Hi, everyone, welcome. This is Brooke and we're in Week 2 of Rupturing Tradition. So, our site this week is The International. We want to start today by thinking ambitiously or opening about this concept of The International by taking apart the prefix inter- and the notion of nation. So, nation is primarily a modern concept, a 19th century concept: the phenomenon of nationhood is often traced to the 19th century. You'll see in the readings that I'm going to focus on today, which constitute the bulk of our readings, Marchand’s Down From Olympus, Bernal’s Black Athena, and Hamilakis’ The Nation and Its Ruins: Antiquity, Archaeology, and National Imagination in Greece, is that the 19th century recurs repeated.. 

One thing about the nation as an imaginary construct is it's constituted and it's reconstituted. Bernal, in the essay from 1989, is speaking about the far right in the 1980s, and the constitution of an American nation-state as properly Western, as properly indebted to its European Greek ancestors against a multi-ethnic notion of the nation. And of course, we're living now through a reckoning with the resurgence of nationalism. So, in tracing nation to the 19th century, that's by no means a historical genealogy, but it is an important site for thinking nation. In thinking about inter-, I want to invite us to think as broadly as possible, not just a nation with other nations or other states, but to ask, what is the nation in relation to?

So, I want to start the lecture with this question of the nation in relation to The International, in relation to other sites we're going to take up in this course. And just to flag where we're going, in the second part of the lecture, I'm going to think about in particular relation between two sites, and of course, the nation and discipline of classics. So, I want to think there about how the formation of national identity gets entangled in different ways with the production of specialized knowledge about Greece and Rome.

But let me come back to thinking initially about what we mean when we think about the nation in relation, very broadly. So, one thing that's recurrent in the notion of the nation and the formation of nationalism is the constitution of an exclusively in the present in relationship to a perceived community in the past, a usually a pre-modern past, an ancestral past, an ancient past. And so, it's through some form of kinship relation or some form of continuity, racial relationships, ethnic continuity, that continuity between past and present is thought [03:00] to lend coherence to the constitution of that national being in the present, and secures, as it were, the integrity of its boundaries through the lineage with the past.

So, in thinking about the nation in relation, very broadly, we can think about that relationship first and foremost, that vertical relationship. We also can think about the more conventional sense of thinking about The International as nations in horizontal relation with one another, in geopolitical relations and cultural relations with one another. Now, when we think of The International, generally speaking, post-war up until very recently probably, we would think about this, at least kind of we, you know, New York Times, kind of we, not an activist we. But this general we would think about The International sort of symbiotic terms or optimistic terms.

But I want to flag when we're thinking about the nation in relation, specifically how nations are constituted in relationship to others in oppositional terms. And so, we see this oppositional definition at work in the constitution of each of the nations that are in play this week. So, it's Germany in relationship to France, whether that's within the Napoleonic wars, whether the Franco-Prussian wars, France and its claims on integrity versus Germany and its claims on on the Greeks in particular and the elimination of the Romans and any religious mediation between past and present.

In thinking about modern Greece, we can think about the constitution of the Turkish, the Ottoman, the Muslim-other and the constitution of the Greek state. Again, to go back to the Bernal and thinking about 1980s US flagging this idea of a multi-ethnic other, a non-Western other to the properly western US [05:00] that has to be affirmed through its proper relationship to the past. So, in this horizontal axis, we can think about the nation and its others.

The last fold that I want to introduce in thinking about the nation in relation is really thinking about how the horizontal work of imagination and its others gets projected onto the navigation of the past so that you want to constitute that community in the past that is your ancestral “we” also in relationship to its others. And so, in the stories that we looked at today, and we covered a lot of material, so I'm trying to chart away through which I think hopefully brings out things that might be useful to us. We consistently see the isolation of the Greeks and the Romans as the true exemplars of antiquity.

And so, in the story of Friedrich August Wolf in his constitution of the the antiquity, which is the subject of a new specialized discipline, Wolf is interested in hiving off Greeks and Romans from their others, whether it's Egyptians, Persians, Chaldeans, Babylonians, Jews, so that that work of self and other is then mediated through the protection as it were of the pure groups. Bernal argues for a similar process in the elevation of the Aryan model in the work of Mueller in the 19th century where again, these others to Greeks are hived off and isolated as not proper objects of knowledge.

So, what we end up with, if we look at this model of thinking the nation in relation with just a couple of simple axioms, which is to say, the nation is constituted through a relationship with its past. And that relationship with its past is critical to the constitution of an exclusionary in the present. So, the nation is a site and working horizontally and vertically, therefore sort of triangulates between the community in the past, the community in the present, and its others, I should say, both past and present. So, that's a model I think we can use to think very broadly of imagining the nation in relation.

I think we can see the entanglement of different sites within the course, particularly clearly in my readings today between the nation and the constitution of the nation and discipline, where the formation of disciplinary, by which I mean really professional, academics, scholarly, knowledge, academic within the university. These forms of knowledge become particularly important to the constitution of national identity. And in the material that we're looking at, because the privileged ancestors are primarily the Greeks, and to a lesser extent, the Romans, we’re looking at how the formation of professional disciplines, philology and archeology in particular, start to play a role in the constitution of national identity.

And I raised this question in part because I think it invites us to ask the extent to which the disciplinary space of classics, whether that's philology or archaeology is a site to use to disrupt broader nationalist projects, whether in the past we can examine the question historically, but particularly relevant also today. So, if indeed there is this dependent relationship, this interdependent relationship between nation and discipline in the discipline of classics, in the case of an number of different sites here, Germany, Greece, and the US, then disciplinary knowledge will be responsive to pressures placed on it by demands to rethink a nationalist project.

Hamilakis makes this interesting point, he says, you know, “Nationalism is always what happens to someone else.” And this claim that he makes that nationalism is, particularly in the scholarly apparatus, the site of critique, goes hand in hand with a point he makes in the introduction about what he adopts as his own relationship to the nationalist imaginary. And I'm going to read his position, because I think it's worth thinking about his actual words. So, he says, 

“While I'm starting from the point of view of opposition to the exclusivist, often xenophobic, and racist and essentialist nature of nationalism, I would not concur with an indiscriminate and often insensitive dismissal of what amounts to people's worldviews, ways of imagining, dreaming, organizing their individual and social lives.”

Hamilakis raises the question of critique of nationalism. But he also raises the question of what takes the place of the nation after its critique? hat fills that vacuum? And so, he doesn't only offer academic knowledge, or even activist knowledge, as a site for critique of the Academy's participation in a broader nationalist project. So, this is really what Bernal is doing, right, in the 1989 essay is he's looking at the complicity of the academy for professional philology with a far-right project. Hamilakis is undertaking critique, but he's also suggesting that we need to participate in other forms of worldbuilding.

And so, I leave you with a question. If we imagine that professional academic disciplinary sites, the valuation of Greek and Romanantiquity need to be disrupted because of their complicity with and support for a nationalist project, what are the forms of worldbuilding that we imagine they should tether their work to?

So, it's really exciting to respond now to Chiara’s lecture and her proposition that she puts forth in her lecture that isolates out the claim that activist thinking is a formal relationship between inside and outside. So, she argues that we might imagine activist thinking, not in terms of its content, its specific ideology, but rather as coming from a place on the outside and disrupting a site that it's alien to, or in some ways estranged from.

And so, I want to raise the question of the extent to which the intervention from outside to inside is implicated in relations of contingency, and isn't always a linear relationship from point A to point B, but might come at an angle, might be the glancing blow, might hit the wrong target, might not as it were, succeed on the terms that it envisioned its own success.

One person who came to mind when I was thinking about Chiara’s lecture is Martin Bernal, who she says is very self-conscious about his role as an outsider within the academy. And in flagging that, I don't mean that he's disingenuous. He is an outsider. He's not a classicist. And he's pretty strongly rejected by the discipline. And his interventions are pretty much suppressed within the discipline after the 1990s.

And so, the question becomes, not so much whether the claim of being an outsider is disingenuous, but again, whether the identity of the outsider is ever pure. And pure might not be the wrong word. I don't mean that in the sense of ideological purity, I mean whether it's the only identity that we inhabit. So, I'm thinking a little bit here of Schliemann, who Bernal resembles in certain respects. And here, we get view of Bernal as outsider by looking at him through Schliemann who has Marchand emphasizes is very defiant vis-à-vis the authority of the profession of classicism, but also very eager to appropriate their methods and even to seek their approval. And Bernal is an outsider to classics, but he's using many of the methods that are proper to classics as a discipline. And in that respect, there's this sense of, what would it mean to be validated? What would it mean to be sort of recognized as delivering the objective truth that the philologists promised, but turned out because of their own ideological blinkers to be unable to deliver?

There's another way that might seem a little less catty, I think of towards Bernal. And I don't mean it to be catty again, I mean, to just think about the ways in which our positions as outsiders are overdetermined often, but also to think about how what's shared between the outsider and the insider, particularly in terms of on the common ground.hat is the object of value held by the inside that motivates the intervention of the outside? It may be wealth. It may be power. It may be opportunity. But there's a way in which, if we think not just of Schliemann, but also Nietzsche, I think it's a way of thinking about Bernal and some of the other figures, which is what's of value with the philologists is they have the Greeks. And Nietzsche wants to reclaim the Greeks. He doesn't want to give up the Greeks. He thinks that in fact, the philologists have sort of sucked all the life out of them.

So, there is actually a shared structure of value that motivates and Nietzsche’s intervention and continues even after he's excommunicated, as it were, from the philological community that he continues to invest in Greece. And in Bernal’s case, I think one of the things that complicates the outsider status is the extent to which he's invested in Black Athena, in giving a different narrative of origin. So, not the Greeks as the founders of Western civilization. I'm going to go behind the Greeks historically, and we're going to look to the Egyptians, I’m going to look to the Phoenicians.

And so, his investment in the Bronze Age as pre-Greek is interesting insofar as the shared valuation of these ancestral stories of who comes first, who constitutes the origin, vis-à-vis say, for example, a story you might tell about the problems with the Aryan model when you look at the Hellenistic period, and the ways in which the Greeks are both related to their neighbors in the Mediterranean before the 5th century, but also all of the evidence that constitutes a kind of syncretic, interrelated world. And of course, that story is very important to the valuation of Egyptian knowledge through Hermes Trismegistus that Bernal talks about and he's looking at the immediate precursors to the Aryan model. So, that the ancient model that continues up to the 18th, 19th century is not uniform all the way throughout, it changes whether you're telling the story about myth, or whether you’re telling the story about Hermes Trismegistus.

And so, the question, I guess, would be for Bernal, how much that shared valuation of an origin story is part of the common ground with the insider and the outsider. So, I'll leave us with those questions. There are many more to ask. And again, I emphasize that my aim is not to introduce a purity test, but rather to see how our overdetermined identities and the ways in which we occupy shared regimes of value complicate the distinction between outsiders and insiders.