Classics and Race: A historical reader provides scholars and students with an exploratory intellectual history of the various and complex relationships between Classics and racist and anti-racist thought-systems and politics. It collects together a series of readings of historical primary sources from the late medieval period until the mid-twentieth century, bringing to light how the classical tradition and post-ancient constructions of race have informed and questioned each other. Each reading is accompanied by an essay, written by a leading specialist who offers a discussion of the primary source.
The volume is arranged chronologically, beginning in the late medieval period and moves through the Renaissance, crucial for understanding classical humanism, and on to the eighteenth century with texts foundational to the modern emergence of classical studies as a discipline and its relationship to the transatlantic slave trade. The essays show how the classical tradition has continuously been structured by debates about race, racism and anti-racism. Including voices from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Europe and North America, the essays demonstrate why the primary text is important for understanding this intellectual and cultural history, and the global reach of the classical tradition.
Table des matières
List of figures
List of contributors
Introduction
Sarah Derbew, Daniel Orrells, and Phiroze Vasunia
Part 1: Contestations of race
1 Kebra Nagast (ክብረ ነገሥት, The Glory of the Kings, c. fourteenth century CE)
Sarah Derbew
2 Petrarch’s Africa (c. 1343)
Samuel Agbamu
3 Leo Africanus (al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan al-Fasi)’s Della descrittione dell’Africa (1550)
Oumelbanine Zhiri
4 Bartolomé de las Casas’s Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (1552)
Christian Høgel
5 Juan Latino’s Austriad *(1573)
*Mira Seo
Part 2: Race and the Enlightenment
6 The Florentine Codex (c. 1550–1570)
David Tavárez
7 Jacobus Johannes Capitein’s De servitude, libertati christianae non contraria (On Slavery as not Contrary to Christian Liberty) (1742)
Grant Parker
8 Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s History of the Art of Antiquity (1764)
Daniel Orrells
9 Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773)
*Tracey Walters
Part 3: Naming histories of race
10 Jules Michelet’s Histoire Romaine (1831)
Mathilde Cazeaux Marty
11 Matthew Gregory Lewis’s Journal of a West-India Proprietor, kept during a residence in the Island of Jamaica and Thomas Staunton St Clair’s A Soldier’s Recollections of the West Indies and America: With a Narrative of the Expedition to the Island of Walcheren (1834)
Margaret Williamson
12 Luiz Gama’s Primeiras Trovas Burlescas de Getulino (First Burlesque Balladas by the Gaetulian, 1859 and 1861)
Andrea Kouklanakis
13 Anna Julia Cooper’s A Voice from the South (1892)
Shelley Haley
14 Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s Works(1894–1909)
Phiroze Vasunia
15 Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood (1902–1903)
Nicole Spigner
Part 4: Colonial and Post-colonial meditations
16 Fanny Jackson Coppin’s Reminiscences of School Life, and Hints on Teaching (1913)
Shelley Haley
17 Tenney Frank’s Race Mixture in the Roman Empire (1916)
Denise Mc Coskey
18 Claude Mc Kay’s Home to Harlem (1928) and Banjo (1929)
Justine Mc Connell
19 Nguyễn Mạnh Tường’s Déracinement (1937)
Kelly Nguyen
20 Sigmund Freud’s Moses and Monotheism (1939)
Richard Armstrong, Miriam Leonard, and Daniel Orrells
21 Mary Church Terrell’s A Colored Woman in a White World(1940)
Emily Greenwood
22 C.L.R. James’s Every Cook Can Govern (1956)
Matthew Quest
23 Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail (1963)
Patrice Rankine
Afterword
Sarah Derbew
A propos de l’auteur
Phiroze Vasunia is Professor of Greek at University College London.