Did classical antiquity connect ethnicity, moral worth, and skin colour? The conventional answer is ‘no’, but then conventional Classics tends to stop, chronologically, before things get interesting. This chapter explores a set of texts from the Roman period and late antiquity that point towards an emergent if elusive epidermal racism. The drivers of this seem to be both empire, with its systematically reductive approach towards human diversity, and Christianity, with its theologisation of white light and black darkness. Late antique texts are, however, inconsistent: Some (e.g. Heliodorus) portray Blackness as noble and idealised, but others (e.g. Nonnus) certainly connect it with defilement and the infernal. Even in late antiquity, then, there is no coherent, thoroughgoing epidermal racism; but we undoubtedly find what Cord Whittaker has called a ‘shimmer’.

This essay details how the author’s vocation as a writer and reader was awakened by the admiration he felt in his youth for Alejo Carpentier’s literature. That same admiration led to discovering Carpentier’s alienation from the Cuban regime, his role as a censor and a censored individual, and his tendency to adapt what he wrote to fit the ideological demands of the moment. Even though the political environment ended up conditioning readings of Carpentier, the author of this essay describes how he learned to strike a balance between admiration and criticism, acknowledging Carpentier’s complexity as a literary figure.

During his literary apprenticeship in the 1920s and 1930s, Carpentier established contact with an impressively wide circle of composers with whom he shared both friendship and artistic kinship. Consequently, he engaged in a series of musical collaborations both in Havana and Paris actively promoting a new musical modernism that sought to revitalize creative expression with reinterpretations of the primitive that owed much to Carpentier’s admiration of the Russian works of Stravinsky; a powerful model for the assertion of his own Cubanidad. Investigating the breadth of Carpentier’s musical interactions, including his programming for the Conciertos de Música neuva, this essay considers the mutual cross-fertilization of ideas that resulted in some of the most innovative works of the period, from his ballets with Amadeo Roldán and projected puppet opera with Alejandro García Caturla to his projects with Marius-François Gaillard, Darius Milhaud and Edgard Varèse, the possible unnamed protagonist in Los pasos perdidos.

This chapter situates sovereignty at the heart of the relationship between international law and empire. I examine the ways in which the concept was defined to exclude non-European peoples while remaining alert to the complexities posed to such exclusionary definitions by the variety of polities that existed during the heyday of European imperialism. Colonial South Asia, with its melange of political units, provides an excellent illustration of this complicated relationship. I explore the diverse articulations of sovereignty in this region along two axes: temporal and categorical. At least three sets of constituents – British officials, rulers and bureaucrats of semi-sovereign entities such as princely states, and anticolonial nationalists in British India – used the language of sovereignty to debate and resolve political problems. I trace their definitions over time. By examining these actors and their legal arguments, we can understand how sovereignty in colonial South Asia transitioned from notions of layered sovereignty to more territorial forms, although pluralist ideas continue to have long afterlives in postcolonial South Asia.

Ancient theories of human diversity and identity strongly influenced most modern forms of scientific racism, including eugenics, tropicalism, craniometry, environmental theories of human development, social evolutionary theories, and theories connecting ‘race’ and intelligence. This chapter explores three of these areas of influence: (1) environmental determinism; (2) models of evolution and the ‘progress’ of civilisations; and (3) population management schemes linked to eugenic thinking. These ideas spread throughout Europe as part of the Enlightenment project to classify everything and throughout much of the globe under the influence of European imperialism and colonialism culminating in the Nazi eugenics program. But this chapter focuses on developments in the United States, the country that pioneered the colour-based bioracism that still dominates contemporary racist thinking between 1870 and 1930, the years when the ‘science of man’ became academic and political dogma.

This essay reassesses Alejo Carpentier’s concept of lo real maravilloso americano [the American marvelous real] by comparing it to analogous notions developed earlier in the works of his Cuban fellow José Lezama Lima, showing how both authors respond to the widespread circulation of French surrealism in the Caribbean between the 1930s and 1940s. In doing so, I deconstruct Carpentier’s claims that his concept of the marvelous real was developed in response to the sense of awe he experienced during his visit to Haiti in 1943, instead viewing it as part of a broader endeavor simultaneously undertaken by several Caribbean writers and intellectuals, particularly in the Francophone islands, who reappropriated surrealist ideas in the context of their own critique of Western thought and an effort to reclaim the islands’ African heritage as part of their struggle for political and cultural autonomy.

This chapter provides a detailed review of the Neandertal facial skeleton with an emphasis on evolutionary interpretations drawn from comparisons to both extant modern humans and earlier fossil Homo. The spatial dynamics involved in the evolution of “midfacial prognathism” within the Neandertal lineage are discussed followed by comparative anatomical descriptions of the Neandertal supraorbital region, ocular orbits, nasal skeleton, infraorbital region, maxillary dental arcade/palate, and mandible. The chapter concludes with a review of unresolved debates regarding potential adaptive (e.g., biomechanical, climatic) and neutral (e.g., genetic drift) evolutionary forces that may have contributed to the appearance of Neandertal facial features.

The chapter is concerned with non-archaeological evidence pertaining to the Early Iron Age in Greece and the eastern Mediterranean. Since this was the only period in Greek history that completely lacked literacy, we are left with oral tradition as the only means of transmitting information between ca. 1200 and ca. 750 BCE. However, numerous anachronisms found in the Homeric poems show that not everything Homer says about the past should be taken at face value. Much more reliable is the evidence of the dialects, another kind of nonarchaeological evidence that throws light on this period. The regional distribution of the historical Greek dialects fits in well with the destruction levels and depopulation attested at many Mycenaean sites, in that both suggest a sharp break in cultural continuity at the end of the Bronze Age. Nothing of this can be found in Homer. Instead, the epics convey an impressive demonstration of cultural continuity and of religious, social, and military uniformity in polities sharing a common identity. It was this picture of an imagined past that became canonical, and the memory of the collapse of Mycenaean Greece and of the period that immediately followed it was effectively wiped out.

This chapter provides an overview of the entangled history between the discipline of Classics and the biological concept of race. Section I.1 outlines the emergence of problematic claims about the alleged White nature of Graeco-Roman antiquity from the modern era to the present day that have helped substantiate biological conceptions of race. Section I.2 examines scholarly work in critical race theory and early modern studies that offer more nuanced definitions of race beyond the biological. Section I.3 summarises work on the study of race in Classics, and Section I.4 discusses the contents of this Companion.

The bones of the Neandertal shoulder are distinguished from those of most living humans by (among other things) their long and gracile clavicles and their broad scapulae with narrow glenoid fossae and dorsal sulci on their axillary borders. The adaptive and evolutionary significance of interspecific variation in shoulder morphology, however, is unclear. Some of the features that differentiate the shoulders of Neandertals and modern humans, such as the long clavicles of Neandertals, may reflect overall differences in somatic bauplan between species, in the context of morphological integration of the thorax, shoulder, and upper limb. Other features, such as the shape of the scapular glenoid fossa, may contain information about interspecific differences in habitual upper limb use. Resolving among different possible explanations of observed patterns of variation is central to efforts to understand the behavior and biology of the Neandertals.

This chapter explores how considerations of private international law affected marriage and gender relations during the Mongol occupation of China, in the Yuan dynasty (1260–1368). I first address matters of jurisdiction and choice of law that arose in Yuan China and border areas when lawsuits involved non-Chinese. It demonstrates the willingness of Mongol Yuan officials to consider non-Chinese law in adjudication and how this process could be complicated by facts on the ground. The section reveals under Mongol rule a form of ‘transnational everyday life’, as other scholars have termed it, and the disadvantages that often accrued to women in these circumstances. Then I demonstrate how the Chinese encounter with Mongol rule and the resulting ‘foreign’ elements introduced into legal practice brought about changes in traditional, codified, Chinese marriage law. Finally, I address the Mongol use of strategic marriages in their interpolity relations both during the united world empire and in the Yuan dynasty. These interpolity marriage relations were crucial to Mongol successes during their conquests and in their efforts to maintain sovereignty over conquered peoples.