ABSTRACT
Critical ancient world studies is a methodology for the study of antiquity broadly defined (temporally, ideologically and geographically) that makes the following four critical steps away from the field known as classical studies and/or classics. Summing up their critical distance from such disciplines, the authors of the Reorient manifesto state, In the process of the forging of a critical space, the authors are de-naturalizing the historiographies, ideologies and teleologies that are normalized, produced and enabled by unquestioned protocols of knowledge formation. Rather, the authors will seek to name (some of) the ghosts of the discipline in this introduction, so as to find alternative ways of studying the ancient world that set themselves against their summoning throughout the rest of this volume.
