The Cambridge Companion to Classics and Race
The Cambridge Companion to Classics and Race
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Race as a concept has had a fraught role in the history of Classics, woven into its formation as an academic discipline. While the texts and artefacts of the ancient Mediterranean world provide complex understandings of what race might mean and how it might operate, they have also provided fodder for modern racial ideologies. This Companion offers a wide-ranging and groundbreaking overview of 'race' and 'racism' in ancient Mediterranean cultures as well as in the formation of Classics as a discipline. Through twenty-four chapters written by a team of international scholars, it clarifies the terms and concepts that are central to contemporary theories of race and explores the extent to which they can be applied to the study of the ancient Mediterranean world, in and beyond Greece and Rome. It also showcases various concrete examples of how Classics has been shaped by the intertwined histories of race and colonialism.
- Provides a clear overview of terminologies of race and racism and how they have been and can be used in the study of ancient Mediterranean history and culture
- Chapters analyse specific case studies of the role of race in sub-areas of the discipline of Classics beyond simply ancient Greek and Roman literature
- Shows how the intertwined histories of race and European colonialisms have informed and continue to inform the formation of 'Classics' as a discipline
Product details
- Published: May 2026
- Format: Paperback
- ISBN: 9781009295130
- Length: 564 pages
- Dimensions: 229 × 152 × 29 mm
- Weight: 0.904kg
- Contains: 40 colour illus.
- Availability: Available
Table of Contents
- An introduction Rosa Andújar, Elena Giusti and Jackie Murray
- Part I. Race and the Premodern Era:
- 1. 'Language and race' Katherine McDonald
- 2. 'Race in ancient Greek visual and material culture' Naoíse Mac Sweeney
- 3. 'Staging race in Greek drama' Rosa Andújar
- 4. 'Plato and Aristotle on race, racecraft and politics' David Kaufman
- 5. 'Race, gender, and genocide in Apollonius' Argonautica' Jackie Murray
- 6. 'Race and slavery in Roman comedy' Mathias Hanses
- 7. 'Sensing brown in the Roman empire' Dan-El Padilla Peralta
- 8. 'Ethnographic discourses: Rome's racialized Africa' Elena Giusti
- 9. 'Whitish supremacy: thinking with skin in Roman Greece' Tim Whitmarsh
- 10. 'Race and religion in late antiquity.' Yonatan Binyam
- 11. 'Navigating classics and negotiating indigeneity from Aristotle to the present' Ashley Lance
- Part II. Modern Disciplinary Formations:
- 12. 'Historiography of art' Katherine Harloe
- 13. 'Anti-semitism and the foundations of classical scholarship' Simon Goldhill
- 14. 'Black Athena/ black Athenians' Maghan Keita
- 15. 'Race and historical writing in an age of empire' Phiroze Vasunia
- 16. 'Modern scientific race and the classical' Rebecca Futo Kennedy
- 17. 'Papyrology and race' Roberta Mazza
- 18. 'Bint Al-Nil: on the modern racing of ancient Egypt' Katherine Blouin
- 19. 'Translation, privilege and racecraft in classics' Shelley Haley
- 20. 'Culture and race in classical reception: west African adaptations of Greek tragedy' Olakunbi Olasope
- 21. 'Classical reception in/beyond Asia' Kelly Nguyen
- 22. 'Graeco-Roman antiquity and white nationalist conceptions of race' Curtis Dozier
- 23. 'Inclusion, diaspora, colonialism: movements in global classics' J. Mira Seo
- 24. 'Nation, whiteness, classical antiquity: another fateful triangle' Patrice Rankine
- Index.
- Show more
