English, Emma

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New England Classical Journal Volume 51 Issue 2 Pages 97-99 10-25-2024 Review of Sarah F. Derbew. 2022. Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pp xvi, 253. Paperback. (ISBN 9781108817912) $25.99. Emma English University of Wisconsin–Madison, ekenglish@wisc.edu Follow this and additional works at: https://crossworks.holycross.edu/necj  Part of the Classics Commons Recommended Citation English, Emma (2024) "Review of Sarah F. Derbew. 2022. Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pp xvi, 253. Paperback. (ISBN 9781108817912) $25.99.," New England Classical Journal: Vol. 51 : Iss. 2 , 97-99. https://doi.org/10.52284/NECJ.51.2.review.english This Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by CrossWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in New England Classical Journal by an authorized editor of CrossWorks. 97sarah F. derBew. 2022. unTangling Blackness in greek anTiquiTy. camBridge: camBridge university Press. PP xvi, 253. PaPerBack. (isBn 9781108817912) $25.99.Although the Black-White racial construction had no place in Greco-Roman antiquity, there is a centuries-long tradition, from Winckelmann to the present, of claiming the Greeks and Romans as “Whites,” who looked down on those with black skin in a kind of “proto-racism.”1 The Whitening of Greek and Roman bodies has served to erase the presence of people with diverse skin tones in antiquity and to justify modern notions of the value of skin color.2 Sarah F. Derbew provides a necessary course correction with her Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity. Adopting a “bidirectional inquiry” into representations of blackness in Greek antiquity, Derbew deftly explores constructions of blackness in literature and visual art, drawing on works from the fifth century BCE to the fourth century CE while parallelly tracking the ways that scholars have conflated these representations with modern notions of Blackness. Because skin color has been so racialized in the modern world, scholars have historically (and mistakenly) assumed that the ancient Greeks placed a similar emphasis on color in determining difference and status. To mark a clean break from previous handlings of ancient race and color, Derbew carefully employs precise terminology to support her analytical framework, seeking to situate black people within ancient context without ignoring the modern conceptual filter of Blackness and the interference of anachronistic modern racial biases present in reception of the ancient world. In the introductory material, Derbew includes a table with a systematized explanation of the nomenclature utilized, ensuring that readers are equipped for a nuanced reading of her material. In the first chapter, drawing on Christina Sharpe’s practice of “anagrammatical Blackness,”3 Derbew continues to elaborate on her orthographical choices to separate ancient blackness from modern anti-Black attitudes. Refusing to treat the modern nation Ethiopia as interchangeable with the land of Greek legend, Derbew refers to the land featured in ancient Greek art and literature as “Aithiopia,” maintaining sharp distinctions between ancient and modern concepts (pp. xiii–xiv). Most importantly, for this discussion, Derbew uses Black (upper case B) to refer to the modern, socially constructed racial categorization encompassing a wide range of skin tones, and black (lower case b) to refer to people whose skin color is rendered extremely dark to black in ancient Greek art and literature (pp. xiii–xiv, 13–16). As Derbew herself acknowledges, some terms carry enough baggage in the modern mind to make separation difficult. In particular, her use of “black face” to describe the faces on Attic janiform cups is somewhat jarring. It invites rather than staves off connection with modern racist 1 Because modern Black and White racial designations were created in the wake of the Atlantic slave trade, male Greek citizens did not refer to themselves as “white” (and, in fact, that level of paleness was associated with upper-class women, effeminate men, or Northern foreigners). They do refer to others as “very dark” or “black” (melangchimos, melangchrōs, etc.). However, these adjectives are not limited to those from the continent now known as Africa, but from a range of locales including Egypt, Aithiopia, India, and Colchis (Derbew, pp. 9–14). Following the creation of modern racial categories, European and American scholars sought to claim Greco-Roman antiquity as part of “White” history, in part because the Whitening of Greek and Roman bodies helped justify contemporary racial hierarchies. Part of a broader scholarly trend, Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (1764) is an early, influential work identifying (sometimes idolizing) ancient Greeks and Romans as “White.” Benjamin Isaac’s Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity, which Derbew rebuts in her text, repackages modern racism into ancient “proto-racism,” alleging a fixed model of anti-Black discrimination in Greco-Roman antiquity (Benjamin Isaac, 2006, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity, Princeton: Princeton University Press).2 I adopt Derbew’s orthography for this review (and will certainly continue to use many of her systematized disambiguations in the future), which I discuss further below.3 Christina Sharpe, 2016, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, pp. 75-77, Durham: Duke University Press.98parodies that may not have been made otherwise (pp. 31–36). In this case, a different term rather than a change in orthography may have served better. However, most of the distinctions she makes between terms successfully keep the modern and ancient dynamics separate. Having illuminated the problems with past scholarship and set the stage for a nuanced, systematized new discourse on blackness, Derbew opts to focus on a series of “illustrative rather than exhaustive” examples from ancient Greek art and literature while never letting the reader forget the past prejudicial interpretations of her examples (p. 25). Each chapter focuses on one work (or type of work) and concludes with “a contemporary comparandum that generates new avenues of connection between the Black archive and the ancient Greek tradition” (p. 25). Her ancient material ranges from fifth-century BCE Attic janiform cups (Chapter 2), Aeschylus’ Suppliants (Chapter 3), Herodotus’ Histories (Chapter 4), and Lucian’s Satires (Chapter 5), to Heliodorus’ Aithiopika in the fourth-century CE (Chapter 6), which she compares with modern material ranging from Langston Hughes’ poetry to Fred Wilson’s photography to the British Museum’s curatorial practices. Derbew, armed with cutting-edge critical race and performance theory, retrieves a wide array of presentations of blackness across time and space in Greek antiquity. Emphasizing the malleability of race’s performance, Derbew scrutinizes the unstable valence of skin color in Greek antiquity, refuting any simplistic interpretations of blackness. Reframing our understanding of race in the ancient Greek world, Derbew reveals that race is “not reducible to skin color and at times has little connection to skin color” (p. 18). In Greek antiquity, race encompasses many factors that mark groups of people as distinct, and “skin color is but one part of a larger mechanism of hierarchal difference in an expansive system of race,” which does not always reflect identity (self-conceptualization) and certainly does not always ascribe low status to darker skin (p. 18). Derbew recasts Attic janiform (two-faced) drinking cups as a part of symposiatic performance, which included a range of types of faces to choose as a mask, rejecting the past assumption by scholars that the black faces are always meant to be comic or ugly in comparison to the lighter face on the obverse side (pp. 37–50). In Chapter 3, the Danaids of Aeschylus’ Suppliants successfully reject the “unGreek” identity the Argive king Pelasgus assigned to them based on their skin color, clothing, and behavior. Instead, with their clever demonstration of their intimate knowledge of Greek language and religious customs, they complicate the relationship between the exteriority of race and self-identification. They perform their “hybrid identity” so successfully that Pelasgus accepts the Danaids as Greek without them needing to relinquish their claim on black and Egyptian identities (p. 67). Next, Derbew turns to Herodotus, whose Aithiopian (and Persian and Egyptian) ethnographers define themselves and others by both visual and nonvisual markers, underscoring “the shaky staying power of skin color as it applies to race” (p. 98). Skin color is just one, often unreliable, indicator of difference from a vast menu of possibilities. The unreliability of skin color in determining race continues in Derbew’s analysis of Lucian’s Satires in Chapter 5. Lucian, a Syrian-Roman writing in Greek, stages a conversation between the Athenian Solon and a traveling Scythian, Anacharsis, who considers many Athenian athletes black due to suntan and dust, which undermines “visual markers as reliable shortcuts to understanding others and themselves” (p. 129). Finally, in Chapter 6, Derbew turns to Heliodorus’ Aithiopika, a Greek novel in which black skin acts as a sign of privilege, that follows Chariclea, a “white” Aithiopian princess born to the black Aithiopian king and queen, on her journey home. The modern comparisons Derbew draws are often illuminating, demonstrating both the continued problems of understanding race and its performance and further proving that the meaning ascribed to skin color is not and has never been fixed. However, occasionally, due to the ambitious scope of the text and its size constraint, some of the modern comparisons may not seem fully fleshed out for audiences not deeply familiar with the scope of modern Black art and literature. Derbew concludes by summing up the book’s central program as laying bare “uncritical analyses of black skin color that have long informed scholarship in Classics” with a new analytical lens, confronting skin color in Greek antiquity in its historical context and complicating fixed notions of blackness, “without precluding 99transhistorical dialogue” (p. 187). A goal in which she succeeds. The clear thread running through the whole work is the instability of skin color’s valuation and role in determining race and the problems past scholarship has had with interpreting its relevance in the ancient material. Derbew chips away at previous anachronistic assumptions that have plagued classical scholarship with excellent use of modern theory on race and performance, replacing them with an updated framework. She thoroughly debunks all notions that blackness was any fixed indication of inferiority or subjugation with her nuanced analysis of the ancient material. As a whole, this book is a needed rethinking of blackness in Greek antiquity, which ends on a call for more vigorous inquiry in the same vein to revise static, outdated assumptions of race. Derbew’s Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity, with its instructive combination of modern theory and ancient material, is sure to stimulate as well as guide future scholars aiming to “equitably untangle the past” (p. 192).Emma English University of Wisconsin–Madisonekenglish@wisc.eduhttps://doi.org/10.52284/NECJ.51.2.review.englishmelanie racette-camPBell. 2023. THe crisis oF masculiniTy in THe age oF augusTus. Wisconsin sTudies in classics. madison, wisconsin: the university oF wisconsin Press, wisconsin studies in classics. PP. xi, 262. hardcover. (isBn 9780299343507) $99.95.In classical scholarship, the political and cultural changes that occurred when the Roman Republican system was replaced by Augustan autocracy are a much-studied topic. Melanie Racette-Campbell’s The Crisis of Masculinity in the Age of Augustus approaches this topic from a fresh perspective, focusing on Roman masculinity. She argues that Augustus’ one-man rule represented a radical change in Roman manhood, which she describes as a crisis in Roman masculinity. In her study, Racette-Campbell demonstrates how the Augustan regime challenged the ways in which Roman aristocrats could perform their masculinity, pushing masculine elite competition from political and military arenas into other, literary spaces. Racette-Campbell examines the Roman elite’s reactions and resistance to Augustus’ status as the ultimate man in the Empire and to his political programs. Although Augustan literature is her primary source material, she also uses visual sources such as monumental art. The introductory chapter begins with a well-crafted summary of the various spheres in which Roman masculinity was performed and of the expectations placed on upper-class males, including the senatorial elite, equites, and the provincial elite. In the latter part of the chapter, Racette-Campbell focuses on the type of masculinity Augustus promoted in his autobiography Res Gestae Divi Augusti and through building projects such as the Ara Pacis Augustae, the Forum Augustum, and the Temple of Apollo Palatinus. In her thorough analysis of the Res Gestae, she recognizes how Augustus introduced new principles of masculinity, positioning himself as the ultimate Roman man who had defeated all his adversaries. The second chapter examines the masculine self-fashioning of Cicero and Catullus, who wrote some decades before the ascension of Octavian Augustus. Racette-Campbell points out that signs of the crisis of masculinity were visible prior to the Augustan regime and can be observed in the ways in which Cicero and Catullus made claims about their masculine power and dominance. Catullus, in his self-fashioning, intends to oppose the accusations of effeminacy through an aggressive and violent performance of masculinity as he threatens to rape his critics. Cicero, on the contrary, presents himself as an ideal citizen man, claiming to have displayed moderatio and love of his patria. What makes Cicero exceptional as a male figure is that many of his writings have survived: he is the Roman man whose self-fashioning is best documented. Therefore, a difficult 

Review of Sarah F. Derbew. 2022. Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pp xvi, 253. Paperback. (ISBN 9781108817912) $25.99.

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Review of Sarah F. Derbew. 2022. Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pp xvi, 253. Paperback. (ISBN 9781108817912) $25.99.

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