Towards a Manifesto for Critical Ancient World Studies

Abstract

Critical ancient world studies (CAWS) is a methodology for the study of antiquity broadly defined (temporally, ideologically and geographically) that makes the following four critical steps away from the field known as classical studies and/or classics. Firstly, it critiques the field’s Eurocentrism and refuses to inherit silently a field crafted so as to constitute a mythical pre-history for an imagined “West”, in particular, by rejecting the “universal” as synonym for the “Western” or the “European”. While classics has been content to construct an ancient world whose value lies in its mirror image of modern Europe, CAWS investigates the ancient history of a world without accepting the telos of the West. Secondly, it rejects the assumption of an axiomatic relationship between so-called classics and cultural value, divesting from cultural capital as a mode of knowledge-making in the field. Thirdly, it denies positivist accounts of history, and all modes of investigation that aim at establishing a perspective that is neutral or transparent, and commits instead to showcasing the contingency of history and historiography in a way that is alert to the injustices and epistemologies of power that have shaped the way that certain kinds of knowledge have been constructed as “objective” within the discipline known as classics. Fourthly, it requires of those who participate in it a commitment to decolonising the gaze of and at antiquity. It is not simply, however, the application of decolonial theory or the search to uncover subaltern or “wretched of the earth” narratives within a subject that has special relevance to the privileged and the powerful. 1 Rather, it dismantles the structures of knowledge that have led to this privileging, and questions the categories, ideas, themes, narratives and epistemological structures that have been deemed objective and essential within the inherited discipline of classics.

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