Rome and America: Communities of Strangers, Spectacles of Belonging (Cambridge 2023) (original) (raw)

Abstract

The book uses the Roman and American shared founding myths of communities formed by strangers dislocated from their own pasts to explore the tensions that arise in creating a national identity of belonging. Through this lens, I provide new readings of Virgil’s Aeneid, the American western, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Cato the Elder, Cicero, Varro, Horace, Noah Webster, W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Charles Eastman and Native American policy, the spectacles of gladiatorial combat, bare-knuckle boxing, and early American theatre, and the fall of the Roman Republic and the current crisis of democracy. What emerges is a complicated relationship between memory, violence, and belonging. The book provides perspective on some of the current issues of the day, including recent discussions of manhood and Trump plans to use the unitary executive as the path to authoritarianism.

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