Race Antiquity and Its Legacy

by McCoskey, Denise Eileen

• ISBN13: 9780195381887
• ISBN10: 0195381882
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-05-01
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

The very ubiquity of race and racial discussions encourages the general public to accept the power it exerts as natural and to allow the process by which it has assumed such authority to remain unquestioned. In this study, Denise McCoskey explains the position of race today by unveiling its relation to structures of thought and practice in classical antiquity. This study thus attempts both to account for the role of race in the classical world and also to trace the intricate ways Greek and Roman racial ideologies continue to resonate in modern life. McCoskey uncovers the assorted frameworks that organized and classified human diversity more fundamentally in antiquity. Along the way, she highlights the noteworthy intersections of race with other important social structures, such as gender and class. Underlining the role of race in shaping the ancient world, she ultimately turns to the influence of ancient racial formation on the modern world as well, an influence mediated by the receptions and appropriations of classical antiquity, borrowings that serve to shore up modernity and its continuing, albeit complex, juxtapositions of past and present. In this deft study, McCoskey provides a touchstone for thinking more critically about race's many sites of operation in both ancient and modern eras.

Author Biography

Denise Eileen McCoskey is Associate Professor of Classics and an affiliate in Black World Studies at Miami University, Ohio. She has written extensively on the politics of race in antiquity, and in 2009 she won the American Philological Association Award for Excellence in Teaching at the College Level.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	p. vii
Foreword	p. ix
Introduction	p. 1
Racial formation	p. 2
Blacks in antiquity	p. 5
Lost in translation	p. 11
Sight unseen	p. 23
Racial Theory	p. 35
A world of difference	p. 36
The ancient environmental theory	p. 46
Becoming Greek	p. 49
The Athenian fifth century	p. 56
The rhapsode of the oikumene	p. 58
From 'Hellenes' to Hellenism	p. 62
Alexanders one world?	p. 64
Becoming Roman	p. 68
Racial formation and Roman empire	p. 75
Gauls and Germans	p. 76
Race as Social Practice	p. 81
Material culture and racial formation	p. 83
Egypt under the Ptolemies	p. 88
Greeks and Egyptians	p. 92
Racial governmentality	p. 96
Racial subjectivity	p. 100
Family in the colonial contest	p. 105
Egypt under Roman rule	p. 109
Marriage and army in Roman Egypt	p. 112
Racial formation and the ancient city	p. 117
Ancient Jewish identity	p. 120
The multicultural city boils over	p. 123
Racial formation and its discontents	p. 127
Racial Representations	p. 132
Mapping the self	p. 135
Viewing the 'other'	p. 139
Persians and pseudo-Persians	p. 143
Staging the 'other'	p. 148
Voicing the 'other'	p. 153
Displaying the defeated 'other'	p. 156
'Becoming' the 'other'	p. 161
Whose History?	p. 167
Coming to terms with Black Athena	p. 171
Coming to terms with 'black' Athena	p. 177
Coming to terms with the ancient Egyptians	p. 181
From ancient to modern empire	p. 185
Coming to terms with Roman conquest	p. 188
Setting new terms: Classica Africana	p. 194
Conclusion: coming to terms with the classical past	p. 198
Afterword	p. 200
Some Suggestions for Further Reading	p. 202
Notes	p. 204
Index	p. 243
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