Emily Greenwood

A Tale of Two O's: Odysseus and Oedipus in the Black Atlantic

[First paragraphs]Crossroads in the Black Aegean: Oedipus, Antigone, and Dramas of the African Diaspora. Barbara Goff & Michael Simpson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. xii + 401 pp. (Cloth US

The trouble with the Ionians: Herodotus and the beginning of the Ionian Revolt (5.28–38.1)

150.00)Romare Bearden: A Black Odyssey. Robert G. O’Meally. New York: DC Moore Gallery, 2007. 116 pp. (Cloth

MAKING WORDS COUNT: FREEDOM OF SPEECH AND NARRATIVE IN THUCYDIDES

45.00)Commenting on cultural imperialism under European colonialism, Frantz Fanon (1990:39) remarked that “The settler makes history; his life is an epoch, an Odyssey.” In Fanon’s analysis the settler’s sense of history derived from the history of the “mother country,” rather than the history of the colony that he or she inhabited. But history did not stop here: the reference to the Odyssey reminds us that behind the modern colonial metropolis was a fictional line of descent reaching back to a Greco-Roman cradle, such that theEuropean settler could lay claim to an even more ancient cultural inheritance. The two books examined here make short work of these classical imperial fictions; O’Meally demonstrates how Romare Bearden’s collages of theOdyssey collaborate with Homer, jazz style, to produce an epic that Black America can recognize as its own. If the voyage of Odysseus is sometimes taken to symbolize the migration of ancient Greek civilization toward the West, Barbara Goff and Michael Simpson interject the troubled figure of Oedipus, who plays Poseidon to the settler’s Odyssey, disrupting the voyage and confusing the trajectory (p. 268).Both studies are timely and speak to a wave of recent research on Black Classicism – an examination of the work to which the classical tradition has been put in Africa and the African diaspora, ranging from the hegemonic appropriation of Classics by colonizers and slave-owners to the use ofClassics as an ironic counterdiscourse that writes back to racism and imperialism, or as a source of mythopoiesis in the formation of modern black identity.

Homer in the Twentieth Century

Placed at the very centre of Herodotus’ work (5.28–6.42), the Ionian Revolt of 499–494 bc plays a pivotal role, both chronologically and causally, linking the Persians’ Eastern campaigns to their invasions of Greece.2 It also represents a crucial moment in Herodotus’ history of the Ionians, which spans the whole work from beginning to end. The Ionians jump-start the Histories, one might say, and they do so because they find themselves at the receiving end of the first known Eastern aggressions against Greeks (1.5.3, 6.2–3). Croesus of Lydia completes ‘the first subjection of Ionia’, as the narrator summarizes at the end of the Croesus logos.3 The second is called ‘enslavement’, when Cyrus defeats Croesus and conquers his possessions.4 And so is the third, which occurs after the failure of the revolt we are examining:

Homer in the twentieth century : between world literature and the western canon

This book contains a diverse collection of essays on the notion of “Free Speech” in classical antiquity. The essays examine such concepts as “freedom of speech,” “self-expression,” and “censorship,” in ancient Greek and Roman culture from historical, philosophical, and literary perspectives.