Dan-el Padilla Peralta | Classicism and other phobias: offense and defense

This talk will outline the contents of a newly drafted book manuscript that queries the relationship(s) between classicism, understood as a system of aesthetic determination and calibration that is not necessarily reducible to or coterminous with classics, and Black life. The main argument is that classics has been overrepresented as if it is or should be the one privileged classicism, in a historical process that is inseparable from the emergence of anti-Blackness. I begin with a general orientation to the book’s main aims, offer a selection of teasers from the main chapters, and conclude with a mix of protreptic and pugilism.