Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity

Sara Derbew, Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 2022). 9781108492588.

Reviewed by Javal Coleman, University of Texas, javalac21@utexas.edu.

Race and racism in the study of Classics continues to remain a highly contested field, from Tenney Frank’s “Race Mixture in the Roman Empire” to Benjamin Isaac’s The Invention of Race in Classical Antiquity.1 Sara Derbew makes a significant contribution to this discussion with Untangling Blackness, a monograph based on her 2018 Yale PhD dissertation. She utilizes critical race theory and performance study theory to propose a new, contextualized approach to the representations of black people in the ancient Greek world.2 Her aim is to demonstrate the varied theatricality of blackness in Greek literature and art from the 5^th century BCE to the 4^th century CE. Additionally, her book seeks to serve as a “metatheatrical stage on which characters enact performances of blackness” (p. 187). Derbew utilizes Fields and Fields’ concept of racism and “racecraft,” which defines racism as a social practice that applies a double standard, rather than relying on the terms “race” and “racism.”3 Fields and Fields use “racecraft” to refer to the way in which racism produces modern race as its object of knowledge (p. 19). They treat racism as a social phenomenon that is constructed from ideologies that misunderstand social reality. In fact, racecraft has become an increasingly popular approach to the study of racism in antiquity in recent years.4

In her introductory chapter, “The Metatheater of Blackness,” Derbew outlines her methodology and makes some important terminological distinctions. She points out that throughout the monograph, she uses “black” and “Black.” The lowercase denotes people with black skin and “phenotypic features including full lips, curly hair, and a broad nose in ancient Greek literature and art” (p. 14). The uppercase refers to modern groups of people socially constructed whose melanin is one common trait. In this chapter, Derbew takes scholars, such as Benjamin Isaac, to task for projecting modern ideas of racism and race onto the ancient evidence. Perhaps the most enlightening aspect of this chapter is section 1.4, which traces the history of scholarship concerning Blackness and blackness in Greek antiquity. Derbew for example, discusses the publication of Martin Bernal’s Black Athena and how it radically challenged the models of Greek history at the time by arguing for the centrality of Egypt and Phoenicia in the development of Greek civilization.5

In chapter two, “Masks of Blackness: Reading the Iconography of Black People in Ancient Greece,” Derbew focuses on material culture. She first examines the often–poorly interpreted janiform vases, a class of vessels decorated with two faces of different colors, one on each side. Derbew points out how scholars such as Grace Beardsley and Frank Snowden Jr. used them to argue about the state of race relations in ancient Greece. The janiform cups’ double-headedness has typically been interpreted with the left side as being “White” and the right side being “Black.” However, Derbew illustrates that the White–Black binary is a modern interpretation and does not have an “ancient visual referent” (p. 33). She insists that we understand the left side as being brown-faced, which “sidesteps the warped mutations of white” (p. 33). Moreover, she argues that the janiform cups held transformative power. They change the drinker of the cup into an audience member who watches the face on the cup (p. 40). She also points out how the drinker of the vessel can hide their face with the janiform cup, almost wearing a sort of theater mask.

After the analysis of the janiform cups, she turns to a discussion of how modern viewers engage with ancient representations of Blackness in museums. She rightly points out how modern museums often retroject ideas of Blackness and Whiteness onto ancient art and use reductive language in describing such works of art. Perhaps the most important point made in this second half of the chapter is that Western museums have often failed to showcase non-Egyptian ancient African peoples (p. 54–55). The sections in this chapter concerning museums are an important scholarly intervention and reminds one of Page DuBois’ similar approach in her Slaves and Other Objects monograph.6 In the chapter, “Greeks in the Museum,”7 DuBois demonstrates how the Getty, British, and the National Museum of Athens do not recognize slaves and slavery in their art. Similarly, Derbew shows how several museums still refuse to acknowledge non-Egyptian ancient African peoples.

The rest of the monograph (chapters three through six) is heavily philological. While the first two chapters naturally provide the solid foundations for Derbew’s theoretical and methodological approaches to the volume, these chapters are the payoff of adapting a metatheatrical approach to blackness in Greek antiquity. Chapter three focuses on Aeschylus’s Suppliants. Derbew argues that the Danaids actively resist assumptions concerning their Greek identity. She argues that they successfully ensure their survival by demonstrating a mastery of Greek religion that allows them to “erode” the label of “foreign” given to them by Pelasgus (p. 72). Furthermore, Derbew tries to show that the Danaids successfully maintain themselves as “Argive Greek, Egyptian, and black” as they heed Danaus’s instructions to honor the Greek gods. The Danaids themselves challenge the limitations of modern racial categories; they simply do not fit comfortably into any one category. 

Chapter four, “Beyond Blackness: Reorienting Greek Geography,” examines the depiction of and subversive performances of blackness in Greek historiography, particularly through the writings of Herodotus. Derbew points out the fact that Herodotus mentions Aithiopians only a handful of times (p. 97). She also clarifies that when she uses Aithiopia, she means both a mythical region and a historical country. Derbew does this to distinguish between Ethiopia, the modern country located in the Horn of Africa east of the Sudan, and Aithiopia, which ancient writers conflate with being the whole of modern Egypt and the Sudan (pp. xiii-xv). After examining references to Aithiopians in Herodotus, Derbew examines the story in which the Egyptians spy on the Aithiopians and report what they find to Cambyses II (Histories 3.17–26). Derbew argues from this story that the Egyptians’ ethnographic discourse points to the fact that there is not a single normative culture (p. 110). In other words, the story of the Egyptians demonstrates that there were multiple competing conceptions of identity amongst the Egyptians described in this text. Finally, she argues that Herodotus’s Aithiopians are powerful actors who are able to disrupt the audiences’ expectations of foreignness.

In chapter five, “From Greek Scythians to Black Greeks: A Spectrum of Foreignness in Lucian’s Satires,” Derbew focuses on Lucian’s depictions of black Aithiopians. She argues that Lucian’s characters are fruitful interlocutors for understanding identity and self-perception, especially as it relates to ancient race (p. 132). From the staged discussion between Solon and the Scythian Anacharsis to the Hermotimus, where an Aithiopian imagines that everyone shares his black skin, characters in Lucian discuss the complexities of blackness. Lucian’s athletes are seen as healthy because of their black and red skin, and their frequent exposure to the sun builds physical strength and integrity (p. 148). Furthermore, she demonstrates how Lucian’s absurd description of blackness makes it even more difficult to reduce black skin to a single group of people. For instance, Anarcharsis’s understanding of blackness equates black skin color with a beast-like nature and violence, whereas the character Solon sees black skin as confirming the athlete’s Greek identity.

Then, in chapter six, Derbew examines the character of Chariclea in Heliodorus’s Aithiopika, arguing that Heliodorus further demonstrates the complexities of describing ancient race. Charicleia is an Aithiopian princess whose white skin is the reason for her abandonment (since her parents have black skin). Heliodorus shows how Chariclea’s adventures complicate the nature of her identity: she is not singularly Greek, black Aithiopian, or white Aithiopian. Derbew demonstrates that the Aithiopika is an “Aithiopian novel written in Greek, not a Greek novel about Aithiopia.” (p. 159). Derbew shows how the role of blackness transforms throughout the novel. Like the Danaids in Aeschylus’s Suppliants, it is Chariclea’s religious and linguistic mastery that allow her to pass as Greek, though Derbew is keen on pointing out that this “passing” is unintentional. It is also made unstable by the fact that she is Aithiopian and born of Aithiopian parents. Derbew concludes the chapter by discussing the act of passing so prevalent in nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American literature, a method by which Black men and women attempted to gain acceptance into the White community.

Overall, the argument of Untangling Blackness is well executed and timely. Not only does this monograph work to imagine the future of the classical discipline, but it is also a pathway and part of that future. The turbulent history of race and racism in Classics has been increasingly revisited over the last several years. Although we are far from John C. Calhoun’s apparent assertion that he would only believe the Negro to be human through his knowledge of Greek, the challenge for the Black classicist and the study of blackness in antiquity is immense. The events at and subsequent discussion around the 2019 SCS meeting is only one proof of this. Although it may be challenging for non-specialists to engage with, Derbew’s monograph will be invaluable for the scholar interested in the study of race in antiquity as well as the historiography concerning this issue. While this work will especially appeal to specialists, the fruits for interacting with this work for the general reader are many, particularly for those who are interested in learning more about the history of the conceptions of race over time.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: The Metatheater of Blackness (pp. 1–28)
2. Masks of Blackness: Reading the Iconography of Black People in Ancient Greece (pp. 29–65)
3. Masks of Differences in Aeschylus’s Suppliants (pp. 66–97)
4. Beyond Blackness: Reorienting Greek Geography (pp. 98–128)
5. From Greek Scythians to Black Greeks: A Spectrum of Foreignness in Lucian’s Satires (pp. 129–57)
6. Black Disguises in an Aithiopian Novel (pp. 158–86)
7. Conclusion: (Re)placing Blackness in Greek Antiquity (pp. 187–92)
Appendix 1 (pp. 193–97)
Appendix 2 (pp. 198–201)

Notes

1. Tenney Frank, “Race Mixture in the Roman Empire,” American Historical Review 21 (1916): 689–708; Benjamin Isaac, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).

2.  On the capitalization of “black,” see below.

3. Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (London: Verso, 2012), p. 17.

4. See, e.g., Jackie Murray, “Race and Sexuality: Racecraft in the Odyssey,” in A Cultural History of Race in Antiquity, ed. Denise McCoskey (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), pp. 137–56; Rebecca Futo Kennedy, “Race and the Athenian Metic Re-visioned,” in Identities in Antiquity, ed. V. Manolopoulou, J. Skinner, and C. Tsouparopoulou (Routledge, forthcoming).

5.  Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, vol. 1, The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785–1985 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987).

6. Page DuBois, Slaves and Other Objects (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

7. DuBois, Slaves and Other Objects, 59-81.