‘A Song of Willow’: Barbary’s Blues and Theft of Happiness in Early Modern England | Watch the full talk

Presented by Justin P. Shaw at Appropriations: A RaceB4Race Symposium in 2020

Justin P. Shaw is interested in how appropriation can mean theft as well as “making something new.” He discusses multiple layers of appropriation in his talk, from Shakespeare’s use of an older play (Giovanni Battista Giraldi Cinthio’s “Un Capitano Moro” written in 1565) as the basis of the plot of Othello, to Desdemona’s “consumption” of Barbary’s song for her own comfort. Using a framework of Black music and the history of appropriation of the Blues to shed light on Desdemona’s memory of Barbary’s song, Shaw asks the question: where is the line between tribute and theft?

One of the barriers to teaching race in the European Middle Ages is the predominant cultural image of the period as racially, religiously, and ethnically homogenous. However, records and texts from the period offer insight into a rich and cosmopolitan period, where there were not only Black people in Europe, but they held positions of power and prestige. Cord J. Whitaker explains the vibrant landscape of the European Middle Ages. 

Many medieval epics regale their audiences with the phenomenon of skin color change, often in the context of religious conversion. The metaphor of Blackness at play in these epics offers a way to understand how phenotypic traits were used as markers of good or evil in the literature and culture of medieval Europe. The long history of racial construction has its roots in how Blackness is leveraged as a metaphor over hundreds of years.

Premodern critical race studies offers a profound lens with which to approach ancient Mediterranean history and culture. As a multi-disciplinary framework and as a rigorous research methodology, PCRS offers new approaches to the field of classics. Dan-el Padilla Peralta discusses the imperative of studying race and racialization in the ancient world and the influence this lens of inquiry has on the field.

What do we mean when we talk about classics or the classical? Dan-el Padilla Peralta deconstructs the history of the field of classics and its investment in hegemony, and how it carries with it an assignment of value. How do we, in the 21st century, relinquish ourselves from this long history of aesthetic sleight-of-hand?

Frequently in our culture, the only times we talk about race are in moments of crisis. Ayanna Thompson offers a guide on how to approach race in the classroom, reminding teachers, “You don’t have to be the expert on race. You just have to be the person who can raise the issues.”

Course description

The application of various forms of cultural and critical theory to the study of literature has a long, varied, and robust history. In recent years, we have seen a revolution in literary criticism as critical race theory has become a dominant approach to understanding not only the works that we read, but also the world around us. This revolution puts questions of race and racial justice at the center of the subject. This class will investigate and gauge the value of critical theories and methods focused on race, racism, and racial justice. The aim of this course is to engage meaningfully with scholars, cultural productions, and criticism that draw on critical race studies within their artistic and scholarly work.

Learning outcomes

After you complete this course, you will: 1) have a better understanding of the main texts, authors, and critical field of study; 2) be able to apply techniques of critical analysis; 3) understand critical race studies approaches to literary and cultural studies.

Course readings

William Shakespeare, Othello

William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

Additional scholarly articles, essays, and chapters will be made available via PDF.  

Course requirements

Daily class participation

This is an upper division course, and you are expected to attend every class meeting. If an emergency forces you to miss class, discuss it with me upon your return. The success of the class depends on your presence and participation. Students are expected to read, and should be prepared to discuss, all assigned material. Please note that this is a reading intensive class.

Group led discussion

Early in the semester, students will work in groups to lead class discussion centered on a specific school of theory (Feminism, Marxism, New Historicism, Psychoanalysis, etc.). The group will present a short overview of the school of theory, explain its significance, and offer brief examples (2-3) of the way this theory can be applied to a literary text. The presentation/discussion should be roughly 20 minutes. I will circulate a sign-up sheet the first week of class.

Public facing essay

For this assignment, you will be asked to write a public facing essay that uses Othello or The Merchant of Venice as a vehicle to explore a contemporary social issue. Please take time to look at the short essays published in ACMRS’s online journal, The Sundial. The public facing works in that journal will give you a sense of what is possible and possibly inspire the approach you take for this assignment. Your essays should be 500-750 words in length and should be submitted via Canvas by the assigned date (see schedule below).

Final project

For your final project, you will present on a product from popular culture of your choice (YouTube video, music, visual art, poem, film, etc.) that adapts and/or appropriates Shakespeare’s work and that engages with the issue of race/racism (implicitly or explicitly). You should interpret your chosen product through the lens of one of the pieces of critical race theory/studies that you read over the semester and explain the value behind considering such a perspective. Presentations should be 10 minutes in length. In addition to the presentation, you will submit a 250-word reflection on why this product and interpretation is meaningful to you.

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In this assignment, Ruben Espinosa offers a creative entry point for students to engage with Shakespeare. Students produce a short film that must touch on a national or local social justice issue using dialogue from one of the plays they’ve studied in class. By focusing these adaptations on students’ interests and communities, students are given the opportunity to question who is allowed access to Shakespeare and consider how these plays are often weaponized against marginalized populations.

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Foul and Fair - an example student production

La Muerte de Ofelia - an example student production

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Why Henry V?

Henry V is a great play to teach when asking students to think about nationalism, ethnocentrism, xenophobia, and immigration. On the surface, the play extols a sense of English identity and community—that is, it is looking to England’s history and inviting Shakespeare’s audience to partake in the organizing of such a community.

Despite all the jingoism, though, the play is giving this sense of nationalism quite a bit of side-eye and ultimately allows us to look at the English themselves through the perspective of the stranger.

Legitimacy and linguistic identity

Given the urgency of anti-immigrant sentiments and legislation in the U.S., the idea of who is deemed a legitimate insider is a significant entry point for American students to discussions about national identity, race, and belonging. Notions of legitimacy in the U.S. are often tethered to linguistic identity, so the play’s attention to language is critical for these conversations.

While the sentiment behind Henry’s “band of brothers” (4.3.60) speech espouses kinship for all men fighting for England, all men are clearly not alike. The Scot Jamy, the Irish MacMorris, and the Welsh Fluellen (who all fight for the English) represent cultural otherness. We can home in on the importance of this representation of otherness when we encourage students to interrogate how the language and cultural identity of the stranger impacts the construction of Henry and of English identity.

When Henry famously historicizes the English victory at Agincourt by connecting it to Saint Crispin’s Day, for example, Fluellen reminds him of Edward the Black Prince’s victory in France and the role of the Welsh in that victory. Fluellen explains how this victory was and continues to be commemorated:

"If your majesties is remembered of it, the Welshmen did good service in a garden where leeks did grow, wearing leeks in their Monmouth caps, which your majesty know to this hour is an honorable badge of service. And I do believe your majesty takes no scorn to wear the leeks upon Saint Tavy’s day" (4.7.89-94).

Fluellen is referring to the practice of commemorating the feast of Saint David (the patron saint of Wales), and it was observed not only by the character Henry V in the play but also by Shakespeare’s own Queen Elizabeth I. It is important because Fluellen infuses Henry’s historicizing moment with alternative, equally significant, and much older cultural tradition. In short, the cultural identity of the foreigner here precedes and supersedes Henry’s historicizing moment.

Fluellen then takes it a step further in connecting Henry with the Welsh tradition. Responding to the leek-wearing custom, Henry says, “I wear it for a memorable honour, / For I am Welsh, you know, good countryman” (4.7.95-96). Henry’s Welsh connection is tenuous (he was the Prince of Wales), but Fluellen responds in kind: “All the water in the Wye cannot wash your majesty’s Welsh plood out of your pody” (4.7.97-98). There is no desire to assimilate with the English here, but instead a clear desire on the part of Fluellen to honor Wales.

Leeks against ethnocentrism

To attend to this understanding of the dominant culture’s identity in Henry V is to encourage our students to scrutinize structures that govern notions of national identity and legitimacy. The play deploys Fluellen’s confidence in his cultural identity to speak to England’s own emerging self-perception, and it questions that ethnocentrism. When, in an offstage moment the knavish Englishman Pistol ridicules Fluellen and his cultural practices and foreignness in a public sphere, for example, Fluellen demands to be treated with dignity. He confronts Pistol, force-feeds him a leek, beats him, and says, “If you can mock a leek, you can eat a leek” (5.1.34). The bloody scene is so striking that the English Gower says to Fluellen, “Enough, captain, you have astonished him” (5.1.35).

While the violence is sobering, Gower sides with the foreigner standing up for himself by saying to Pistol after Fluellen departs:

Will you mock at an ancient tradition, begun upon an honourable valour, and worn as a memorable trophy of predeceased valour, and dare not avouch in your deeds any of your words? I have seen you gleeking and galling at this gentleman twice or thrice. You thought because he could not speak English in the native garb he could not therefore handle an English cudgel. You find it otherwise, and henceforth let a Welsh correction teach you a good English condition (5.1.70-80).

To be certain, Fluellen has been teaching his English audience all along—reminding Henry that history is larger than the moment, and demonstrating that respect breeds respect, and indignity engenders violence. Gower calls for respect of the stranger’s cultural traditions and personhood and also for dignified behavior on the part of the host society. The critical moment allows our students to see how language discrepancies—as Fluellen employs a broken English—and cultural identity, issues vividly relevant in our present moment, infuse a play that imagines an inclusive brotherhood while demonstrating how that inclusion is always just out of reach for the stranger.

A neighbor worthy of respect

The many markers of identity in this play—patron saints, religious affinities, language, customs, and cultural traditions—are all facets of nation building and concurrent markers of divisiveness. However, when one looks past difference, when one listens beyond the broken English, when one sees Fluellen not as an object shedding light on Henry’s identity, but rather as someone distinctly valuable and decisively self-possessed, one will recognize in him the many foreigners, and the many immigrants, who demand to be, and who should be, treated with dignity.

To treat others with dignity, it seems, renders one a neighbor worthy of respect. In the U.S., and in our present moment, we have yet to accomplish this.

Biopolitics and citizenship in Euripides’ Ion

a lecture by Dan-el Padilla Peralta

I'm here today to talk with you about the value of a play written in the fifth century BCE for contemporary discussions of race, racialization, and citizenship. That play is Euripides' Ion. And what I'll do over the next few minutes is give a brief overview of the context of the play itself and what forces in 5th century classical Greek and Athenian culture shape it. From there I'll provide an assessment of how the play can be used to invigorate conversations about citizenship and belonging with an emphasis on how these intersect with formulations of race. With Euripides' Ion, we can explore a couple of features of citizenship: citizenship as security or safety for some and not for others, early definitions of who can be counted as a legitimate citizen and who cannot, and ways that classical Greek ideas about citizenship continue to inform and inflect discussions about citizenship today. Here I'll be thinking in particular about the biopolitics of citizenship and how we understand the relationship between reproduction and citizenship.

“And in the third year after this in the archonshop of Antidotos, on account of the multitude of citizens, at Pericles’ proposal they decided that no one who had not been born of two citizen parents would have a share in the city.”

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This is a description of the Athenian citizenship law of 451 BCE, as preserved for us in the constitution of the Athenians. And this is a law that operates in the background to Euripides' Ion.

But first, The Suppliants

To make our way to the Ion, we'll start by thinking with one of his predecessor playwrights in classical Athens, Aeschylus, and a production of the playwright Aeschylus that also bears on questions of citizenship: The Suppliants. Aeschylus' The Suppliants raises a question that's important for our assessment of citizenship in classical Athens: "How can a space that is open to all protect me?" This play centers the story of immigrants pleading for protection and for this reason, it's received some take-up in contemporary adaptations of Greek myth. Among the most riveting and much discussed of these adaptations was Moni Ovadia’s production on the island of Sicily some years ago, a production that was staged with deliberate emphasis on and conscious attention to the EU’s treatment of migrants and refugees.

In one of the key scenes of Aeschylus' The Suppliants, the ruler Pelasgus attempts to have the immigrant women who've attached themselves to an altar of Zeus for supplication and protection moved away from the altar to a more open public space. The Chorus Leader responds, "How can a space that is open to all protect me?" In a recent essay, the philosopher Sara Brill has mulled over this question's implications, and I'll quote her:

"But the Chorus Leader's question — 'How can a space that is open to all protect me' — lays bare the conditions of democracy in an even more profound way. We can hear in it, a deep awareness of the relation between how humans bear the weight of symbolic life and the fragility of embodied existence. Will we be safe here in this shared and open space created by human agreement?"

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The labor of creating public spaces that protect the most vulnerable is an exacting labor, and its demands aren't always, and indeed are not usually, distributed equitably. These labors and their consequences are ones that Greek tragedies are quite interested in exploring. The labor of moving towards "a shared and open space that's created by human agreement" we see from some of these tragedies is incomplete if we limit ourselves to fumbling for abstractions without thinking long and hard about how the most vulnerable are made to feel in open spaces.

Greek tragedians

The Ion, which is a tragedy by the playwright Euripides, is where I'll try to ground some of that understanding that develops in this Greek context. This is a play that emerges in the course of the 5th century BCE's ongoing negotiations of Greek identity. And in order to get a sense of the play's place in Greek life, I'll give a brief overview of what Greek tragedy looks like during this period and who the major players in the production of tragedies in Athens were.

There are three canonical tragedians. There is, first of all, Aeschylus, who lived between the 520s and 456/455 BCE, and is the author of The Suppliants. He is an author who fights in the Greco Persian wars and who enjoys a prominently visible role in public life. He scores 13 victories for his plays at the Great Dionysia, the public festival where these plays were staged. Next we have Sophocles, who was 495 to 405 BCE, who is very politically engaged, very productive. In addition to putting on plays, over 120 of which we have titles for, he is also a player on the political scene. And finally, we have Euripides, who is 40 years younger than Aeschylus, 10 to 15 years younger than Sophocles, and who, by comparison to Aeschylus and Sophocles, is not quite as successful initially, but who becomes incredibly popular in later generations. He will come to outshine the other two playwrights, 19 of his plays survive.

Racialized reproduction

The Athenian citizenship law of 451 BCE is important for understanding one of Euripides' plays, the Ion. And to clarify the relationship of that citizenship law, I'll turn to a passage from Susan Lape's recent book. In Race and Citizen Identity in the Classical Athenian Democracy, Susan Lape writes:

"By requiring that future citizens have two native parents, the law fostered the idea that the citizen body was a descent group or genos in the specific sense of an interbreeding group. In so doing, the citizenship law brought new political salience to Athenian women and their reproductive work. [...] By identifying Athenian or native women as the only women capable of producing Athenian citizens, the law tapped into both gender and ethnic national or racial categories. To put it another way, the law attached ethnic national or racial salience to Athenian women and to their reproductive work. In this way, it created a regime of racialized reproduction."

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This regime of racialized reproduction is grounded in, among other things, the production and reproduction of myths on stage. And the philosopher Arlene Saxonhouse has given a lot of thought to this in her writing in Fear of Diversity. In particular, she's drawn attention to how the diversity entailed in heterosexual creation is at the center of some of the most anguished debates about citizenship and belonging in classical Athens.

Crucial to these debates and to the myths that coalesce around them is the premise that Athenian identity is rooted in the land of Attica. This is a racial script. It is a script of autochthony, of belongingness to the soil, and it's a bedrock principle of Athenian civic identity. The givenness and the constructedness of the biological, in this context, and the relationship between the biological and the land requires examination. Euripides' Ion gives us one framework within which to conduct that evaluation. In this play, we see the interrelation of sexual violence, civic origin stories, and structures of citizenship, all of which receive concentrated but powerful treatment in the play. The Ion is a play put on in the years after the Periclean citizenship law of 451 BCE. And one way of reading this play is as an extended meditation on who gets to feel safe and who does not get to feel safe in an Athenian context.

Who was the Ion for?

But first, let's dig a little deeper into the life and context of its author, Euripides. As I noted earlier, Euripides is the third of the canonical Athenian playwrights whose productions between them account for the lion's share of our knowledge about classical Greek tragedy and Greek intellectual culture in the fifth century. It's important to recognize that these plays are spaces for thinking-out-loud about issues of significance and salience for the Athenian community. All of these plays are put on at the Great Dionysia Festival in honor of the god Dionysus at Athens, for which three tragedians were chosen to compete. Each year, each tragedian had to stage four plays, and at the conclusion of the multi-day cycle of performances a victor was chosen. The three canonical Athenian playwrights about whom we know the most happen to have lived long and incredibly productive lives. There's much that we wish we knew about the staging of the plays themselves and their original incarnation. We're decently well-informed about their authors and about the festival context in which the performances took place, but the question of who precisely was allowed to be in the audience for these plays, plays whose roles were all acted by men, remains a point of contention.

If, as one school of thought holds, the overwhelming majority of those in the audience were men, then, as the philosopher Arlene Saxonhouse has commented, in the case of plays that have strong female roles such as Euripides' Ion, "the city of adult males saw on stage the powerful portrayal of women—women whose existence, as the playwrights reflected on the human condition, could not be denied as curtly as Pericles had chosen to do in his funeral oration." Here, Saxonhouse is referring to the funeral oration delivered by the Athenian statesman Pericles that's reserved for us in Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War. This is a funeral oration that sidelines women, not addressing them until the very end, where Pericles avails himself of a few very slighting remarks to these women after having spent much of the speech extolling the virtues of Athens.

Autochthony and Athenian civichood

We'll come back to that speech in a moment, but for now, I want to focus on how Euripides' Ion in particular brings out some of the tensions between gender roles and identities in civic space, and how these tensions in turn inform the representation of the biopolitics of citizenship and the biopolitics of race. Euripides' Ion, like many of the other Greek tragedies during the fifth century, constructs a space for the negotiation of fundamental questions concerning Athenian society's organization around sex/gender difference, precisely as this difference structures the physical and intersubjective spaces in which the plays are put on and are processed by their viewers.

The Ion foregrounds autochthony as a racial script before proceeding to more extensive comment on sexual assault and violence as charter-myths for the civic foundation story of Athens. This is a story that is of interest to many of our Athenian sources and many of our Greek sources on Athens. And in the history of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides has the Athenian statesmen, Pericles, spell out the implications of autochthony quite explicitly. "In this land of ours, they have always been the same people living from generation to generation up until now." The Ion invests this idea with some real heft by grounding Athenian roots in the soil of Attica. But here's where some of the tensions that are associated with this myth begin to come into focus. These tensions are at the heart of the conflicts in the play. 

For these tensions, it's important to have a vocabulary for thinking about race and for articulating race. And for this, we'll turn again to Susan Lape, who has argued that the idea of Athenian autochthony is a racial formation. With many definitions of race that we can bring to bear on the material in Euripides' Ion, I'm going to examine two that can provide us with a foundation for calibrating the relationship between these stories of autochthony and racial discourse in fifth century Athens.

The first is from Michael Omi and Howard Winant's classic Racial Formation In the United States: "Race is a concept," they explain, "which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies... an unstable and 'decentered' complex of social meanings constantly being transformed by political struggle.” For Omi and Winant, racial formation is a technology for constructing difference through typologies and hierarchies of the human body.

A second definition, one proposed by Barbara and Karen Fields in their 2012 book, Racecraft, has race "standing for the conception or the doctrine that nature produced humankind in distinct groups, each defined by inborn traits that its members share and that differentiate them from the members of other distinct groups of the same kind but of unequal rank."

It's the second definition that can help us get a grip on the racializing properties of autochthony as guiding the myths that are told about Athenians and that Athenians tell themselves about their origin: the collective embrace of the myth that Athenians descend from people who are literally born from the soil. This is the story that according to some of our sources begins with the god Hephaestus' effort to rape Athena, and in his failure, his ejaculation on the ground then produces Erechtheus, the first Athenian, is a story that separates Athens from other Greek communities. The story's racial underpinnings are suggestive of some of the strategies that were available to civic communities in the archaic and classical Greek world and communities that were seeking to reinvent themselves, especially in the fifth century BCE context. The myth of autochthony was important to an Athens on its way to claiming a kind of superpower or hegemonic status among other Greek city states, and who paired that rise to hegemonic status with escalating investments in slavery and colonialism. But the myth is also important for us if we want to use Euripides' Ion as a way of thinking about citizenship's dependence on fictions. 

Citizenship as fiction

This is a story that invests the Athenian state with an abstracted coherence. It's predicated on the intersection of civic identity with biological kinship, and it relies for its reproduction as a story that people buy into on its staging by Euripides among others. The fiction operates on a number of different levels, beginning with one of the fictions that is central to the narrative arc of Euripides' Ion itself. One of the fictions subjected to scrutiny in Euripides' Ion itself is the fiction of paternity. Xuthus, the husband of Creusa, one of the protagonists of the play, is tricked into believing that he is Ion's father. Germane to the work of interrogating Athenian citizenship's interaction with kinship and with false kinship as laid out in the Ion is another point brought by the philosopher Arlene Saxonhouse.

In Fear of Diversity, she has this very powerful insight into the significance of the birth of Erechtheus from the soil of Attica. This is a coming into being that productively varies the virgin birth or parthenogenesis myths that circulate in other Mediterranean and Eastern Mediterranean contexts. "The city in its idealized and mythologized origins,” Saxonhouse writes, "is peopled from a single source: the earth, and is not dependent on the diversity entailed in heterosexual creation."

On this reading, in its canonical form, the myth of Athens' origins erases both racial and sexual difference because it postulates a unitary Athenian community that doesn't descend from the licit and consensual union of a man and a woman. But what the Ion does is to challenge this in part by demonstrating that this origin myth is encased in all kinds of fabulations about, first of all, the consent or non-consent of those individuals who are necessary to the biopolitics of the Athenian state. And second, the participation, willing or unwilling, of folks from the outside who are required to legitimate the project of Athenian civichood, even as they are denied access to its full benefits.

Reproductive labor

I'll now set out three passages in the Ion that foreground several dimensions of the fundamental paradox of Athenian civichood. Namely, that there could be no Athenian civichood without the reproductive labor of Athenian women, even though Athenian men and the intellectual productions with which they were associated sought insistently to exclude or marginalize women from the necessary biopolitics of the city.

Beginning with lines 10 and 11 of Euripides' Ion, which tee up the centrality of sexual trauma and violence to the experiences of Creusa, one of the protagonists of the play. Early in the play, we receive a very brief description of the experience that Creusa has had. "Phoebus compelled Erechtheus' daughter Creusa / to accept his violent embrace," in conjunction with Creusa's words to Ion at lines 251 to 254, "Unhappy women! What things that gods ought err! And where / shall we turn for justice when we are being destroyed / by the unjust actions of those who are much stronger?"

These verses call up the constitutive violence by which the divine and human heteropatriarchy comes into being in Athens and how it enters into conversation with debates about the meanings and limits of justice, especially as these bear on the trauma of sexual assault. This trauma is excavated for its bearing on the content and extension of justice in the Athenian polity and it's presented to us, in the second set of lines I quoted, from the perspective of a victim. At the same time though, one of the more harrowing features of Euripides' Ion is that at the very end of the play, Creusa, the victim of the sexual assault, is made effectively to forget the trauma that she has experienced after rediscovering and reconnecting with the child who was born as a consequence of this sexual assault.

Access to citizenship

Another dimension of these debates concerning citizenship is brought out in the description of another of the characters whose arc is central to the plot of Euripides' Ion. This is Xuthus, Creusa's husband, for whom we get a brief description of his background, followed by more extensive presentation of his perspective in the play.

At lines 59 and following, we receive some background information about Creusa's husband, Xuthus: "...a war rose between / Athens and Chalcodon's people in Euboea; / Xuthus as an ally helped to end the strife / and though he was not a native, but Achaean / son of Aeolus, son of Zeus, the prize / he won was marriage to Creusa. But / in all these years, no children have been born."

What's noteworthy here is Creusa's marriage out to a foreigner for whom marriage into Athenian society is a reward. The implication of the phrase, "though he was not a native," is that normally marriage to Athenian women was reserved for Athenian-born men. In other words, that Athenian society was endogamous. And this is a state of affairs that is solidified by the Periclean citizenship law and the social opprobrium against exogamy that we can detect in the exclamation of Ion himself to Creusa at line 293: "A foreigner! How could he marry an Athenian!"

Middling ideology

Later on in the play, lines 485 to 490 and again at line 625 and following, we as readers are put in the position of being able to connect the dots between the play on the one hand and the elaboration of what Ian Morris and other scholars of Greek culture have termed a "middling ideology" in Greek culture. This middling ideology seeks systematically to level distinctions between Athenian male citizens, while also presupposing in the background that these male citizens will enjoy privileges that are denied to other more vulnerable or minoritized communities.

Here's the Chorus in Euripides' Ion: "For myself," the Chorus sings, "I would choose, rather than wealth / or a palace of kings, to rear / and love my own children: shame to him who prefers / a childless life, hateful to me. / May I cling to the life of modest possessions / enriched by children."

Ion himself channels the same ideological commitment. In the play, we hear him say, at 625, "I would prefer to live / as a happy citizen than be a king / who must choose to have the evil as his friends / and must abhor the good for fear of death. / You might reply that gold outweighs all this... Let me avoid distress, seek moderation."

This is a recapitulation of middling ideology. It's an ideology that values the capacity to enjoy a moderated existence as a member of the polity that comes with some obligations—having children, being a participant in the reproductive system that defines the capacity of the Athenian state to sustain itself—but that distinguishes sharply the average Athenian citizen from people aspiring to wealth, or seeking to accumulate wealth, or seeking to differentiate themselves from other citizens via the accumulation of goods. What makes this middling ideology particularly significant for our purposes is that it is really bound up with racial principles. It's bound up with autochthony and with an understanding of the enduring significance of autochthony to the constitution of Athenian civic life.

Biopolitics

I've been making use, from time to time, of the term biopolitics. And in order to clarify how autochthony and racialization work hand-in-hand, I need to say a few more words about what biopolitics entails–what the regulation of life and reproduction at the hands of the state have to do with the capacity of Athenians to develop and inhabit a biopolitical order. Anxieties about reproduction are at the heart of the Ion and other classical Athenian sources. One of Pericles's encouragements to those who have lost their children in the early stages of the Peloponnesian War is to keep making more babies. Not only because, as Pericles says, these new children will prevent you from brooding over those who are no more, but because, Pericles continues, they will be a help to the city, both in filling the empty places and in assuring her security: "For it is impossible for a man to put forward, fair and honest views about our affairs if he has not, like everyone else, children whose lives may be at stake."

Reproduction within the family unit and its relevance to the affairs of the city state are subject to continuing interest in later decades of Greek historical writing and Greek political theory. So for instance, in Aristotle's Politics, a lot of space and time is given over to explaining how, why, and under what circumstances children should be brought into the world for the purposes of defending and shoring up the city state.

One of the things that's at stake in the interweaving of citizenship and politics, in our Athenian and Greek sources, is nothing less than the indexing of full civic identity to childbearing capacity: if one cannot have children or chooses not to have children, can one even be a good citizen? Can one even be a citizen in the first place? Does legitimate civic standing require the production of children? To what extent should the state actively intervene in the management of the family so as to promote practices it deems most beneficial or conducive to the overall good of the citizen body? To what extent should the state interfere in people's exercise of agency over their own bodies? These persist as living and explosive issues in Greek philosophy from the late fifth century, well into the fourth century BCE.

And in the case of Euripides' Ion, though, we are also faced with still another dimension of citizenship that brings out the implications of the Periclean citizenship law for not just the biopolitics, but the substantive rights held by members of the Athenian city state.

At lines 670 to 675, Ion says, "If I may do so / I pray my mother is Athenian / so that through her I may have rights of speech. / But when a foreigner comes into a city / of pure blood, though in name a citizen / his mouth's a slave: he has no right of speech."

In bringing up biopolitics earlier, I was channeling the French philosopher Michel Foucault. What I want to do in thinking about this passage from Euripides' Ion is develop one of Foucault's insights into the relationship between biopolitics and the capacity to speak in the city. And to that end, I'll read a passage from one of Foucault's lectures. In his lectures on “The Government of Self and Others”, which were originally delivered at the Collège de France, 1982 to 1983, Foucault devotes a section to a brief discussion of the Ion, in which he writes:

"We see someone in search of his birth who does not know his mother, and so who wants to know what city and community he belongs to. Why does he want to know this? He wants to know precisely so that he knows if he has the right to speak. And since he is searching for this woman, he hopes that the mother he will eventually discover will be Athenian and thus belong to his community, this dēmos, et cetera, and that by virtue of this birth, he himself will have the right to speak freely, to have parrēsia. For he says, in a town 'without stain,' that is to say, within a town which keeps its traditions, in a town in which the city state, the constitution, the politeia has not been debased by tyranny or despotism or by the abusive integration of people who are not truly citizens, so in a town which has remained without stain and in which the politeia has remained what it should be, only those who are citizens have parrēsia. Beyond this general theme which structures the search for this single personage's mother and which links the right to speak to membership of the dēmos, it's worth keeping hold of two things. The first," Foucault continues, "is that the right to speak, parrēsia, is transmitted in this case by the mother. Second, you see too that the stranger status is defined and appears in contrast with that of citizens who have the right to speak, and so far as the town is without stain, his tongue is servile. Exactly: his mouth is a slave. To ge stoma doulon. That is to say, the right to speak, the restriction on the freedom of political discourse is total. He does not possess this freedom of political discourse; he does not possess parrēsia."

Colonial citizenship and autochthony

At the conclusion of Euripides' Ion, we are left with several questions, all of which Euripides poses to the audience and invites Athenians, and possibly non-Athenians in the audience, to engage. The first concerns the extent and expansiveness of citizenship in the Athenian world. In the play’s final movements, we see a vision of the future after Ion, the future of the community that will descend from Ion as that community extends across the Aegean Sea, and in the process, anticipates by several centuries the substantive colonization that the Athenian empire will itself undertake in the fifth century BCE. So, foregrounded for Euripides' audience is the question of what it means to be a citizen of an Athenian community that has extended well beyond Athens, but that is still claiming this rootedness in the soil of Attica. How do the imperatives of autochthony, and imperialism, and settler colonialism interact with each other? But relevant to this question is another one that is more intimately embedded in the reproductive logic of this community. It is a question that arises on either end of the Athenian citizenship law of 451 BCE and that, as given shape and form by the experiences of Creusa in the play, guides the play's own intervention in these debates, and also steers the conversation that I think Euripides intended his audience to have.

What is the place of women, and what is the place of gender and gendering in the construction of the Athenian civic community?

Noted earlier that in Thucydides' account of the Periclean funeral oration, held and delivered on the occasion of the commemoration of the war dead in the early stages of the Peloponnesian War, the Athenian statesman Pericles, instrumental in the passage of the citizenship law, effectively sidelines women, addressing them directly only at the very end of his speech. At the same time, though, at various points in the speech, it is clear that without the reproductive labor of women in the Athenian community, there is no future to the Athenian community. The expectation and the burden is that for those families who have lost children in the conflict, this reproductive labor will continue to be carried out. This labor imposes demands, it triggers tensions, and some of these tensions are ones that we can read into Euripides' Ion. And that I think in some cases, especially when we see the fraught conversations between Xuthus and Creusa, on the one hand, and Creusa and Ion on the other, are ones that the playwright very intentionally frames in the course of developing the narrative momentum of the play itself.

A final question to take up concerns the formation of the Athenian civic body along racialized premises in the fifth century BCE. From the beginning of my effort to contextualize Euripides' Ion, I've drawn attention to the works of Susan Lape and others that have made a pretty compelling case for understanding the citizenship law as racializing, in that, among other things, it locks Athenian identity and Athenian citizenship into a biological and birthright paradigm. What one can do to recover more fully the dynamics of racialization in the Athenian world of the fifth century BCE and the greater Greek world beyond Athens, is to think about how the citizenship law intersects with or diverges from developments in other Greek communities.

Here, it's important to emphasize that by Euripides' time, and certainly in the generations after Euripides, his plays and other plays put on stage in Athens in the fifth century BCE are circulating to other parts of the Greek world. How are communities, Greek speaking communities in the south of Italy, for example, or in Sicily, or on the Ionian coast of Asia Minor, wrestling with the content and messaging of this play? How does this play and other plays invite them to engage questions concerning the Greekness and the definition of Greekness that was such a contested topic in Athens itself and in other communities during this period? Most importantly of all, from the perspective of thinking with and about race in the fifth century BCE and after, how are racial concepts embedded in the vocabulary and concept worlds of Greeks themselves?

We have noted that autochthony, the myth of Athenian rootedness in the soil, is one potent mechanism by which Athenians and other Greek speakers lay out a set of authoritative claims concerning the coherence, the presumed biological coherence, and ontological coherence, of a community. There are, of course, other ways of imagining the formation of communities that were available to and were trafficked heavily by Greek speakers during this period. For instance, migration narratives and the idea that some Greek communities had originated not from the soil, but directly as a result of diasporic or migration and its trajectories over the Mediterranean world in the seventh, sixth, and fifth centuries BCE create circumstances for other Greek speaking communities to assert that their identities had come into being and shape in the course of movement, not in the course of stasis or residence in one place. 

Athenians themselves are on the move, and as I noted a minute ago, one of the tensions that's bubbling to the surface in the period when this play is put on is how to reconcile the facts of Athenian mobility with the presumed facts of a kind of proto-national ethnic racial coherence. That tension and its foregrounding in Euripides' Ion makes it an exceptionally suggestive text for thinking about dilemmas of citizenship, belonging, and racialization. And its confrontation with biopolitics and the imperatives of reproduction also make it a valuable text for thinking about the overlays and intersections of racialization and gender.

Course description

The extrajudicial murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor have brought renewed and overdue attention to the fatal designs of civic inequality. These designs—and the debates over the assignment, withholding, or deprivation of citizen status and civic protections from which they emerge—have a long and violent history. In this course we will attempt to map a history of citizenship as concept and institution from the ancient Mediterranean world to the 21st century. Some of the questions to be tackled include: who/what is a citizen? What are the prerogatives and rights that come with citizenship? Who is eligible to be—or become—a citizen? (How) are racial and gendered exclusions wired into the historical legacies and present-day practice of citizenship? How is citizenship imagined and narrated? What does it mean to be a global citizen? Although we will make much fuss over the ancient Mediterranean in the first half of the course, one objective of this course is to determine whether and to what degree such an orientation makes sense. To arrive at this determination, we will experiment with a range of different historical and conceptual genealogies for modern frameworks of citizenship. Our readings will run the gamut from poetry and narrative fiction to political theory and narrative nonfiction.

Course expectations and policy

For our Zoom lectures and precepts, we do not have policies on clothing: wear whatever you want, so long as you’re comfortable (but wear something). And while we would love to see your radiant facial expressions, we also understand if you need to turn your camera off for all or a portion of a Zoom. Please feel free to use a background filter; we are happy to supply themed ones. If, at any point, the course content or discussions make you so uncomfortable that you feel the need to turn off the camera and/or disconnect from the call, please touch base with us afterwards via email. If it’s concerning a subject that you would rather not address with us directly, please consider consulting with me.

Grading

Weekly journaling

We ask that, starting in Week 2, you initiate a conversation with someone not enrolled in the course (a member of your family or your community; a friend; a mentor) about one of the readings for that week; and that you then write a short paragraph about this conversation, not to exceed one page double-spaced, in which you summarize how you explained the reading to your conversational interlocutor and what their response to that summary was. The choice of conversational medium (face-to-face, phone, Zoom/Skype, email etc.) is entirely up to you and can vary from week to week. We’ll provide you with a link to a Google Drive folder for uploading your paragraphs, which you should aim to do no later than the end of day each Friday. Your instructors will check this folder three times to track your progress: at the end of Weeks 4, 8, and 12. With your permission (which we will solicit in advance), we may quote from your paragraphs in lecture and discussion. The end-of-term grade for this unit will be a holistic assessment of your paragraphs. You’re allowed to miss two weeks out of eleven (i.e. we will evaluate only nine of your paragraphs).

Take-home midterm

This open-book exam will be administered in two parts. Part A will consist of two argumentative essays that you’ll write in response to set prompts (we’ll give you four options). Our expectation is that you take two hours on Part A. Part B will consist of two creative essays: for the first, you’ll draw up a dialogue with one of the authors you’ve read up to that point in which you criticize their position on a specific aspect of citizenship (and they respond in turn to your criticisms); for the second, you will write in the style of another of the authors you’ve read, expanding and elaborating on one of their main points. Our expectation is that you take two hours on Part B as well. 

Take-home final

This open-book exam will consist of three parts: a reflection on your journaled conversations in which you take stock of directions taken and not taken; a design project in which you draw up a constitution for a new national government; and an argumentative essay that asks you to critique an author from the course’s first half from the position of an author in the course’s second half. Our expectation is that you take three hours on this exam.

Classroom culture and expectations

In order to build and maintain a collaborative and affirmative environment, we encourage you to practice care and generosity in your interventions; to always to make space for others to participate equitably in the conversation; and to be on guard against those habits of discourse that militate against inclusion. Please hold us, your instructors, to that same standard as well.

Your ability to access the course material on your own terms and engage with it to the maximum extent possible is of paramount importance to us. We’re always happy to discuss your learning needs and how best to accommodate them.

Finally, we wish to draw attention to the presence in many of our readings of practices and language that are implicated in or actively embrace colonialism, slavery, and sex- and gender-based violence and discrimination. We will need to practice special care, for ourselves and each other, when subjecting this material to critical scrutiny.

Course texts

Euripides, Complete Tragedies III (Chicago)
Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy (Penguin)
Aristotle, Politics (Hackett)
Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk (Norton)
Vitoria, Political Writings (Cambridge)
Rankine, Citizen

Questions of citizenship, belonging, and ­national identity shape contemporary life. Who is and who is not a citizen, and how this is determined across national and racial lines, has a deeply rooted history. In ancient Greece, tragedians like Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides responded to their particular political moment with plays that demanded audiences to consider the nature of citizenship and nationality within their society. Dan-el Padilla Peralta expounds on how Euripides’ Ion deals with the question of citizenship and how it resonates across the long history of racialization.

To begin a classroom discussion about the myth (or curse) of Ham, undergraduates can consider what they know about stories and histories and what they understand as truth. In the case of Ham, the claim is for an explanatory truth: why it’s reasonable, even righteous, to enslave other people. A premodern critical race perspective on such a claim looks to where the idea comes from, what it has influenced, and how it has evolved. The myth of Ham can help students consider the origins of culturally determined truths.

Starting with student experience

Students are often more engaged when they start with their own experiences. As societies change so do people’s understanding about the meaning of events in the past. On an individual level, students might share ideas about:

• A historical event that they understand differently now than what they remember learning in elementary school. Example: causes of the U.S. Civil War.

Destabilizing history

Sometimes history is used as a substitute for causality: because this happened, things are the way that they are. Students can consider how the lens of premodern critical race scholarship on the myth of Ham turns this idea around. 

• Which came first: slavery, or the idea that slavery is divinely sanctioned?
• How does tracing the origins of the myth of Ham provide evidence that stories about the past don’t just change—that they are purposefully retold in ways that suit the needs of the storyteller? 
• Do students see history(ies) as fundamentally unstable and multi-vocal? How do the variations in the stories about Ham and the curse expand student thinking about how truth, or beliefs, evolve over time?

Racialization as marking

Thinking about racialization means wondering about how the “marking” of a person (or a kind of person) would cause people to judge an individual or group. 

• What is a somatic normative? 
• Do students see modern variations in social attitudes toward eye or nose shapes?
• Is there a standard of beauty? Standards about tattoos? Or suntans? 

History as a record of idea shifting

Students can think about history as a record of people’s changing ideas, not just events that happen to groups. A discussion related to the myth of Ham could include:

• What kinds of new knowledge about the world probably caused new perspectives on food, dress, or language?
• How might changing perspectives on the world cause individuals to seek scriptural passages that would explain why some groups had more power than others? 

How do we counter historical narratives?

Because the myth of Ham has been “wielded to justify by divine decree the colonization, enslavement, and oppression of Black Africans,” what do students think they could or should do (as writers, or activists, or in other roles) to counteract this racist rationalization? Is there a Throughline to today’s influencers and the impact of social media?

Ham and the rationale for colonization

European Christian nations used the Hamitic myth as a rationale for slavery and the colonial endeavors of various empires. In the 15th century the Portuguese began a regular program of slave-raids. Gomes Eannes de Azurara, a scholar in the court of Prince Henri the Navigator, references the curse of Ham in The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea, a travel narrative that glorifies the nation of Portugal and the colonization of Africa:

Black were Moors like the others, though their slaves, in accordance with ancient custom, which I believe to have been because of the curse which, after the Deluge, Noah laid upon his son Cain [sic], cursing him in this way: that his race should be subject to all the other races of the world. And from this race these blacks are descended, as wrote the Archbishop Don Rodric of Toledo and Joesphus in his book on the Antiquities of the Jews, and Wlter, with other authors who have spoken of the generations of Noah, from the time of his going out on the Ark.

George Best, a chronicler of travel narratives, also used the curse theory to define racial difference. These texts were hugely influential in early modern England, and helped create British society’s understanding of a larger world they had never seen. George Best, in A true discourse of the late voyages of discoverie. . . (1578) wrote:

Blacknesse proceedeth of some naturall infection of the first inhabitants of that Countrey, and so all the whole progenie of them descended, all still polluted with the same blot of infection. Therefore it shal not be farre from our purpose, to examine the first originall of these blacke men, and how by lineall discente, they haue hitherto continued thus blacke.

Best then goes on to recount what had become a common argument, that God cursed Ham’s son, Chus [sic], and his descendants with Blackness. He thus concludes,

And of this blacke & cursed Chus came al these blacke Moores which are in Africa... the cause of the Ethiopians blacknesse, is the curse & natural infection of bloud, & not the distemperature of the clymate.

In her 1969 article, “The Hamitic hypothesis; its origin and function in time perspective,” Edith Sanders writes, “It becomes clear then that the hypothesis is symptomatic of the nature of race relations, that it has changed its content if not its nomenclature through time, and that it has become a problem of epistemology.” This story lingers in the minds of Europeans, moving outward, adapted as needed, while the colonial occupation of most of the world continues—like a virus, it spreads.

Chouki El Hamel writes in Black Morocco:

Not until the Western European Enlightenment and the rise of empirical science did the religious account of the origins of race start to crumble, only to give rise, unfortunately, to racist pseudoscientific concepts of human classifications based on the unfortunate distortion of Darwin’s theory, namely social Darwinism. But even the conceptual revolution of the Enlightenment did not prevent the 19th century European travelers to Africa from referring to the Hamitic theory in their travel accounts. As contemporary historian William McKee Eans concluded: ‘By studying the shifting ethnic identifications of the ‘sons of Ham,’ by following their journey in myth from the land of Canaan to the land of Guinea, we can perhaps learn something about the historical pressures that shaped modern white racial attitudes.'

Just as spices travel so does the sinful idea of the Hamitic curse. The Hamitic myth and its racist connotations were used in the religious and cultural history of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Ham, chattel slavery, and the Americas

The curse of Ham mythology, a mainstay of early modern European thought around race and national identity, was a primary tool of propaganda in early America to condone and ensure the longevity of chattel slavery. Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning gives some brief examples of this transfer of thought from Europe to America and its weaponization in the infant nation:

In a 1615 address for the planters in Ireland and Virginia, the Reverend Thomas Cooper said that White Shem, one of Noah’s three sons, ‘shall be lord over’ the ‘cursed race of Cham’—meaning Noah’s son Ham—in Africa. Future Virginia politician George Sandys also conjured curse theory to degrade Blackness. In a 1620 paraphrase of Genesis, future politician Thomas Peyton wrote of Cain, or ‘the Southern man,’ a ‘black deformed elf,’ and 'the Northern white, like unto God himself.’ Five years later, Clergyman released the gargantuan four-volume Hakluytus Posthumus of travel manuscripts left to him by his mentor, Richard Hakluyt. Purchas blasted the ‘filthy sodomits, sleepers, ignorant, beast, disciples of Cham . . . to whom the blacke darknesse is reserved for ever.’ These were the ideas about African people circulating throughout England and the English colonies as African people were being hauled into Britannia on slave ships.

Frederick Douglass, in the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, published in 1849, writes of the curse of Ham’s fragility, and the unstable border between white and Black, in a specifically American context:

Every year brings with it multitudes of this class of slaves. It was doubtless in consequence of a knowledge of this fact, that one great statesman of the south predicted the downfall of slavery by the inevitable laws of population. Whether this prophecy is ever fulfilled or not, it is nevertheless plain that a very different-looking class of people are springing up at the south, and are now held in slavery, from those originally brought to this country from Africa; and if their increase will do no other good, it will do away the force of the argument, that God cursed Ham, and therefore American slavery is right. If the lineal descendants of Ham are alone to be scripturally enslaved, it is certain that slavery at the south must soon become unscriptural; for thousands are ushered into the world, annually, who, like myself, owe their existence to white fathers, and those fathers most frequently their own masters.

This passage from Douglass is significant because it showcases how the instability of race is not only a contemporary concern. These constructions have been built upon shaky ground.

During the American Civil War and Reconstruction, Benjamin Palmer, the “founding father” of the Southern Presbyterian church, a famous orator, and the founder of Rhodes College, frequently leaned on the curse of Ham mythology to persuade the public of his secessionist politics. A vehement supporter of segregation, and in particular, the enslavement of Black Africans, the mythology of Ham became his primary means of the moral and religious justification for slavery in his many sermons.

One of the many examples of these speeches is Palmer’s “National Responsibility before God,” delivered June 13, 1861. Stephen R. Haynes, in his book Noah’s Curse: The Biblical Justification of American Slavery, notes:

“In ‘National Responsibility before God,’ Palmer relied on Noah's curse to explain the historical position of the African, to confirm the dependency of the American Negro, and to provide a theological justification for slavery. He established the importance of Genesis 9 by noting that ‘if we ascend the stream of history to its source, we find in Noah's prophetic utterances to his three sons, the fortunes of mankind presented in perfect outline.’ The benediction given to Shem, Palmer writes, marks him for a ‘destiny predominantly religious,’ and the divine trust of the Hebrew Semites until the time of Christ was to ‘testify for the unity of God against the idolatry of mankind.’ Turning to the descendants of Noah's son Japheth, Palmer contends that the ‘enlargement’ promised him in Noah's blessing can be seen in ‘the hardy and aggressive families of this stock [that] have spread over the larger portion of the earth's surface, fulfilling their mission as the organ of human civilization.’ According to Palmer, the task of civilizing the world, assigned first to Greeks and Romans and later to the various nations of Europe, has been realized through Japhetic achievements in the scientific, artistic, and public realms. Finally, Palmer delineates the fortunes of Ham as indicated in Noah's prophecy:

‘Upon Ham was pronounced the doom of perpetual servitude—proclaimed with double emphasis, as it is twice repeated that he shall be the servant of Japheth and the servant of Shem. Accordingly, history records not a single example of any member of this group lifting itself, by any process of self‐development, above the savage condition. From first to last their mental and moral characteristics, together with the guidance of Providence, have marked them for servitude; while their comparative advance in civilization and their participation in the blessings of salvation, have ever been suspended upon this decreed connexion with Japhet and with Shem.’”

Ham in our contemporary culture

The curse of Ham mythology is also still a part of our artistic and cultural development, alluded to over and over again in literature, television, and art. Many Black artists, writers, and entertainment creators have used it strategically in their art-making, developing a critical frame in which viewers and readers can question the implications of racial difference, and creating counter narratives to reclaim the story as one of their own. 

Sula by Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison’s Sula alludes to the Hamitic myth from the consciousness of a white bargeman who finds Chicken Little’s drowned body. This is a moment in which Black people’s deaths are not mourned, but are merely an inconvenience to white people:

“A bargeman, poling away from the shore, found Chicken late that afternoon stuck in some rocks and weeds, his knickers ballooning about his legs. He would have left him there but noticed that it was a child, not an old black man, as it first appeared, and he prodded the body loose, netted it and hauled it aboard. He shook his head in disgust at the kind of parents who would drown their own children. When, he wondered, will those people ever be anything but animals, fit for nothing but substitutes for mules, only mules didn’t kill each other the way n—s did. He dumped Chicken Little into a burlap sack and tossed him next to some egg crates and boxes of wool cloth. Later, sitting down to smoke on an empty lard tin, still bemused by God’s curse and the terrible burden his own kind had of elevating Ham’s sons, he suddenly became alarmed by the thought that the corpse in this heat would have a terrible odor, which might get into the fabric of his woolen cloth. He dragged the sack away and hooked it over the side, so that the Chicken’s body was half in and half out of the water.”

The Malediction of Cham 

Visual and performance artist Marielle Plaisir’s series The Malediction of Cham, reimagines Blackness—the black in the paintings is created through the layering of many colors, rather than using black paint straight from the tube. Plaisir shows the multitudes that exist in Blackness and questions the history that has pushed Black people into a realm of difference. 

‍Black and holy

Nina Peton, an anthropologist who did field work in Morocco in the 1950’s, collected a narrative on the Blackness of the Harratin in the Draa valley: 

“The Harratin relate that they are the descendants of Noah’s second son, Ham, and that once upon a time they used to be white. One day, however, Ham protected his head during a heavy rain-storm by carrying the Koran on top of it. The rain was so heavy that it washed all the characters of the holy book on to Ham’s skin; these characters, being sacred, were inedible, and so they turned Ham and his offspring black forever!”

This is the power of bringing truth to the stories we are given. In this counter narrative, Blackness is no curse, it is a sacred gift.

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Works cited

Best, George. A true discourse of the late voyages of discoverie, for finding of a passage to Cathaya by the Northwest, under the conduct of Martin Forbisher Generall: Divided into three Bookes. London, England: The Argonaut Press, 1938.  

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Boston, MA: Anti-Slavery Office, 1849.  

Eannes de Azurara, Gomes. The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea. Translated by Charles Raymond Beazley and Edgar Prestage. London, England: Printed for the Hakluyt Society, 1896.  

Haynes, Stephen R. Noah’s Curse: The Biblical Justification of American Slavery. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2002.  

Kendi, Ibram X. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. New York, NY: Bold Type Books, 2016.

Morrison, Toni. Sula. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.  

Sanders, Edith R. “The Hamitic Hypothesis; Its Origin and Functions in Time Perspective.” The Journal of African History 10, no. 4 (1969): 521–32. http://www.jstor.org/stable/179896.

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The biblical origins

The “curse” of Ham mythology begins with the Old Testament. The story goes: Ham sees Noah sleeping naked and tells his brothers, Shem and Japheth. His brothers then cover up Noah’s nakedness with a cloth. When Noah wakes, he blesses Shem and Japheth for covering him, but curses Ham’s son Canaan, and thus his whole lineage, to be servants of his brothers.  

King James version - Genesis 9:22-26  
22 And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without.
23 And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father's nakedness.
24 And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him.
25 And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.
26 And he said, Blessed be the Lord God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.

Canaan’s associations with Blackness, with Africa, with nations and racial categories do not exist in the Bible’s telling of the story. The initial connections with race and the categorization of people by race comes from retellings and manipulations of this story in the Talmud, medieval Islamic scholarship, and early history texts.  

The myth rears its ugly head

In the Babylonian Talmud, a collection of rabbinic writings that date back to the 6th century, racial distinctions are clearly evident with respect to the sons of Noah. In the rabbinic debates of the 2nd-5th centuries, early scholars were trying to develop an understanding of the peoples of the Earth and of the world around them. They used the only framework they had and knew: the Bible. Attempting to classify people who didn’t fit the somatic image of themselves—in particular, Black people—they rationalized this difference as being a result of the curse.  

Yaakov ven Yitzchak Ashkenazi (1550-1628), an expert in rabbinic literature, wrote (as translated by Paul Isaac Hershon), “Noah said to Ham, ‘Thy children shall be dark and black.’ These are the Ethiopians and the Negroes, which have descended from Ham, on account of the curse.”

In some translations of the Babylonian Talmud, there is an assumption or conflation that Ham was blamed for castrating his father Noah—not just seeing him naked. There are many different versions of the myth, with many different implications about what Ham “did” to Noah upon seeing him naked, from castration and mockery to rape and incest. Regardless of the interpretation, the ends are the same: Ham is no bystander, he is an active agent of sin. Compared to the biblical version, this is a radical revision.  

In a 20th century translation in Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis by Robert Graves and Raphael Patai, Noah said:

“‘Now I cannot beget the fourth son whose children I would have ordered to serve you and your brothers! Therefore it must be Canaan, your first born, whom they enslave. And since you have disabled me from doing ugly things in blackness of night, Canaan’s children shall be born ugly and black! Moreover, because you twisted your head around to see my nakedness, your grandchildren’s hair shall be twisted into kinks, and their eyes red; again because your lips jested at my misfortune, theirs shall swell; and because you neglected my nakedness, they shall go naked, and their male members shall be shamefully elongated!’ Men of this race are called Negroes, their forefather Canaan commanded them to love theft and fornication, to be banded together in hatred of their master and never to tell the truth.”

This is the seed of the story as we now know it. Ham’s curse of servitude was racialized.  

The tendrils of this implication are wildly pervasive: Blackness, as a result of this story, is a curse, meaning it is associated with sin, with evil. And to widen that scope, the connection between Blackness, sin, and nations—“These are the Ethiopians and the Negroes, which have descended from Ham, on account of the curse”—means that entire nations and communities of Black people are condemned to servitude, and to the assumption that they are, by Godly decree, inferior.    

Ham, race, and the early Islamic world

Evidence of the acceptance of the Hamitic story can be found in the work of early Muslim scholars. In Arabia in the 9th and 10th centuries, the majority of enslaved people were Black Ethiopians whose subjugation was justified because of their Blackness and the negative cultural perceptions that being Black had in Arab culture.  

The racial aspect of the Hamitic curse was adopted in Arabic literature in a manner that allowed race to become associated with slavery and lesser peoples. The so-called “Hamitic curse” was interwoven with social status and pre-existing racial prejudices to justify racial discrimination at odds with the principles of Islam.  

Various scholars such as al-Yaqʿubi and al-Tabari mention the curse of Ham in their histories and incorporate a racialized worldview, wherein the sons of Noah make up distinct racial categories or nations. In Tarikh al-Tabari, the Hamitic myth is used to classify people into good and bad races, Semites and Hamites, reinforcing not only a racial division, but a national one.  

“Nuh awoke from his sleep and learnt what had happened he cursed Kan‘an b. Ham but did not curse Ham. Of his posterity are the qibt, the Habasha, and the Hind. Kan‘an was the first of the sons of Nuh to revert to the ways of the sons of Qabil (Cain) and indulged in distractions and singing and made flutes, drums, guitars and cymbals and obeyed Satan in vain amusements. Nuh divided the earth between his sons, assigning Sam the middle of the earth…and to Ham the land of the west and the coasts (sawahil) [...]. After they had crossed the Nile of Egypt the descendants of Kush son of Ham, namely the Habasha and the Sudan, split in two groups. These were the Zaghawa, HBSH, Qaqu, Marawiyyun, Maranda, Kawkaw and Ghana”
- al-Yaʿqubi

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“Ham begat all those who are black and curly haired, while Japheth begat all those who are full-faced with small eyes, and Shem begat everyone who is handsome of face with beautiful hair. Noah prayed that the hair of Ham’s descendants would not grow beyond their ears, and wherever his descendants met the children of Shem, the latter would enslave them…. Shem begat the Arabs, Persians, and Byzantines, in all of whom there is good. Japheth begat the Turks, Slavs, Gog, and Magog, in none of whom there is good. Ham begat the Copts, Sudanese, and Berbers.”
- al-Tabari

As people of the Middle Ages were sorting out the concepts of nations and continents, arranging them by their peoples and their religions, the concerns of national division became a larger part of the ever-evolving mythology. These decisions are inconsistent among texts and authors, and frequently texts contradict themselves, evidence that this was a changing, chimera of a story.  

By defining “good” nations and “bad” nations, medieval scholars were developing religiously based rationales for racial, ethnic, and religious differences—many rooted anti-Blackness.

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Works cited

al-Tabari, Abu Jaʿfar Muhammad b. Jarir. The History of Al-Tabari: Prophets and Patriarchs, vol. 2. Translated by William M. Brinner. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1986.  

al-Yaʿqubi, Abu l-ʿAbbas Ahmad b. Abi Yaʿqub. Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History. Edited by J. F. P. Hopkins and Nehemia Levtzion. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1981.  

El Hamel, Chouki. Black Morocco: A History of Slavery, Race, and Islam. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2013.  

Graves, Robert, and Raphael Patai. Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964.  

Yitzchak Ashkenazi, Yaakov ben. Tzeénah Ureénah: “Go Ye and See”: A Rabbinical Commentary on Genesis. Translated by Paul Isaac Hershon. London, England: Hodder and Stoughton, 1885.

Course description  

This course examines the legacies and afterlives of slavery in mass incarceration and modern-day policing. In recent years, there has been growing public awareness that mass incarceration has its roots in slavery and that racial bias infects all aspects of our criminal injustice system. However, our nation has yet to reckon with the reality that America’s systems of policing and mass criminalization have histories rooted in white fear—not merely of Black people, or even Black resistance, but of the very notion of Black freedom. Therefore, this course examines how, from the founding of the nation, Black people’s desire for freedom led fearful whites to establish a network of laws, policies and social practices that laid a durable foundation for systems of racial and social control that continue to exist in modified forms today. Creating a precedent for state policing and social control that would haunt future generations of Black people in America, state and federal authorities implemented a complex web of legal codes, patrols, and state militias that monitored and governed Black people’s lives in sickening detail, ensuring that whites were empowered to use all means—legal and extralegal—to control Black lives. This course helps us to understand how and why these systems emerged, and why policing has become such a problem in American society that it infiltrates and undermines nearly every Black family and community across the nation, even in the 21st century.  

Course synopsis

This course begins by examining policing and incarceration in the contemporary moment. We will discuss the recent murders of Black people by police, including the tragic deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. And we will explore the rise and structure of the modern police state in the United States, particularly the role of mass incarceration in Black communities.  

Then, in an effort to locate the origins of policing in Black communities, we will analyze the historical evolution of surveillance and policing. As this course reveals, government policing of Black people in mainland North America began almost concurrently with the introduction of slavery itself. Within two decades after Africans landed in Virginia in 1619, colonial lawmakers began drafting legal codes defining slavery and limiting enslaved Africans’ rights. By the late 17th century, slave laws became increasingly draconian, particularly as panic about Black rebellion intensified. White colonists lived in deep fear of their enslaved human property—a fear that proliferated throughout all thirteen colonies, and resulted in laws granting white people “absolute power and authority” over Black people. In the years that followed, the Haitian Revolution and the subsequent rebellions it inspired prompted widespread anxiety among whites in the United States and caused white governmental authorities to enact increasingly despotic laws, targeting men, women, and children.  

Even after slavery’s legal demise, local, state, and federal authorities continued to monitor and police Black communities. Most southern states passed Black Codes, which scrutinized and governed Black people’s movements and empowered the police and the militia to monitor and punish them for any and all violations. As during enslavement, Black women were especially subject to physical and sexual violence at the hands of police. In subsequent decades, state and federal authorities persisted in their mission to monitor and sabotage Black liberatory leaders and organizations. Most famously, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)’s notorious counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) targeted Dr. Martin Luther Jr., Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) and others, seeking to “prevent the rise of a messiah who could unify” the Black community. And by the late 20th century, the devastating loophole in the 1 Amendment, which banned slavery “except as a punishment for crime,” gave rise to the afterlives of slavery: racial profiling, mass incarceration, and modern-day surveillance and policing. Therefore, this course concludes with a detailed examination of contemporary policing, surveillance, and mass incarceration.  

Course content / trigger warning

Given this course’s focus on violence—physical, psychological, and sexual—there may be times that the course content could be disturbing, even traumatizing for some students. If you suspect that specific material is likely to be emotionally challenging for you, I am available to discuss any concerns you may have before the subject comes up in class. Even so, I am aware that it’s not always possible to predict one’s emotional reactions, so if you ever wish to discuss your personal responses to course material with the class, or with me individually afterwards, I welcome such discussions as an appropriate part of our classwork.

In addition, if you ever feel the need to step away during a class discussion, you may always do so without academic penalty. You will, however, be responsible for any material you miss. If you need to leave the room for a significant time, please obtain notes from another student or see me individually to discuss the situation.

Classroom philosophy  

Your instructor holds the perspective that all classes are essentially intercultural encounters—among individuals in the class, between the readers and any given author, and among the authors, the students, and the professor. We are all learning how to effectively learn from one another. Such a classroom requires particular capacities and commitments on our part. It also requires mutual effort in helping each other understand the course material and the differing interpretative positions we may bring to a more complex understanding of the material. While each of us seeks to advance our own knowledge, we are also a community in which we are each responsible to help the other members of the community learn effectively.

In an effort to enhance our learning experience, we expect that students and instructors will commit to do the following:  

• Acquire and utilize intellectual skills and capacities that will enable us to work effectively with the complexities of the course material.
• Develop increased self-knowledge and knowledge of others.
• Understand how the material we are studying relates to our own previous learning, backgrounds, and experiences, and how we can use and apply our new knowledge effectively.
• Develop the ability to critique material in a mature manner using our own previous learning and experiences as part of the critique when appropriate.
• Develop the communication skills that facilitate our learning and our ability to listen, read, reflect, and study to understand.
• Remain engaged and in communication even when the course material or discussion is confusing or upsetting, by recognizing that understanding does not imply agreement.
• Respect everyone’s ideas and values even when we disagree.

Learning outcomes

By the end of this course, students will be able to: 

1. Analyze and interpret primary source materials.

2. Speak and write critically about secondary historical sources by examining diverse interpretations of past events and ideas in their historical contexts.

3. Understand and analyze the origins and development of policing and mass incarceration in Black communities.

Example early paper assignment (referred back to at the end)

The first two weeks of this term will be dedicated to exploring contemporary policing in Black communities. Students will submit a short, “think piece” reflecting on the following questions: Based on what we have discussed in class so far, what are your thoughts about contemporary policing? In what ways is policing a “problem” in Black communities and what factors, policies, and laws have created this problem? Why might it be important to consider history and America’s racial past as key factors in understanding how Black people are monitored and policed in the US?  

Example primary source analysis

Throughout the term, we will read several primary sources, which are documents or images that were created during the historical time period we are studying. This assignment allows students to practice analyzing primary source materials and using them to interpret the nature of policing in Black communities. Students should select a primary source and submit a short, written analysis based on the course material.  

Papers should be approximately 3-5 pages and should consider the following:

1. When was the source created and why? Was it created in response to a particular event or series of events?

2. What does the source reveal about the nature of policing and surveillance in Black communities during the era in which it was created?  

3. What particular fears does it reveal among whites?  

4. What repercussions would it have created for the Black community?  

Example final reflection paper  

Students will submit a paper reflecting on the following questions: after reviewing your first reflection paper, how has your thinking about policing in Black communities evolved during this semester? How have our readings and discussions about the historical development of policing changed or enriched your understanding of modern-day policing, surveillance, and mass incarceration? Have any of your original ideas radically changed? If so, why? What evidence from the course would you use to support or refute your original thinking?  

Course readings

The following books are required for the course

Sally Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2003).

Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2017).

Excerpts from the following books are required reading

• Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010).
• R. J. M. Blackett, The Captive’s Quest for Freedom: Fugitive Slaves, the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, and the Politics of Slavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
• Ward Churchill, The Cointelpro Papers: Documents from the FBI’s Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United States (New York: South End Press, 2001).
• Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004).
• Talitha L. LeFlouria, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016).
• Danielle McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (New York: Vintage, 2011).
• Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, [2010] 2019).

Other required readings

• ‍The Massachusetts “Body of Liberties,” Old South Leaflets (Boston: Directors of the Old South Work, n.d. [c. 1900]), 7: 261-280.
• An Act for the Better Ordering and Governing Negroes and Other Slaves in This Province (1740).
• The 13^th Amendment.
• Politicians’ letters about the Haitian Revolution.
• Alex Altman, “Why the Killing of George Floyd Sparked an American Uprising,” TIME, June 4, 2020.
• Say Burgin, “Rosa Parks on Police Brutality: The Speech We Never Heard,” Black Perspectives, January 23, 2020.
• Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Fear of a Black Uprising,” The New Republic, August 13, 2020.
• Kali Nicole Gross, “Policing Black Women’s and Black Girls’ Bodies in the Carceral United States,” Souls, 20:1, (2018) 1-13.
• LaShawn Harris, “Everyday Harm: Black Women and a History of Police Violence.”
• Cheryl Hicks, “Breonna Taylor, Police Brutality, and Black Women’s Historic Demands for Justice.”  
• Jill Lepore, “The Invention of the Police,” The New Yorker, July 13, 2020.
• NPR News Coverage of the 1992 Los Angeles Rebellion.
• Movement for Black Lives, “End the War on Black Trans, Queer, Gender Nonconforming, and Intersex People.”  
• Sasha Ann Panaram, “#SayHerName: Seeking Justice for Breonna Taylor,” Black Perspectives, November 2, 2020.
• Laurence Ralph, “The logic of the slave patrol: the fantasy of black predatory violence and the use of force by the police” Palgrave Communications 5, 130 (2019).
  
• LaKisha Simmons, “How the State Deploys ‘Know-Your-Place’ Violence against Black Families in their Homes.”
• Videos of police beating Rodney King and the murder of George Floyd - Trigger Warning: These videos depict extreme violence, and viewing them is NOT required for the course. They are available only for those who choose to view and analyze them, so please watch them at your own discretion.

Goal

It’s often difficult for students to understand the realities of enslaved Africans. Students may make assumptions about how they would have responded to enslavement. This classroom exercise challenges students to consider all the costs and consequences that enslaved people faced when responding to their enslavement. It forces students to think about the harsh realities of slavery and the practical issues that enslaved people grappled with when responding to their circumstances. Students consider all the challenges and issues that enslaved people faced when responding to their enslavement. Should they resist? Runaway? Rebel? Or simply survive?  

Prep

Students should be knowledgeable of the material realities of enslavement. This exercise should occur at a point in the class when the students have learned about the rise, development and basic structure of slavery as an economic, social, and political system. They also should also be familiar with cultural resistance, fugitive slaves, and rebellions. They should have some familiarity with the different ways that enslaved people responded to enslavement.

Format

Randomly break the class up into 4 or 5 groups. Each group is assigned a form of resistance, and they're asked to make a short presentation in which they deliver a compelling argument in favor of the resistance strategy they've been assigned. One group will argue that the enslaved community should use daily resistance (described), another supports the notion of running away, the third group advocates for armed rebellion. The final group are judges—they are the ones who listen to each argument, ask supplementary questions, and then vote on which form of resistance to employ. 

The exercise is usually a debate in which each group presents their argument to the entire class. They should consider commenting on both the strengths of their strategy and the weaknesses of the competing strategies. At the end, one group wins the debate by convincing the judges to endorse their strategy. 

Depending on the size of the class, you can also add a fifth group, which would argue simply to accommodate to slavery and survive, in order to ensure that future generations live and perhaps live free. 

Or, conversely, you could have all four groups (daily resisters, runaways, armed rebels, and accommodationists) and then have the entire class vote rather than have a separate group of judges. 

Outcomes

This exercise changes how students think about resistance against slavery when they have to consider tough questions about resources, strategies, and the punishments they might face, or even worse, the punishments their family members and loved ones might face. Make sure that each group is pushed to ask themselves hard questions about the strengths and weaknesses of their strategy and what hindrances or consequences they might face, not only if they fail, but also if they succeed.  

Instructions for student groups

Daily Resistance

Includes all of the following

Social resistance—building family and community

Cultural Resistance—developing “liberation theology”

Work Avoidance—working slowly, breaking tools, faking illness, etc…

Arson and Poisoning

Questions to consider

• Do you plan to use one of these strategies, or a combination of all of them?  
• What exactly is your plan going to be, and how will you implement it? What is your goal, and will you be successful?  How would you define “success” with daily resistance?
• If you choose something risky, such as arson or poisoning, how many people would you involve in the execution of your plan?  Would the conspirators include domestic slaves, field slaves, or both?
• What are the benefits of using the particular strategy you have chosen?  Why do you think that it is the most effective attack against slavery?
• What are the drawbacks or consequences of your strategy?  

Flight/Running Away

Questions to consider

• What exactly will your plan be? Are you planning to escape permanently or just temporarily run to the woods? How and when do you run? Do you know where you’re going and how to get there? Are you planning to run to the North, or to a maroon society?
• Do you have money, tools, or supplies to help you?  
• If you are successful, what are the benefits of running away?
• What risks are involved with this strategy? What are the potential consequences of your actions?

Armed Rebellion

Questions to consider

• What exactly is your plan going to be? What method or strategy are you going to use? 
• Do you have weapons? How many people are you going to include in the plan?  Are you going to include domestic slaves, field slaves, or both? 
• What is your long-term strategy? Do you plan to just attack your own plantation, or is this a larger movement?
• What is your plan for after the rebellion begins? Are you going to try to escape? Seek refuge in a maroon society, sail for Haiti, or return to Africa?
• What do you believe are the benefits to your strategy?
• What are the potential risks? What are the consequences of your actions?

Accommodation/Survival

Questions to consider

• What does it mean to “accommodate” to the system of slavery? What would your daily life look like? 
• What does “survival” mean during slavery and why is it important? 
• Do you feel like you are “selling out,” or is there something inherently valuable about surviving under these circumstances? 
• What are the potential benefits for you and your community if you choose to accommodate? What potentially negative consequences does your choice have?  ‍

Judges

Questions to consider

• What do you think would be the most effective response to slavery?  
• What is the goal?  Do you want to help people cope with slavery?  Escape it?  Destroy it?
• What are the potential problems with each of these strategies?  What are the potential drawbacks or consequences for each strategy?
• What specific flaws do you see for each strategy, that you would want to ask questions about?

In the years before independence in the United States there were over fifty documented conspiracies, rebellions, and plots by enslaved peoples in resistance to slavery. Unfortunately, this history has been largely overlooked. Many historians have dismissed incidents of slave insurrections as insignificant, or too small to qualify as acts of political resistance. This dismissal devalues the self-awareness enslaved people had for their position in colonial society.

By studying these rebellions and the unique political climate in which they took place, we can better understand the ways in which enslaved people strategically worked against and resisted slavery since its inception. We can also trace how anti-Black racism is deeply embedded into the foundations of U.S. legal code and law enforcement.