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African Athena: New Agendas

Online ISBN:
9780191731464
Print ISBN:
9780199595006
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

African Athena: New Agendas

Daniel Orrells (ed.),
Daniel Orrells
(ed.)
Associate Professor in Classics and Ancient History, University of Warwick
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Gurminder K. Bhambra (ed.),
Gurminder K. Bhambra
(ed.)
Associate Professor in Sociology, University of Warwick
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Tessa Roynon (ed.)
Tessa Roynon
(ed.)
Tutor in English, University of Oxford
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Published online:
19 January 2012
Published in print:
1 October 2011
Online ISBN:
9780191731464
Print ISBN:
9780199595006
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

The appearance of Martin Bernal's Black Athena: The Afro-Asian Roots of Classical Civilization in 1987 sparked intense debate and controversy in Africa, Europe, and North America. His detailed genealogy of the ‘fabrication of Greece’ and his claims for the influence of ancient African and Near Eastern cultures on the making of classical Greece, questioned many intellectuals' assumptions about the nature of ancient history. The transportation of enslaved African persons into Europe, the Americas, and the Caribbean, brought African and diasporic African people into contact in significant numbers with the Greek and Latin classics for the first time in modern history. In this book chapters explore the impact of the modern African diaspora from the sixteenth century onwards on Western notions of history and culture, examining the role Bernal's claim has played in European and American understandings of history, and in classical, European, American, and Caribbean literary production. This book examines the history of intellectuals and literary writers who contested the white, dominant Euro-American constructions of the classical past and its influence on the present.

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