CLASSICS BETWEEN EPISTEMICIDES AND HAUNTOLOGIES: A Caribbean reading

This contribution pairs two critical paradigms-hauntology and epistemicide-to recover an episode in the history of classical reception: the varied and shifting significations that attach to the figure of Homer in the poetry of the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Hispanophone Caribbean. I scrutinize this episode to develop theory from the margins about the properties of classic(is)s(m) in postcolonial worlds and to practice a more attentively recuperative classics. My investigation is structured around an overview of Caribbean literary encounters with Homer and Homeric epic in the lead-up to the Age of Revolutions (I); the Hellenophilias of the mid- to late nineteenth century in the newly independent Dominican Republic (II); the homosocial parameters of the poetic productions that took Homer as beacon and referent (III); and, finally, the gendered and racialized occlusions that came to be hitched to a Dominican literary economy of Homeric signifying (IV).