African Athena New Agendas

by Orrells, Daniel; Bhambra, Gurminder K.; Roynon, Tessa

• ISBN13: 9780199595006
• ISBN10: 0199595003
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-12-17
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

The appearance of Martin Bernal'sBlack Athena: The Afro-Asian Roots of Classical Civilizationin 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. InAfrican 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 Athenaexamines 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 Biography

Daniel Orrells was educated at King's College, University of Cambridge. He is Associate Professor of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Warwick.

Gurminder K. Bhambra holds degrees from the University of Sussex and the London School of Economics. She is Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of the Social Theory Centre at the University of Warwick, and has been Visiting Assistant Professor of Critical Social Thought at Mount Holyoke College, US. She won the Philip Abrams Memorial Prize for best first book in sociology in 2008 for Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination.

Tessa Roynon teaches English and American literature at the University of Oxford. Her current research centres on the classical tradition in modern American fiction; additionally she is writing The Cambridge Introduction to Toni Morrison. She studied English at Clare College, University of Cambridge, has an M.A. from Georgetown University, where she was a Fulbright Scholar, and was awarded her PhD by the University of Warwick in 2007.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	p. viii
List of Figures	p. ix
List of Contributors	p. x
Introduction	p. 1
Myths and Historiographies, Ancient and Modern
Believing in Ethiopians	p. 19
Black Apollo? Martin Bernal's Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, volume iii, and Why Race Still Matters Patrice	p. 40
Greece, India, and Race among the Victorians	p. 56
Black Minerva: Antiquity in Antebellum African American History	p. 71
Black Athena before Black Athena: The Teaching of Greek and Latin at Black Colleges and Universities during the Nineteenth Century	p. 90
'Ethiopia shall stretch forth her hands unto God': Garveyism, Rastafari, and Antiquity	p. 106
Between Exodus and Egypt: Israel-Palestine and the Break-up of the Black-Jewish Alliance	p. 122
Beyond Culture Wars: Reconnecting African and Jewish Diasporas in the Past and the Present	p. 139
Egyptian Athena, African Egypt, Egyptian Africa: Martin Bernal and Contemporary African Historical Thought	p. 156
The Afterlives of Black Athena	p. 174
Classical Diaspora, Diasporic Classics
In the House of Libya: A Meditation	p. 191
Hellenism, Nationalism, Hybridity: The Invention of the Novel	p. 210
The Idea of Africa in Lucan	p. 225
Was Black Beautiful in Vandal Africa?	p. 239
Identifying Authority: Juan Latino, an African Ex-Slave, Professor, and Poet in Sixteenth-Century Granada	p. 258
John Barclay's 'Camella' Poems: Ideas of Race, Beauty, and Ugliness in Renaissance Latin Verse	p. 277
'Lay in Egypt's lap each borrowed crown': Gerald Massey and Late-Victorian Afrocentrism	p. 293
'Not Equatorial black, not Mediterranean white': Denis Williams's Other Leopards	p. 311
Wole Soyinka's Yoruba Tragedy: Performing Politics	p. 326
Mythopoeia in the Struggle against Slavery, Racism, and Exclusive Afrocentrism	p. 343
Dislocating Black Classicism: Classics and the Black Diaspora in the Poetry of Aimé Césaire and Kamau Brathwaite	p. 362
The Africanness of Classicism in the Work of Toni Morrison	p. 381
Afterword	p. 398
Conclusion	p. 414
References	p. 418
Index	p. 463
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