The appearance of Martin Bernal's Black Athena: The Afro-Asian Roots of Classical Civilization in 1987 sparked intense debate and controversy in Africa, Europe, and North America. His detailed genealogy of the 'fabrication of Greece' and his claims for the influence of ancient African and Near Eastern cultures on the making of classical Greece, questioned many intellectuals' assumptions about the nature of ancient history.
The transportation of enslaved African persons into Europe, the Americas, and the Caribbean, brought African and diasporic African people into contact in significant numbers with the Greek and Latin classics for the first time in modern history. In African Athena, the contributors explore the impact of the modern African disapora from the sixteenth century onwards on Western notions of history and culture, examining the role Bernal's claim has played in European and American understandings of history, and in classical, European, American and Caribbean literary production.
African Athena examines the history of intellectuals and literary writers who contested the white, dominant Euro-American constructions of the classical past and its influence on the present.
Martin Bernal has written an Afterword to this collection.
Author(s): Daniel Orrells, Gurminder K. Bhambra, Tessa Roynon
Series: Classical presences
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2011
Language: English
Pages: 469
Cover......Page 1
Contents......Page 7
Acknowledgements......Page 10
List of Figures......Page 11
List of Contributors......Page 12
Introduction......Page 17
Part I. Myths and Historiographies, Ancient and Modern......Page 33
1. Believing in Ethiopians......Page 35
2. Black Apollo? Martin Bernal’s Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, volume iii, and Why Race Still Matters......Page 56
3. Greece, India, and Race among the Victorians......Page 72
4. Black Minerva: Antiquity in Antebellum African American History......Page 87
5. Black Athena before Black Athena: The Teaching of Greek and Latin at Black Colleges and Universities during the Nineteenth Century......Page 106
6. ‘Ethiopia shall stretch forth her hands unto God’: Garveyism, Rastafari, and Antiquity......Page 122
7. Between Exodus and Egypt: Israel–Palestine and the Break-up of the Black–Jewish Alliance......Page 138
8. Beyond Culture Wars: Reconnecting African and Jewish Diasporas in the Past and the Present......Page 155
9. Egyptian Athena, African Egypt, Egyptian Africa: Martin Bernal and Contemporary African Historical Thought......Page 172
10. The Afterlives of Black Athena......Page 190
Part II. Classical Diaspora, Diasporic Classics......Page 205
11. In the House of Libya: A Meditation......Page 207
12. Hellenism, Nationalism, Hybridity: The Invention of the Novel......Page 226
13. The Idea of Africa in Lucan......Page 241
14. Was Black Beautiful in Vandal Africa?......Page 255
15. Identifying Authority: Juan Latino, an African Ex-Slave, Professor, and Poet in Sixteenth-Century Granada......Page 274
16. John Barclay’s ‘Camella’ Poems: Ideas of Race, Beauty, and Ugliness in Renaissance Latin Verse......Page 293
17. ‘Lay in Egypt’s lap each borrowed crown’: Gerald Massey and Late-Victorian Afrocentrism......Page 309
18. ‘Not Equatorial black, not Mediterranean white’: Denis Williams’s Other Leopards......Page 327
19. Wole Soyinka’s Yoruba Tragedy: Performing Politics......Page 342
20. Mythopoeia in the Struggle against Slavery, Racism, and Exclusive Afrocentrism......Page 359
21. Dislocating Black Classicism: Classics and the Black Diaspora in the Poetry of Aimé Césaire and Kamau Brathwaite......Page 378
22. The Africanness of Classicism in the Work of Toni Morrison......Page 397
Afterword......Page 414
Conclusion......Page 430
References......Page 434
B......Page 479
D......Page 480
G......Page 481
J......Page 482
N......Page 483
S......Page 484
Z......Page 485
