Old-School is a podcast about Black Studies and the classics. African American writers have been embracing and rejecting the classics since 1773. We honor that history by telling both of those stories.
Publisher
the African American Intellectual Traditions Initiative
Yusef Komunyakaa’s war poem, “Latitudes,” begins with a curious sentence: “If I am not Ulysses, I am/ his dear, ruthless half brother.” Chi and Chad discuss what this poem has to say about the aftermath of wars ancient and modern and the power of the subjunctive.
28 Jun 2023
S1E5 - Migratory Habits of the Soul
Chi and Chad close read Robert Hayden’s “A Plague of Starlings,” a tiny poem about a walk across campus that opens out onto the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, Plato’s Phaedo, Aesop’s Fables, and the afterlife.
28 Jun 2023
S1E4 - “I Sit with Shakespeare”
Chi attempts to fix a problem she’s been having while teaching W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk. Shakespeare, a time-traveling dog, and dislike of overalls are all involved. So are the reparative potential of reading the classics and a one-hundred-year-old pedagogical controversy.
28 Jun 2023
S1E3 - A Letter to Phillis Wheatley, Part 2
Chi and Chad discuss the classical allusions in Wheatley’s poem, “To Maecenas.” Who was Maecenas? Why did Wheatley write a poem to him? And how should we interpret allusions?
28 Jun 2023
Sidebar: “An Evening Thought”
In this sidebar episode, Chad tells Chi about his close reading of Jupiter Hammon’s first published poem, “An Evening Thought: Salvation by Christ Alone” and what it has to do with the name of a gate in the second Jewish Temple.
28 Jun 2023
S1E2 - “Bibleistic”: The Poetry of Jupiter Hammon
Chad takes a tour through the Joseph Lloyd Manor where Jupiter Hammon, the first published African American poet, was enslaved for much of his life and where he wrote his first poem. The guides, Lauren Brincat and Andrew Tharler of Long Island Preservation, discuss Hammon’s life, poetry, and education.
28 Jun 2023
S1E1 - A Letter to Phillis Wheatley, Part 1
Phillis Wheatley was both the first African American woman to publish poetry and a poet deeply engaged with the classical works of antiquity. Chi and Chad discuss how writers and readers have dealt with that complex legacy through Robert Hayden’s 1976 poem, “A Letter from Phillis Wheatley, London 1773.”
8 Jun 2023
Introducing the Old-School Podcast
Introducing the Old-School Podcast
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Apple Podcasts (US)
5.0 / 5
6 ratings
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