Blog Post #64: Graduate Student Feature with Jermaine Bryant

One of Peopling the Past’s goals is to amplify the work of young and/or under-represented scholars and the amazing research that they are doing to add new perspectives to the fields of ancient history and archaeology (broadly construed). We will thus feature several blog posts throughout the year interviewing graduate students on their research topics, focusing on how they shed light on real people in the past.

What topic do you research? 

I am never quite sure whether to call myself a literary scholar with a strong interest in social history, or a social historian with a literature problem. I suppose one of the nice things about classics is that we’re able to blend our interests in such a way that we never really have to choose. I have a couple of interests that are occupying most of my attention right now:  

I also have strong interests in reception and comparative work, particularly Black or African diaspora receptions, with a particular fondness for hip-hop and poetics of resistance. I am working on an article about a poem written by Leopold Senghor, the first president of Senegal, who wrote an “Elegy of Carthage” where he uses figures from the ancient North African past that appear in Roman history to convince the first president of Tunisia to politically organize with Africans, rather than Europeans, as a part of the Pan-Africanist movement.  

What sources or data do you use? 

For my dissertation research, I use a variety of texts from the Augustan period, both poetry and prose. The early elegists—Propertius and Tibullus in particular—have a fascinating perspective on how literary production relates to the politics of the era, and one can see elegy more generally as a genre that resists Augustan moral ideals and moral legislation and reckons with the legacy of civil war violence. A newer interest of mine is the declamations of Seneca the Elder. Declamation is essentially a rhetorical training exercise where the orator gives a speech in-character, either reckoning with an imagined ethical problem or giving advice to a historical or mythic figure.  Seneca’s declamations, although often seen as “imperial” literature, record (or purport to record) the exercises of rhetoricians from the Augustan period. 

My black poetics and reception work has some affinities with my Latin work, specifically regarding societal traumas and the poetics of resistance that are born from them. Hip-hop and Roman elegy, I believe, are very similar in this regard. I have written about this and intend to write more about it in the future. As for my work on Senghor’s poetics, there is much less written about this when compared to Augustan literature, so I have been doing quite a bit of digging in newspapers and other announcements from the immediate postcolonial period in North Africa to get a sense of the politics of the time, as well as learning more about the history of postcolonial Africa. Reception studies are most powerful when one pays equal attention to the receiving culture and the culture received. It is a daunting task, but learning new things is always exciting. 

How does this research shed light on real people in the past? 

Some of my dissertation authors, of course, wrote some of the “most canonical” works of Latin literature. Vergil and Livy are some of the first authors one traditionally reads in Latin literature education. So many things—really it seems almost everything—has already been said about them. In my wildest dreams, I hope that my project grants a new way of looking at this body of literature and encourages others to think of the political power of making art from traumatic experience. This way of looking at the politics of the early Augustan period does not necessarily view Augustus’ accession to power as an entirely or necessarily bad thing, but one that simultaneously allows for feelings of relief at the end of the violence, mixed with a remembrance of his days as the “kid butcher.” These feelings can coexist. 

Still, I think a view of the complex politics of the period that centers Augustus is limiting. Perhaps more central to the authors is the mass death and witnessing what can be seen as a complete societal unraveling. No one was untouched by the horrors of the war, regardless of side. Some areas (like Umbria, Propertius’ homeland) were hit harder by the violence than others, and the land redistributions certainly created lasting social tensions within communities, as you now have members of those communities whose presence is inextricably linked to the violence of the war. 

I have recently been reading Hanif Abdurraqib’s work on black performance and his history/memoir/love letter to A Tribe Called Quest, Go Ahead in the Rain: it is really inspiring the way he mixes personal experience with history, literary criticism, and epistolography to breathe life into his reflection on a group of musicians, even if the form of a book deprives the reader of their music. His connection to the material, as a Black man in the 90s who was following their careers in real time, sheds light on the very real, very political power of hip-hop to illustrate the concerns of a community, as well as influence that community.  

As for my Senghor work, the legacies of colonialism are still with us. Classics is tied up in that legacy. What speaks to me about Senghor’s work is that he knew that Bourguiba (the president of Tunisia to whom the poet is dedicated) would immediately recognize the characters and stories from the Roman texts he alludes to. This familiarity is the direct product of the colonial past that Senghor calls for Bourguiba to cast off. In this way, he doubly underscores the violence of canon: there is violence that Dido, Hannibal, and Jugurtha experience at the hands of white Europeans (in Senghor’s view), alongside the violence that puts the canon in the minds of colonized subjects. 

Classicists often like to point to the meanings that “diverse” receivers of classical texts derive from those texts (I am thinking specifically of classicists’ fondness of—I’d maybe even say fetishistic obsession with—W.E.B. Du Bois and Derek Walcott), and there is value in that, but often they gloss over the fact that the reason those receivers use Greco-Roman texts is because their educations did not value other bodies of work. I hope my Senghor work makes this fact impossible to ignore.