Classics and Race: A historical reader provides scholars and students with an exploratory intellectual history of the complex relationships between Classics and racist/anti-racist thought-systems. 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 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, from the late medieval period to 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 and South 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.
DOI: 10.14324/111.9781800088139
Number of illustrations: 4
Publication date: 24 April 2025
PDF ISBN: 9781800088139
EPUB ISBN: 9781800088146
Hardback ISBN: 9781800088108
Paperback ISBN: 9781800088122
List of figures
List of contributors
AcknowledgementsIntroduction
Sarah Derbew, Daniel Orrells and Phiroze VasuniaPart I: Contestations of race
1 Kebra Nagast (Glory of the Kings, c. fourteenth century CE)
Sarah Derbew2 Petrarch’s Africa (c. 1343)
Samuel Agbamu3 Leo Africanus’ ‘Cosmographia de l’Affrica’ (Cosmography of Africa, 1526)
Oumelbanine Zhiri4 Bartolomé de las Casas’s Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, 1552)
Christian Høgel5 Juan Latino’s Ad Catholicum and Austriad (1573)
Mira Seo6 The Florentine Codex (sixteenth century) edited by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún
David TavárezPart II: Race and the Enlightenment
7 Jacobus Elisa Johannes Capitein’s De servitute, libertati christianae non contraria (Is slavery compatible with Christian freedom or not?, 1742)
Grant Parker8 Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (History of the art of antiquity, 1764)
Daniel Orrells9 Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773)
Tracey WaltersPart III: Naming histories of race
10 Jules Michelet’s Histoire Romaine (Roman history, 1831)
Mathilde Cazeaux Marty11 Thomas Staunton St Clair’s A Soldier’s Recollections of the West Indies and America (1834) and Matthew Gregory Lewis’s Journal of a West-India Proprietor (1816–8)
Margaret Williamson12 Luiz Gama’s Primeiras Trovas Burlescas de Getulino (First burlesque ballads by Gaetulian, 1861)
Andrea Kouklanakis13 Anna Julia Cooper’s A Voice from the South (1892)
Shelley Haley14 Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s Works (1894–1909)
Phiroze Vasunia15 Pauline Hopkins’ Of One Blood: Or, the Hidden Self (1902–3)
Nicole A. SpignerPart IV: Colonial and postcolonial meditations
16 Fanny Jackson Coppin’s Reminiscences of School Life, and Hints on Teaching (1913)
Shelley Haley17 Tenney Frank’s ‘Race Mixture in the Roman Empire’ (1916)
Denise Eileen McCoskey18 Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem (1928) and Banjo (1929)
Justine McConnell19 Nguyễn Mạnh Tường’s Sourires et larmes d’une jeunesse (Smiles and tears of youth, 1937)
Kelly Nguyen20 Sigmund Freud’s Moses and Monotheism (1939)
Richard Armstrong, Miriam Leonard, and Daniel Orrells21 Mary Church Terrell’s A Colored Woman in a White World (1940)
Emily Greenwood22 C.L.R. James’s Every Cook Can Govern: A Study of Democracy in Ancient Greece, Its Meaning for Today (1956)
Matthew Quest23 Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail (1963)
Patrice RankineAfterword
Sarah Derbew
Index
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