Graeco-Roman Shades and Colonial Shadows in the Caribbean

This seminar in the Classical Reception series 'Out of the Shadows of Empire' will take place online only.

‘But the dead never stop talking, and sometimes the living hear’, remarks one of the narrators of Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014). Addressing his listeners from beyond the grave, the observation offers an evocative metaphor for the processes of reception. This paper explores how, in the hands of Marlon James and Derek Walcott, Graeco-Roman antiquity reverberates through the modern Caribbean as voices of the living and the dead, confronting the colonial entanglements of the discipline of Classics and repurposing its myths and motifs. The effect is to destabilise oppressive imperial shadows, syncretising the legacies of Greece and Rome as aspects of the contemporary Caribbean, and in so doing, dismantle the hierarchies of the past to point the way towards a new future.

Justine McConnell is Reader in Comparative Literature and Classical Reception at King’s College London. She is the author of Black Odysseys: The Homeric Odyssey in the African Diaspora since 1939 (2013), Performing Epic or Telling Tales (with Fiona Macintosh, 2020), and Derek Walcott and the Creation of a Classical Caribbean (2023); she has also co-edited four volumes on the reception of Graeco-Roman antiquity.