African Athena: New Agendas
Daniel Orrells, Gurminder K. Bhambra, and Tessa Roynon
Abstract
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 ... More
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 this book chapters explore the impact of the modern African diaspora 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. This book 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.
Keywords:
Martin Bernal,
Africa,
Europe,
North America,
Near Eastern cultures,
classical Greece,
African diaspora,
Euro-African constructions
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2011 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199595006 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2012 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199595006.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Daniel Orrells, editor
Associate Professor in Classics and Ancient History, University of Warwick
Gurminder K. Bhambra, editor
Associate Professor in Sociology, University of Warwick
Tessa Roynon, editor
Tutor in English, University of Oxford
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