Departmental Lecture: Tom Sapsford (Boston College)

Of Goat-Pans and Satyrs: a weird tale from Hanno the navigator to William S. Burroughs

Hanno the navigator, on a colonial expedition down the West Coast of Africa, relates encountering an island of fearsome music and blazing fires with no apparent source. As several figures read and rewrite this story it more and more gets associated with the goat-god Pan and his wild acolytes. This talk explores the reception history of this tale both in ancient geography writing and in modern horror fiction to examine the ways in which non-African writers often fail to see practices on this continent except through Greco-Roman eyes and how they have continued to fetishize non-European cultural practices through an erotic/phobic lens (Amin 2017) even when—as in the case of Burroughs—incorporating this material for the purposes of imagining a radical gay utopia. 

Illustration: David Wilcox from Oui Magazine, August 1973