Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity

This important and timely book is the first to examine the articulations of blackness from the fifth century BCE to the twenty-first century. Sarah Derbew charts literary and artistic representations of black Egyptians, Aithiopians, Indians, and Greeks in the ancient Greek world and, in disentangling the ways that key constituents co-produce blackness, examines how authors and artists create characters, contemporary scholars analyze these personae, and readers and viewers bring their own interpretation to the fore. 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 the ancient Greek world. Shaped foundationally by performance studies and critical race theory, the book maps out an archaeology of blackness that reappraises its valence. This anti-racist study promotes a contextualized, rigorous approach to representations of black people in Greek antiquity that rejects simplistic conflations.