Professor Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela in conversation with
Professors Elena Isayev (Exeter University), Heidi Grunebaum (UWC), and Grant Parker (Stanford University).

This Round Table event is part of a series of exploratory conversations to open up discussions on the history of systemic racism with a specific focus on the question of whether trans-colonial perspectives of literature might intersect with the violence of racism and oppression in the classics. Postcolonial scholars have focused too narrowly on “trauma” as the axis upon which the vision of postcolonial literature evolved—on rethinking trauma and “decolonising” trauma studies—without much engagement with the foundational forces of racism and violence in historical trauma, that is, its connections to violence and racism in the classics.