Afro-Greeks

"Afro-Greeks explores dialogues between Anglophone Caribbean literature and the complex legacies of ancient Greece and Rome, from the 1920s to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Classics still bears the negative associations of the colonial educational curriculum that was thrust upon the British West Indies with the Victorian triad of the three Cs (Cricket, Classics, and Christianity)." "In a study that embraces Kamau Brathwaite, Austin Clarke, John Figueroa, C.L.R. James, V.S. Naipaul, Derek Walcott, and Eric Williams, Emily Greenwood traces a distinctive regional tradition of engaging with Classics in the English-speaking Caribbean. She argues that, following on from C.L.R. James's revisionist approach to the history of ancient Greece, there has been a practice of reading the Classics for oneself in Anglophone Caribbean literature, a practice that has contributed to the larger project of the articulation of the Caribbean self. The writers whom she examines offer a strenuous critique of an exclusive, Western conception of Greco-Roman antiquity, often conducting this critique through literary subterfuge, playing on the colonial prejudice that Classics did not belong to them. Afro-Greeks examines both the terms of this critique, and the way in which these writers have made Classics theirs."--Jacket.

Year

2010

Language

English

Series

[Classical presences]

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Editions

3

Pages

298

ISBN

9780199575244

Data source: Wikidata