it. This is a book that deserves to be read; and thoughtfully, critically, engaged with. It is a conversation that classicists need to have—and should do so with passion, personal commitment, and the respect that enables conversation to play its proper, democratic political role, which is so under threat in contemporary society, not just in America but across too much of the world.
Notes
[1] Fitzgerald, W. The Living Death of Antiquity: Neo-Classical Aesthetics (Oxford, 2022).
[2] “Power Structures: White Columns, White Marble, White Supremacy,” Medium, Oct 27, 2020.
[3] Based on the Martin Lectures in Oberlin and the Grey Lectures in Cambridge in 2025.
[4] Leonard, M. Revolution: Modern Uprisings in Ancient Time (Chicago, 2025).
[5] Perry, I. Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation (Durham, NC, 2018).
[6] Pagden, A. The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge, 1986).
[7] See Goldhill, S. ‘Anti-Semitism and the Foundations of Classical Scholarship’, in The Cambridge Companion to Classics and Race, ed. Andújar, R., Giusti, E. and Murray, J., (Cambridge, 2026) for discussion and bibliography.
[8] Güthenke, C. Feeling and Classical Philology: Knowing Antiquity in German Scholarship 1770-1920 (Cambridge, 2020); Daston, L. ‘Necrophilia’, in History of Classical Scholarship 3 (2021): 57-66.