Khameleon Classics Khameleon Productions

In the final episode of Khameleon Classics, host Shivaike Shah and assistant producer Malin Hay look behind the scenes at the making of the show, and discuss how a project that was conceived as a five-episode miniseries on Medea ended up becoming thirty episodes covering everything from ancient Egypt to Reconstruction-era America and beyond.

In the last decade, public statues have become a focal point for debates about the remembrance and commemoration of history. Robert E. Lee in Richmond, Virginia, Edward Colston in Bristol, and Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College, Oxford: do statues of these figures remind us of their harmful legacies, or valorise them in spite of them? And how do our interpretations and misinterpretations of classical sculpture inform the style and significance of public statuary in the modern day? Shivaike Shah speaks to Verity Platt, Professor of Classics and History of Art at Cornell University, about what we get wrong about classical statues, and about the history of iconoclasm in Ancient Greece and Rome.

To find out more about this topic, check out the reading list on our website: https://www.khameleonproductions.org/statues-then-and-now

W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) was one of the foremost thinkers and writers about race in the period directly after Reconstruction. He was also a professor of Classics who engaged closely with a number of Greek and Roman writers, including Cicero, Aristotle and Plato. Shivaike Shah speaks to Dr Mathias Hanses, Associate Professor of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies and African Studies at Pennsylvania State University, about his characterisation of Du Bois as a ‘Black Cicero’. What light does Du Bois shed on Cicero’s relationship with race in orations like Pro Archia Poeta? And how does an acknowledgement of Du Bois’s engagement with the Classics – and of the limitations of his approach to Black empowerment – reposition us in relation to the field today?

To find out more about this topic, check out the reading list on our website: https://www.khameleonproductions.org/khameleon-classics/classics-and-dubois

Throughout the Reconstruction era, from the end of the American Civil War in 1865 to the start of the Jim Crow era at the end of the nineteenth century, both Black activists and white supremacists used their classical education in service of their political ideals. Shivaike Shah talks to Jackie Murray, professor of Classics at the University of Kentucky, about the ways that writers engaged in dialogue with one another about the merits of Reconstruction, the status of classical education at this time, and the assumptions that such an education produced in its pupils about the inherent value of empire - irrespective of which side of the debate they were on.

To find out more about this topic, check out the reading list on our website: https://www.khameleonproductions.org/khameleon-classics/classics-and-the-reconstruction

What happens when, in the wake of worldwide upheaval, a Classics department decides to put into practice the principles of anti-racism and social justice in the classroom? Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina is now the first department of Classics in the world to require coursework in critical race theory for all majors and minors. Shivaike Shah talks to the founding teachers, THM Gellar-Goad (Associate Professor at Wake Forest) and Caitlin Hines (Assistant Professor at the University of Cincinnati), about the impetus for the project, the impact it has had on the faculty, and the importance of destabilising assumptions about what ‘core’ Classics curricula should contain.

To find out more about this topic, check out the reading list on our website: https://www.khameleonproductions.org/khameleon-classics/classics-beyond-whiteness

What can reading classical political texts teach us about our own politics? This is the question that Demetra Kasimis, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, is answering with her work, which looks at democracy and its dilemmas in the context of Ancient Greece. Her article ‘Medea the Refugee’ places Medea’s status as an immigrant in the centre of her reading of the play. Shivaike and Demetra discuss the slipperiness of political definitions and terms, both in Ancient Greece and today, and reflect on the desire, constant across space and time, for dominant powers to define political in-groups in relation to a perceived other.

To find out more about this topic, check out the reading list on our website: https://www.khameleonproductions.org/khameleon-classics/classics-and-politics-of-migration