African Athena (original) (raw)
New Agendas
Edited by Daniel Orrells, Gurminder K. Bhambra, and Tessa Roynon
Classical Presences
- An interdisciplinary volume which draws on sociology, ancient history, historiography, philology, literary history, and literary criticism.
- Important for classical reception studies.
- Re-opens the debate and controversy provoked by Martin Bernal's Black Athena, while changing the terms of that debate and focusing on the implications of Greek, Roman, African, and Middle Eastern intersections.
- Afterword by Martin Bernal.
African Athena
New Agendas
Edited by Daniel Orrells, Gurminder K. Bhambra, and Tessa Roynon
Classical Presences
Description
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.
African Athena
New Agendas
Edited by Daniel Orrells, Gurminder K. Bhambra, and Tessa Roynon
Classical Presences
Table of Contents
Introduction Daniel Orrells, Gurminder K. Bhambra, & Tessa Roynon.
Part I: Myths and Historiographies, Ancient and Modern
1. Believing in Ethiopians, Maghan Keita
2. Black Apolloa Martin Bernal's The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization Volume III and Why Race Still Matters?, Patrice Rankine
3. Greece, India and Race among the Victorians, Partha Mitter
4. Black Minerva: Antiquity in antebellum African American history, Margaret Malamud
5. Black Athena before Black Athena: The Teaching of Greek and Latin at Black Colleges and Universities, Kenneth Goings & Eugene O Connor
6. Ethiopia shall stretch forth her hands unto God: Garveyism, Rastafari and Antiquity, Robbie Shilliam
7. Between Exodus and Egypt: Israel-Palestine and the break-up of the Black-Jewish Alliance, Anna Hartnell
8. Beyond Culture Wars: Reconnecting African and Jewish Diasporas in the Past and the Present, Tobias Green
9. Egyptian Athena, African Egypt, Egyptian Africa: Martin Bernal and Contemporary African Historical Thought, Stephen Howe
10. The After-lives of Black Athena, Robert J. C. Young
Part II: Classical Diaspora / Diasporic Classics
11. In the House of Libya: A Meditation, V. Y. Mudimbe
12. Hellenism, nationalism, hybridity: the invention of the novel, Tim Whitmarsh
13. The Idea of Africa in Lucan, Paolo Asso
14. Was Black Beautiful in Vandal Africa?, John H. Starks, Jr.
15. Identifying Authority: Juan Latino, an African Ex-Slave, Professor and Poet in Sixteenth-Century Granada, J. Mira Seo
16. John Barclay's Camella Poems: Ideas of Race, Beauty and Ugliness in Renaissance Latin Verse, John Gilmore
17. 'Lay in Egypt's lap each borrowed crown': Gerald Massey and Late-Victorian Afrocentrism, Brian Murray
18. 'Not equatorial black, not Mediterranean white': Denis Williams Other Leopards, John Thieme
19. Wole Soyinka's Yoruba Tragedy: Performing Politics, Astrid Van Weyenberg
20. Mythopoeia in the Struggle against Slavery, Racism, and Exclusive Afrocentrism, Edith Hall and Justine McConnell
21. Dislocating Black Classicism: Classics and the Black Diaspora in the Poetry of Aime Cesaire and Kamau Brathwaite, Emily Greenwood
22. The Africanness of Classicism in the Work of Toni Morrison, Tessa Roynon
Afterword Martin Bernal
Conclusion Daniel Orrells, Gurminder Bhambra, & Tessa Roynon
African Athena
New Agendas
Edited by Daniel Orrells, Gurminder K. Bhambra, and Tessa Roynon
Classical Presences
Author Information
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.
Contributors:
Daniel Orrells (University of Warwick), Gurminder K. Bhambra (University of Warwick), Tessa Roynon (University of Oxford), Maghan Keita (Villanova University), Patrice Rankine (Purdue University), Partha Mitter (University of Sussex), Margaret Malamud (New Mexico State University), Kenneth Goings and Eugene O'Connor (Ohio State University), Robbie Shilliam (Victoria University of Wellington), Anna Hartnell (Birkbeck College, University of London), Toby Green (University of Birmingham), Stephen Howe (University of Bristol), Robert J. C. Young (New York University), V. Y. Mudimbe (Duke University), Tim Whitmarsh (University of Oxford), Paolo Asso (University of Michigan), John H. Starks, Jr. (Binghamton University SUNY), J. Mira Seo (University of Michigan), John Gilmore (University of Warwick), Brian H. Murray (King's College, London), John Thieme (University of East Anglia), Astrid Van Weyenberg (University of Amsterdam), Edith Hall and Justine McConnell (Royal Holloway College, London), Emily Greenwood (Yale University), Tessa Roynon (University of Oxford), Martin Bernal (Cornell University).
African Athena
New Agendas
Edited by Daniel Orrells, Gurminder K. Bhambra, and Tessa Roynon
Classical Presences
Reviews and Awards
"African Athena evokes with a breath-taking scope of vision the different ways in which Black Athena has acted as a foundational text for those interested in teasing out the dynamics of cultural engagements between Europe and Africa in both antiquity and modernity. African Athena is a triumph and will serve as the starting point for research in the field for many years to come."--Bryn Mawr Classical Review