{"id":8243,"date":"2012-03-30T15:51:16","date_gmt":"2012-03-30T15:51:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.faceofmalawi.com\/?p=8243"},"modified":"2012-03-30T15:51:16","modified_gmt":"2012-03-30T15:51:16","slug":"m-d-usher-talks-arab-spring","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/new.faceofmalawi.com\/index.php\/2012\/03\/30\/m-d-usher-talks-arab-spring\/","title":{"rendered":"M.D. Usher Talks Arab Spring"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Faculty - M. D. Usher, Associate Professor and Chair<\/p><\/div>\n

University of Vermont classics professor M.D. Usher has a way of getting caught up in regime-change protests. During a conference in Cairo last month, he was hustled out of Tahrir Square, a site that struck him as \u201ca kind of Occupy Wall Street space.\u201d A year ago, in the middle of a monthlong teaching stint at the University of Malawi, he witnessed the campus erupting in blockades and overturned cars in reaction to the African country\u2019s latest ruler.<\/p>\n

\u201cWithout exaggeration, I can say that I saw it first,\u201d Usher declares of the latter instance.<\/p>\n

He\u2019ll be showing slides from both experiences at a talk he\u2019s giving at UVM this coming Tuesday evening. Entitled \u201cAgamemnon in Africa, Ulysses in Ulaanbaatar: Classics Gone Global,\u201d the talk is one of this year\u2019s two public Dean\u2019s Lectures \u2014 a series awarded to accomplished faculty with a knack for communicating their academic research to students and general audiences.<\/p>\n

Why is a classics prof talking about the likes of the Arab Spring? Usher believes emerging democracies such as those in Egypt and Malawi could learn much from Greek literature, particularly Aeschylus\u2019 triad of tragedies known as the Oresteia.<\/p>\n

Aeschylus wrote Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers and The Eumenides in 458 BC, when \u201csmall Athens had just defeated great Persia,\u201d Usher explains. It was the height of Athens\u2019 experiment with democracy, and new ideas of justice and governing were on the rise. Set mostly in a mythical era, the trilogy concerns the case of Orestes, who murders his mother because she murdered his father. Orestes is ultimately tried by a jury of Athenian citizens, who spare him the death sentence. Reason and democratic processes prevail over the old order\u2019s endless cycle of revenge killings.<\/p>\n

Usher isn\u2019t the only classical scholar to deem the Oresteia relevant to ongoing struggles to establish democratic states. His talk will address the work of British classicist George Thomson, who developed the first Marxist interpretations of Greek literature. As Usher will show, Thomson\u2019s late-1930s translation of the Aeschylus trilogy inspired filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini\u2019s 1970 documentary Notes Toward an African Orestes, filmed in newly postcolonial Africa.<\/p>\n

Though Usher will also comment on Greek epic poetry\u2019s fundamental orality and his own encounter with a still-living oral epic tradition in Mongolia, the bulk of his talk will cast the tragedies as touchstones for political struggles around the world.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe tendency is to see Western literature as insular and imperialist,\u201d Usher observes. \u201cBut if you actually look at these texts with fresh eyes, they do speak to emerging democracies. The Greeks invented democracy, more or less, and if democracy is going to be the new paradigm, you need to look back at Greek literature.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

University of Vermont classics professor M.D. Usher has a way of getting caught up in regime-change protests. During a conference […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8244,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[334],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8243","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-misc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.faceofmalawi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8243","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.faceofmalawi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.faceofmalawi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.faceofmalawi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.faceofmalawi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8243"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.faceofmalawi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8243\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.faceofmalawi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.faceofmalawi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.faceofmalawi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.faceofmalawi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}