[The academic discipline of classics is facing profound challenges
from scholars that are looking to renovate its traditional focus on
the "whiteness" of its subject. This study is an expression of that
challenge.]
[[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

DOES CLASSICS HAVE A FUTURE?  
[[link removed]]


 

Najee Olya
August 8, 2022
Los Angeles Review of Books
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ The academic discipline of classics is facing profound challenges
from scholars that are looking to renovate its traditional focus on
the "whiteness" of its subject. This study is an expression of that
challenge. _

,

 

_Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity_
Sarah Derbew
Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781108861816

THE PRESENT INESCAPABLY colors our understanding of the past. As an
object lesson, take this high-handled ceramic drinking cup
[[link removed]], made in sixth-century
BCE Athens, in the shape of two female faces joined at the back of the
head. One face is the deep black of slip, a mixture of clay and water;
the other is the iron-rich red-orange of Athenian clay itself. One has
full lips, a broad nose, and hair made of added pieces of clay to
indicate curls and texture; the other, thinly painted lines for
eyebrows and a darker red on the lips. Viewed from the side, the two
faces appear sharply delineated.

How to make sense of such an object? Museum interpretations often rely
on modern racial terminology. In the description of this particular
vase, the black-slip face is read as “African” and “black,”
the red-orange one as “Greek” and “white.” In ancient Greece,
these terms would have been anachronisms. But today, because of the
centuries of intellectual baggage
[[link removed]] that have
intervened, the artifacts are often considered visualizations of
alterity, with “black” people and women cast as “the other” in
contrast to male citizens, without accounting for the nuances of these
relationships. Is it possible, however, to understand ancient Greek
representations of blackness such as these, along with their literary
counterparts, without projecting backward modern constructions of
race? Is it possible both to understand the past _and_ find analogues
in the present without blurring the distinction between the two?

These questions are at the heart of Sarah Derbew’s ambitious and
groundbreaking book, _Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity._
Informed by critical race theory and performance studies, Derbew aims
to “promot[e] a contextualized, critical approach to representations
of black people in Greek antiquity.” To do this, she assembles a
range of case studies in ancient Greek literature and art from the
fifth century BCE through the fourth century CE, treating each genre
discussed “as metatheatrical stages on which performances of
blackness occur.” Every chapter also draws parallels with modern
subversions of racist tropes and acts of resistance carried out by
Black people in daily life.

Derbew takes readers on a tour spanning 900 years of Greek art and
literature, in which she identifies “performances of blackness.”
The main text begins with a chapter on vases from ancient Athens. One
chapter is devoted to Aeschylus’s fifth-century tragedy
_Suppliants_. Others go beyond classical Athens to survey the cultural
and chronological variety of the ancient Greek world. These treat the
fifth-century BCE historian and protoethnographer Herodotus, an Ionian
Greek from the cosmopolitan Asian city of Halicarnassus; the
second-century CE satirist Lucian, a Greek-speaking Syrian writing
under the Roman Empire; and the third- (or fourth-) century CE
novelist Heliodorus, a Greek-speaking Phoenician from Emesa in Syria.
Differences in genre allow the author to take a wide-ranging look at
how blackness was deployed and manipulated in multiple contexts.

Derbew’s book arrives at a pivotal moment in classical studies. The
past years have seen debates on the whiteness of the discipline
[[link removed]]
and calls to burn the field down
[[link removed]]. The very term
“classics” has come under fire
[[link removed]]
for its perceived elitism and opacity, with eminent departments
(including Berkeley’s [[link removed]]) abandoning the
name. Some have criticized the field’s intense focus on ancient
Greek and Latin
[[link removed]]
at the expense of archaeology, the ancient Mediterranean outside
Greece and Rome, and the interdisciplinarity that forms the foundation
of research like Derbew’s. Perhaps unsurprisingly, attempts to
broaden the boundaries of the discipline have drawn fire from some
quarters. The recent reworking of Princeton’s undergraduate language
requirements
[[link removed]]
in classics, for example, has become grist
[[link removed]]
for the culture warrior’s mill
[[link removed]].
Yet what Sarah Derbew has accomplished is a testament to the kind of
innovative work one can do by combining traditional philological rigor
with fresh and novel thinking.

Of key importance to Derbew’s investigation is the distinction she
makes between lowercase black/blackness and uppercase Black/Blackness.
The difference is explained as clearly as possible, but this is where
things become a bit tricky, to the extent that Derbew includes a table
of terms and definitions before the book’s introduction. She
explains that “lowercase ‘black’ denotes people with black skin
and phenotypic features including full lips, curly hair, and a broad
nose in ancient Greek literature and art,” in contrast to uppercase
“Black,” which “refers to a modern, socially constructed group
of people whose melanin is merely one of its distinguishing traits.”
Ancient blackness, then, refers primarily to people with dark skin
that the Greeks called _Aithiopes_ (a compound of the words for “I
blaze” and “face”), generally associated with Africa south of
Egypt, and sometimes even India.

For Derbew, things are not so neat, however, and people with dark skin
are not all Aithiopes. The category of “black people,” for
example, is used “as an inclusive term for geographically diffuse
peoples with black skin, as they are rendered in ancient Greek
literature and art.” As a result, ancient blackness was malleable,
and could apply not only to Aithiopes but also to Egyptians and
Greeks. In addition, she informs the reader that “undeniable
similarities linking ‘black’ people and ‘Black’ people aside,
‘Black’ is not a direct referent for ‘black.’”

Derbew, however, does not claim that there was no such thing as race
in ancient Greece. On the contrary, following classicist Denise
McCoskey [[link removed]], she
understands race in antiquity not through now-discredited biological
formulations, but as a socially constructed, “outward-facing
category of evaluation.” Helpfully, when Derbew mentions race in the
ancient Greek context, she often includes a condensed version of her
definition as a parenthetical to remind the reader; for example,
“external categorization” is one such descriptor. Accordingly,
Derbew borrows Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s
[[link removed]] idea of racial
formation, whereby people label others to strengthen their own
self-importance. She also highlights medievalist Geraldine Heng’s
[[link removed]] and
classicist Rebecca Futo Kennedy’s
[[link removed]] important
contributions to the study of socially constructed notions of
“premodern race,” [[link removed]] as well as
the related but distinct concept of identity. Unlike race, identity
“refers to people’s self-ascribed conceptualization of
themselves.” Together, race and identity “reveal the mixture of
social projections and self-declared moments of assertion at play
during performances of blackness.”

Although race is not a novel topic for classicists, how scholars
approach the subject and the kinds of questions they ask about it have
undergone a major transformation. Derbew’s concept of race in
ancient Greece advances far beyond Frank M. Snowden Jr.’s
[[link removed]] influential
work. A Harvard-trained Black classicist, Snowden set out to show,
beginning in the 1940s, that racism directed at modern Black people
had no direct equivalent in Mediterranean antiquity. At the same time,
Snowden maintained that race was a biological reality and a
transhistorical phenomenon. As ancient historian Christopher Parmenter
[[link removed]] has
recently put it, “Snowden neatly transposes American definitions of
‘black’ and ‘white’ 25 centuries into the past, establishing
race as an essential principle of world history. Racism or colour
prejudice, on the other hand, were perversions of the modern era.”

Derbew and Snowden’s respective approaches to race, then, are polar
opposites. Snowden used race-essentialist physical anthropology to map
modern biological race onto the ancient Mediterranean. Derbew’s much
more expansive definition of “external categorization” allows her
to move beyond skin color as the primary indicator of race. Her
definition may be so broad, however, as to fall into a trap. As
philosopher of race Adam Hochman [[link removed]]
points out, “social kind definitions of race inflate the category
beyond recognition, allowing too many sorts of groups to count as
‘races.’” While Derbew diverges from Snowden on the issue of
race, the two are not so distant when it comes to racism. Snowden
contended that “color prejudice,” as he called it, was largely
absent in Mediterranean antiquity, and Derbew maintains that ancient
Greek attitudes toward foreigners cannot be directly equated to modern
anti-Blackness.

The reader first sees Derbew’s methods put into action in her
analysis of blackness in ancient artifacts and modern museum
descriptions, including the example of the vase with which I began
this essay. Performances of blackness using such vases took place in
symposia, drinking parties wherein the consumption of wine allowed for
conversation on subjects from politics to philosophy, as well as
contemplation of self and other. Three-dimensional drinking cups
formed in the shape of human faces lent an air of the theatrical.
Derbew, following earlier scholarship, argues that the vases serve as
both cups and masks, allowing their users to become performers by
taking on new identities and decentering the self. The experience was
heightened by both the visual and tactile aspects of the cups along
with the increasing inebriation of the participants.

Where Derbew differs from earlier interpreters is in her assertion
that these performances of blackness were not opportunities to
contemplate and dominate the foreign and the exotic. Instead, they
“reinforce the jocular atmosphere, in that they invite many
performers to the party. Moreover, the interconnected faces circumvent
cultural chauvinism.” Yet a key aspect missing from the discussion
is that ancient users of the vases were not necessarily Greek. As with
much Athenian pottery, the objects often ended up in the graves of
Etruscans — a fact that requires recognition that the artifacts had
multiple possible meanings depending on the context.

The modern parallel that Derbew offers concerns displays of ancient
blackness in museums. Here, the focus is the presentation of Nubian
artifacts, often grouped as subsidiary sections of Greco-Roman or
Egyptian collections. Derbew details the positives and negatives of
the Nubian installations
[[link removed]]
in the British Museum, which at some points place Nubia in a hierarchy
subordinate to Egypt, but at others present its importance beyond
relations with its northern neighbor. Derbew highlights as a positive
example of “critical curation” the Boston Museum of Fine Art’s
2019–20 Ancient Nubia Now [[link removed]]
exhibition, which situated Nubia within a network of other cultures
including Egypt, Greece, and Rome without subordinating it to any of
them. Derbew’s emphasis on museums is incredibly important, as these
are the interfaces between specialists and the general public, and it
behooves curators to present artifacts and the ancient cultures that
made them as accurately as possible.

Derbew’s literary analyses display her skill as a classical
philologist and her profound command of theory. One example is her
treatment of Lucian’s satires, where Derbew’s analysis borrows
cultural critic Rey Chow’s concept of the “xenophone” — that
is, “the linguistic domain in which nonnative writers of English
disrupt the presumed monolingualism of the anglophone archive.”
Swapping out English for Greek, Lucian “unsettle[s] the category of
‘foreigner’ (_xenos_) via the language (_ph__ōn__ē_) that he
places in the mouth of his characters.” The most interesting case is
Lucian’s _Anacharsis_, set in the sixth century BCE, which relates a
conversation between the Scythian traveler Anacharsis and his Athenian
friend Solon. The two watch athletes train while discussing issues
including physical appearance, dress, and identity. Anacharsis, as a
foreigner, is situated within the Athenian xenophone and stages a
non-Greek perspective on Greek athletics, including incredulity at the
fact that the athletes use mud to protect their skin from the sun.
Their mud-darkened skin, then, is, according to Derbew, “a temporary
mask. It contributes to the athletes’ physical prowess, which in
turn feeds into their successful performance of Greek identity without
demanding any permanent bodily alteration.” The men, once stripped
of their mask of blackness, are no longer virile but feminine: their
complexion is again white like that of elite Greek women, whose
activities required that they spend much time indoors.

Derbew also uses the _Anacharsis_ to show how modern ideas about race
shape translation, singling out elements of H. W. Fowler and F. G.
Fowler’s 1905 translation. Solon notes that some Greek men, unlike
the mud-covered athletes, are “somewhat red to rather black because
they have been colored and toughened up by the sun” (in Greek:
_hyperythroi eis to melanteron hypo tou h__ēliou kechr__ōsmenoi_).
The Fowlers simply gloss this as “sunburnt.” By choosing this
term, Derbew rightly points out that they “have catapulted
Lucian’s characters out of their literary context and into a modern
world in which prolonged exposure to the sun has become synonymous
with a painful affliction for people with low levels of melanin.”
The discussion ends with a modern parallel to Lucian’s “variable
manipulations of blackness” in the form of Paul Beatty’s 2015
novel _The Sellout_, a satirical take on skin color and modern race.
In the novel, the main character is a Black man named Me who “ends
up in front of the US Supreme Court charged with human enslavement and
violation of the Civil Rights Act.” A stranger in the capital like
Anacharsis in Athens, Me offers an outsider’s look, in this case by
“mock[ing] the city’s pretensions to emulate ancient Rome.” By
describing himself as an “Ethiop,” Me “also signals an
unexpected resolution at the intersection of past blackness, through
the etymology of ‘Ethiop’ (_aith__ō_, ‘I blaze’), and present
Blackness, through his lived experience.” Here, Derbew deftly
separates blackness from Blackness while showing how the latter aids
in understanding the former.

In the end, does _Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity_ accomplish
its titular goal? Generally speaking, the answer is yes. Derbew guides
readers through the complexities of race and its terminology while
offering nuanced interpretations of authors, genres, and artifacts in
which she has identified performances of blackness. In drawing
attention to modern parallels, Derbew demonstrates how the modern can
illuminate the ancient without conflating the two. Even so, this is a
difficult needle to thread, despite the effort at terminological and
conceptual precision. Ultimately, the book is certain to spark much
discussion among scholars, students, and other interested readers, and
this itself is a success. _Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity_ is
proof that the future of classics is already here. It’s simply
waiting for everyone else to catch up.

¤

_Najee Olya is a PhD candidate in the Program in Mediterranean Art &
Archaeology at the University of Virginia and the incoming Bothmer
Fellow (2022–23) in the department of Greek and Roman art at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art. He was previously Bert Hodge Hill Fellow
(2019–20) and William Sanders Scarborough Fellow (2021–22) at the
American School of Classical Studies at Athens._
[[link removed]]

* intellectual history
[[link removed]]
* Classics
[[link removed]]
* Critical Race Theory
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit portside.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 



########################################################################

[link removed]

To unsubscribe from the xxxxxx list, click the following link:
[link removed]