Empire of Ruin: Black Classicism and American Imperial Culture

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John Levi Barnard (Assistant Professor of English, Assistant Professor of English, The College of Wooster)

Empire of Ruin

Black Classicism and American Imperial Culture

John Levi Barnard (Assistant Professor of English, Assistant Professor of English, The College of Wooster)

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English

Oxford University Press Inc
11 January 2018

Art & design styles: Classicism; Literary studies: general; Social & cultural history; Cultural studies; Ethnic minorities & multicultural studies

"From the US Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial and the 9/11 Memorial Museum, classical forms and ideas have been central to an American nationalist aesthetic. Beginning with an understanding of this centrality of the classical tradition to the construction of American national identity and the projection of American power, Empire of Ruin describes a mode of black classicism that has been integral to the larger critique of American politics, aesthetics, and historiography that African American cultural production has more generally advanced. While the classical tradition has provided a repository of ideas and images that have allowed white American elites to conceive of the nation as an ideal Republic and the vanguard of the idea of civilization, African American writers, artists, and activists have characterized this dominant mode of classical appropriation as emblematic of a national commitment to an economy of enslavement and a geopolitical project of empire. If the dominant forms of American classicism and monumental culture have asserted the ascendancy of what Thomas Jefferson called an ""empire for liberty,"" for African American writers and artists it has suggested that the nation is nothing exceptional, but rather another iteration of what the radical abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet identified as an ""empire of slavery,"" inexorably devolving into an ""empire of ruin."""

By: John Levi Barnard (Assistant Professor of English Assistant Professor of English The College of Wooster)
Imprint: Oxford University Press Inc
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 155mm, Width: 239mm, Spine: 25mm
Weight: 470g
ISBN: 9780190663599
ISBN 10: 0190663596
Pages: 248
Publication Date: 11 January 2018
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Introduction Chapter 1: Phillis Wheatley and the Affairs of State Chapter 2: In Plain Sight: Slavery and the Architecture of Democracy Chapter 3: Ancient History, American Time: Charles Chesnutt and the Sites of Memory Chapter 4: Crumbling into Dust: Conjure and the Ruins of Empire Chapter 5: National Monuments and the Residue of History

John Levi Barnard is an Assistant Professor of English at The College of Wooster.

Reviews for Empire of Ruin: Black Classicism and American Imperial Culture

This is a brilliant study of power in the US. ... Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. * L. L. Johnson, CHOICE * Honorable Mention for the 2018 MLA William Sanders Scarborough Prize