The Book:
Untangling Blackness In Greek Antiquity
“In the midst of this moment of reckoning, diverse representations of black people in ancient Greek literature and art remind us that reductive notions of skin color are relatively recent.” - SFD
Image by Fred Wilson, courtesy of Pace Gallery
Summary:
Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 2022) is the first book to examine the articulations of blackness from the fifth century BCE to the twenty-first century. In the book, Sarah F. Derbew traces literary and artistic representations of black Egyptians, Aithiopians (Nubians), Indians, and Greeks in the ancient Greek world. In addition, she probes deeply into race’s precarious grip on skin color and thereby uncovers the silences, suppression, and misappropriation of blackness within modern studies of Greek antiquity. Altogether, her anti-racist study promotes a contextualized, rigorous approach to representations of black people in Greek antiquity that rejects simplistic conflations.
Endorsements:
Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University:
“While it’s too much to imagine that those endlessly fascinating Greek ancestors of ours were color-blind, they most certainly were keen on marking difference, linguistically and geographically. But what about “racially?” What was “blackness” to a citizen of Ancient Greece, and what did the blackness of Sub-Saharan Africans, in fact, signify? And what in the world did an “Ethiopian” such as Memnon, whose people were favored by the gods, appear to be physically in the Greek imagination? Speculation about such complex matters has never elicited more energetic speculation and wishful thinking from scholars, journalists, and filmmakers than today, who inevitably read Greek attitudes toward physical differences through the lens of black-white race relations in the West today. Which is why Sarah Derbew’s Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity is a most welcome corrective to the school of Afrocentricity … Bringing deep learning and calm, convincing reasoning to a politically-loaded subject is always difficult. But Professor Derbew accomplishes this task with eloquence, grace, and hard-hitting analytical skills that make this book must reading for all of us who long to know how racial differences manifested themselves in the sublime culture from which we all descend.”
Dr. Simon Goldhill, University of Cambridge:
”Sarah Derbew’s impressive first book is a carefully reflective study which is also provocative in the best sense, and a significant intervention in the field of classics. She untangles the vocabulary of race, ethnicity, skin colour and identity to let us see the vested interests and misrecognitions of modern scholarship - and offers a transformative vision of ancient Greek engagements with Africa.”
Dr. Denise Eileen McCoskey, Miami University (Ohio):
In Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity, Sarah Derbew provides a radical and desperately needed reframing of Greek antiquity, weaving together a breathtaking range of ancient and modern sources to probe not only the complexity and richness of black presences in the ancient Greek world, but also the modern structures of thought, disciplinary training and even museum curation that have prevented us for far too long from seeing them.’
Reviews:
Čulík-Baird, Hannah (2023) “Sarah F. Derbew, Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity.” Bryn Mawr Classical Review, September 14.
Meyer-Zwiffelhoffer, Eckhard (2023) “Sarah F. Derbew, Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity.” Historische Zeitschrift 316 (3): 681–83.
Parmenter, Christopher Stedman (2023) “Review of Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity by Sarah F. Derbew.” Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology and Heritage Studies 11 (1): 128–32.
Vout, Caroline (2023) “Finding the Ancient Other?: Visual Representations of Black People in the Ancient World,” Times Literary Supplement, January 20.
Olya, Najee (2022) “Does Classics Have a Future: On Sarah Derbew’s ‘Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity’,” Los Angeles Review of Books, August 8.
Terlizzo, Ciro (2022) “Il colore della pelle: tra letteratura antica e pubblicità contemporanea,” Classico Contemporaneo 8: 98–106.