CLASSICISM IN DISPUTE: THE CONSTRUCTION AND DECONSTRUCTION OF THE CLASSICAL TRADITION IN THE AMERICAS.
This symposium proposes a space for interdisciplinary reflection on the crucial—and often conflictive—role played by the classical Greco-Roman tradition in processes of inventing, legitimizing and contesting American identity from the early colonial period to the present. Far from being a merely passive or mimetic transposition of Eurocentric models, the appropriation of the geography, texts, philosophy, aesthetics and institutions of classical Antiquity in the Americas constitutes a dynamic phenomenon of cultural translation, hybridization and tension with indigenous traditions and selective memory. The symposium will be structured around contributions from an international network of researchers from various disciplines—history, philosophy, literature and art history, for example. The axes of discussion may address questions such as how ancient science, cosmography and thought served as intellectual scaffolding in the colonial encounter and the subsequent ordering of American territory. The use of classical literary, pictorial and political languages in colonial or republican contexts, aimed at shaping the identity of these territories and their inhabitants, will be explored. At the same time, it will examine how the appropriation and resignification of these materials already carry the tensions still characteristic today of the relationship between the Americas and their multiple and conflictive heritage. The transdisciplinary character of this symposium constitutes a deliberate commitment to overflow traditional methodological boundaries, strengthening humanistic research through dialogue among history, the philosophy of science, literature and philology, art history, and decolonial thought. This crossing of perspectives not only reflects the profound complexity of cultural appropriations and resistances in the Americas, but is also indispensable for destabilizing and questioning the Eurocentric disciplinary assumptions built for other contexts, which prove insufficient to account for the epistemic tensions of our territory.
