Classics and race. A historical reader

Open access

[Authors and titles are listed at the end of this review]

Sourcebooks rarely aim at inspiring change. Most are conceived in response to a preexisting demand, collating snippets of texts intended to illustrate or deepen the lessons students presumably imbibe from the professor or textbook. Yet despite a burgeoning scholarly interest in classical reception and its relationship with modern racial discourse, work that vitally informs the selection of texts in Classics and race, courses teaching this topic remain peripheral to the “standard” offerings at the university level, as far as I am aware. And if my awareness is not anomalous, then the editors and contributors of this volume are presenting us educators with a tool to inspire course development in a needed direction.

To be clear, this collection does not speak to racial discourse in antiquity, what the editors call the “ancient archive,” but instead complements this archive by treating the mutual influence between the classical tradition and both racist and anti-racist discourse, starting in the late medieval period and ending in the mid-20^th century. To this end, voices are included from five continents, from colonizers and colonized, enslaver and enslaved, male and female. Alongside well-known exploiters of Greco-Roman and biblical texts to propound or resist racial theories—Leo Africanus, Winckelmann, Wheatley, Tenney Frank, Freud, King—one encounters unexpected gems like the early modern Black intellectual Juan Latino, the post-Civil War anti-racist activist-teacher Anna Julia Cooper, and a Socratic-minded Gandhi. Every instructor will have  favorites, and the size and breadth of the collection allow all to assign what aligns with their strengths, whether historiography, literature, rhetoric, or memoir.

The editors have organized each source chronologically by publication date and into groupings whose headings could just as easily have been “1300-1600,” “The Eighteenth Century, “The Long Nineteenth Century,” and the “The Twentieth Century.” Recognizing that other ordering principles might make more sense to others, the editors also suggest helpful thematic groupings in the “Introduction.” One of the more unique editorial choices was to start each chapter with the source itself, prefaced only by a citation. This decision avoids the pitfalls of those anthologies that impose interpretation in the introduction to the source (or the footnotes), predisposing students to the editors’ understanding of the text rather than allowing them to draw their own initial conclusions. On the other hand, for sources whose authors are not well known, the absence of even a brief introduction at the outset may leave students wondering what is going on, unless provided with basic background by their instructors ahead of time.

After the excerpt from each source (with the exception of Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, for only a link to an online reproduction could be provided due to copyright restrictions), readers encounter commentary written by specialists offering the needed background on the author and the work, an elucidation of the classical references and allusions in the passages provided, and an interpretation of how these references supported the author’s views on issues of race, which in turn clarify how understandings of race impacted knowledge of the classics itself at each given moment. Particularly exemplary are the articles by Grant Parker on Jacobus Elisa Johannes Capitein’s De servitude, libertati non contraria and by Patrice Rankine on King’s Letter. Both are written in an engaging, accessible style; provide sufficient background on the author’s life, work, and context; thoroughly explain classical references without assuming much knowledge of classical texts or history; and offer relatively open-ended readings of the sources that encourage further student exploration. Parker deftly exposes the Ciceronian influence in Capitein’s self-presentation while employing a theoretically sophisticated understanding of race to make sense of this African-born defender of slavery and anti-Blackness. Rankine expertly teases out both the depth of King’s classical learning and the particularity of his Socrates.

These two articles illustrate the many insights offered by each commentary that will enrich students’ and instructors’ encounter with the selected sources. For those already teaching courses on classical reception, whether focused on race or not, the volume is an invaluable resource, thanks especially to its availability as open access. Likewise, those with less  background in this area now have a solid foundation upon which to develop such a course. My own interest in Classics and race comes from teaching a seminar on race and antiquity requiring history majors to produce a research paper that serves as a culmination of their overall history coursework, and I look forward to using this sourcebook to inspire students interested in more recent history and geographies beyond the Mediterranean to develop their research passion in directions that pay attention to the crucial interplay between the classical tradition and multiple modernities.

With these education contexts in mind, I offer the following comments to best facilitate this book’s use in the classroom, and as possible improvements on what one hopes will be a second edition. First, students may find some of the commentary articles less accessible than is ideal. In some cases, this is merely an issue of theoretical diction or academic style. Yet many of the commentary authors assume readers already possess an ample background in classical works. Students pursuing disciplines outside the classics, or those classics majors in their early years or focusing on material culture, may grasp the casual references to details in Homer or the Aeneid, but will likely feel overwhelmed by the expectation that the works of Lucan, Isidore, and Pliny are common knowledge. In a similar vein, few students (or even instructors) will be well versed in the historical context of early 20^th century Vietnam. These are all easy fixes for well-prepared instructors and future editors.

Another aspect of the volume that calls for pedagogical guidance is its employment of the concepts of race and racism. The editors provide a concise definition of both in the “Introduction” that will require unpacking in the classroom, particularly as power dynamics are less emphasized than might be expected (especially in defining racism). More importantly, the commentaries do not seem to have been expected to endorse these definitions, leading to unevenness in how the concepts are treated, especially in the articles on early modernity. For instance, Samuel Agbamu’s characterization of Petrarch’s Punic War narrative as a form of racialization fails to consider the presence (or rather, absence) of power surrounding a work that was not published during his lifetime and had no discernible influence on European-African relations at the time—possibly such influence occurred later but is never discussed. Likewise, Tavarez’s narrow focus on phenotype left me wondering if different, less Western ways of naturalizing Otherness were present in the Florentine Codex that could be fruitfully analyzed as racial discourse governing Mexica hierarchies within their (former) empire.

Finally, the use of endnotes distracts. Admittedly, this is in part a personal pet peeve: endnotes cause unnecessary interruption to the flow of reading. But it is the attempt to assign multiple functions to these notes that causes significant confusion in some of the articles. An example is the chapter on Jules Michelet’s Histoire romaine, more specifically, William Hazlitt’s nineteenth-century translation. The endnotes at times reflect Hazlitt’s annotations, at other times those of Mathilde Cazeaux (the author of the commentary). In other cases, more endnotes are needed to help students with unfamiliar terms (e.g., Hindi concepts central to Gandhi) or references (e.g., Frank’s classical and racial allusions).

Others may feel that that certain perspectives are underrepresented—Sarah Derbew in the “Afterword” regrets the lack of contemporary African authors, and my shopping list would include Islamic authors from the modern period and more engagement with material culture—but no sourcebook can do everything, and I would argue that the volume does its job in inspiring not just study of what it includes, but also the desire to discover what it does not. As such, it is a recommended resource for those looking for primary sources in classical reception, as well as for those willing to broaden their teaching repertoire into an area that is sure to awaken students to the impossibility of understanding modern societies without appreciating the importance of the classical tradition for those who sought to shape these societies.

Authors and titles

Introduction, Sarah Derbew, Daniel Orrells and Phiroze Vasunia

Part I: Contestations of race

1. Kebra Negast (Glory of the Kings, c. fourteenth century CE), Sarah Derbew
2. Petrarch’s Africa (c. 1343), Samuel Agbamu
3. Leo Africanus’ Cosmographia dell’Affrica (Cosmography of Africa, 1526), Oumelbanine Zhiri
4. Bartolomé de las Casas’s Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, 1552), Christian Høgel
5. Juan Latino’s Ad Catholicum and Austriad (1573), J. Mira Seo
6. The Florentine Codex (sixteenth century), edited by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, David Tavárez

Part II: Race and the Enlightenment

7. Jacobus Elisa Johannes Capitein’s De servitude, libertati christianae non contraria (Is slavery compatible with Christian freedom or not?, 1742), Grant Parker
8. Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (History of the art of antiquity, 1764), Daniel Orrells
9. Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), Tracey Walters

Part III: Naming histories of race

10. Jules Michelet’s Histoire romaine (Roman history, 1831), Mathilde Cazeaux
11. 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 Williamson
12. Luiz Gama’s Primeiras Trovas Burlescas de Getulino (First burlesque ballads by Gaetulian, 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’ Of One Blood: Or, the Hidden Self (1902-3), Nicole A. Spigner

Part IV: Colonial and postcolonial 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 Eileen McCoskey
18. Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem (1928) and Banjo (1929), Justine McConnell
19. Nguyễn Mạnh Tường’s Sourires et larmes d’une jeunesse (Smiles and tears of youth, 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. L.R. James’s Every Cook Can Govern: A Study of Democracy in Ancient Greece, Its Meaning for Today (1956), Matthew Quest
23. Martin Luther King Jr’s ‘Letter from a Birmingham jail’ (1963), Patrice Rankine

Afterword, Sarah Derbew