Publication date: 24 April 2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781800088139
Number of illustrations: 4
Classics and Race
A historical reader
Sarah Derbew (Editor), Daniel Orrells (Editor), Phiroze Vasunia (Editor)
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.
List of figures
List of contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Sarah Derbew, Daniel Orrells and Phiroze Vasunia
Part I: Contestations of race
1 Kebra Nagast (Glory of the Kings, c. fourteenth century CE)
Sarah Derbew
2 Petrarch’s Africa (c. 1343)
Samuel Agbamu
3 Leo Africanus’ ‘Cosmographia de l’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)
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 servitute, libertati christianae non contraria (Is slavery compatible with Christian freedom or not?, 1742)
Grant Parker
8 Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (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 Marty
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 C.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
Index
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
Sarah Derbew (Editor)
Sarah Derbew is Assistant Professor of Classics at Stanford University.
Daniel Orrells (Editor)
Daniel Orrells is Professor of Classics in the Department of Classics at King’s College London
Phiroze Vasunia (Editor)
Phiroze Vasunia is Professor of Greek at University College London.
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