The afterword explains why Louis Bieral’s life matters. He had an almost unique set of experiences. He illustrates the importance of violence to the operation of nineteenth-century American society. He also suggests the difficulty of establishing the rule of law, replacing the veneration of physical might with the celebration of persuasion.

No act better distilled the two faces of independence – its aspirations and disappointments – than the act of going to school. This chapter examines the expansion of schooling, and its inherent precarity, in the first decades after independence. Relying heavily on local sources and oral histories, this chapter focuses on the lived and affective experiences of students. It argues that repeated assurances by the state that schooling held the key to a better future consistently jarred with the experience of most school-goers. So palpable were these schooling pressures, that in the early 1960s, Western psychiatrists identified a new, regionally specific mental disorder, Brain Fag [fatigue] Syndrome, to account for the stress students experienced. The rapid, but uneven, expansion of schooling indicated who was excluded from the larger development project of the nation.

Focusing on the 1961 UNESCO Conference of African States on the Development of Education, this chapter shows how and why public schooling became the defining development project of West African independence. At the highpoint of African decolonization, two radically new propositions intersected, each shaping the other: the rise of new economic tools, including human capital theory and manpower planning, and the triumph of anticolonial and antiracist demands that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights indeed be universally applicable.

This chapter argues that colonial, Europhone education was the discursive terrain where battles over race and development were waged. Debates over education – access, curricula, credentials – were contests in which European and African men struggled over perceived limits to the African future. As such, contests over colonial education were clashes over different development visions, which were themselves veiled debates about race.

The Introduction defines the paradigm of anticolonial development, acquaints the reader with the scope of the book, and situates its main contributions in the literatures on education, decolonization, race, and development in Africa. It argues that a Black Atlantic perspective changes how we see decolonization and development in West Africa, by revealing schooling’s essential role in aspirations of African emancipation. The second part of the Introduction details the book’s unique methodological approach of comparison in global perspective. Such comparison allows for dialogue across two different colonial and postcolonial histories (Ghana/British empire and Côte d’Ivoire/French empire), in the process offering a regional history of the global spread of public schooling during the twentieth century.

Mongolia hovers on the edge of early English drama: While no playtexts survive from the Elizabethan period featuring their history, there are consistent allusion to the peoples of the Tatary tribes unified under Chinggis Khan in English theatrical documents from 1536 onward. This chapter takes as a key case one of the eight surviving backstage-plots of the period to consider the stage life of Chinggis Khan inaugurated by the lost “Tamar Cham” plays. The two plays proved highly successful in the Elizabethan era and continued to haunt the paratextual record of early English performance into the late eighteenth century. The chapter explicates the financial data of the “Tamar Cham” plays in a repertorial context invested in Mediterranean tyrants to situate two newly discovered medieval source documents that together suggest a particular nostalgia in a fantasy if global unity.

This chapter examines a form of racialization at Rome that declared certain non-Romans to be innately suitable to enslavement. In an instance of racecraft through stagecraft, Roman comedy contributed to the naturalisation of this noxious ideology by presenting a cast of characters whose visual appearance and social or legal status corresponds directly to predictable sets of character traits. At the same time, the enslaved and freed themselves wrote and performed Roman comedies, so the fabula palliata also pushes back in important respects against their times’ racial formations. The discussion concludes with an analysis of the life of the comic playwright Terence whose authorship of his plays was called into question because he allegedly lacked the innate ability for impressive literary production.

This chapter considers different metaphors for racial encounters in American Classics departments, and how they interact globally. Beginning with the APA ‘Minority Scholarship’ in the early 2000s, the chapter traces different approaches to diversifying the demographics of traditional Classics departments in the United States, and how the field has developed in new regions. How might the proliferation of Classics programs in Southeast Asia be read as diaspora, or be distinguished from a form of neo-colonialism? How do Classics programs in Asia or the Global South interact with local histories of race and colonisation? Combining historical and contemporary case studies, this chapter reflects on different potential models of ‘diversifying’ Classics in a variety of global contexts.

This chapter explores the role and construction of race in Plato and Aristotle’s political philosophy. Focusing especially on Plato’s noble lie and Aristotle’s theory of natural slavery, I argue that both philosophers appeal to racial difference in order to reinforce and justify the differential access of the members of the societies they consider to political power and even freedom. While Plato introduces race into the kallipolis in order to persuade the farmers, craftsmen, and soldiers to accept their political disenfranchisement, Aristotle draws on and racializes existing Greek stereotypes about non-Greeks in support of his theory of natural slavery. Despite the significant differences between their respective accounts of and attitudes towards race, I argue that Plato and Aristotle’s accounts cumulatively show that the classical philosophical tradition was already quite interested not only in existing racial stereotypes and classifications but also in the mechanics of racecraft and the political uses of race.

This chapter looks at the relationship between papyrology and race from a historical and disciplinary perspective. European imperialism, from Napoleon’s expedition onwards, enabled the legal and illegal transfer of a hundred thousand papyrus fragments from Egypt to Europe and North America. The process was sustained by White race supremacy ideas, which most scholars embraced, according to which Egyptians and their Ottoman ruling elite were incapable of appreciating the real meaning of antiquities, including manuscripts, putting at risk their preservation. The accumulation and archival of papyri in European and North American collections went hand in hand with a programmatic exclusion of Egyptians from studying the material and was functional to the creation of a new academic field, papyrology, controlled by White classicists. The chapter’s conclusion opens question about future directions, regarding both colonial collections and institutional inequality.

This chapter is in two parts. The first offers a general overview of twentieth-century African adaptations of Greek tragedy. It discusses the selection and treatment of age-old cultural practice of the Yoruba in adaptations by playwrights such as Wole Soyinka (Bacchae) and Ola Rotimi (The Gods Are Not to Blame), and how these exemplify an engagement with and representation of other peoples and cultures. The second segment examines the complexities of culture and race in Femi Osofisan’s Tegonni, An African Antigone and MEDAAYE: A Re-reading of Euripides’ Medea, utilising the concept of ‘symbolic violence’, as developed by Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu’s concept is pertinent here for penetrating the means by which dominant groups assign identities and roles to the dominated, and also for identifying how the latter may then accept or reject the dominant construction depending on the resources of resistance that they command and can deploy. I argue that a similar struggle revolving around symbolic violence is visible in racial and gender constructions in Graeco-Roman culture, and that these two plays of Osofisan not only serve as intercultural dialogues for navigating these issues but also provide a thread for tracing the processes of these constructions.

Study of the material remains of Greek and Roman antiquity played a key role in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century emergence of the modern disciplinary formation of Classics as the comprehensive study of the ancient Mediterranean world. Over the same period, it was also central to the development of racial thought in the spheres of aesthetics, ethnology, and historical anthropology. After articulating a conception of race that, following Stuart Hall and Noémie Ndiaye, treats it as a ‘sliding signifier’ drawing upon an archive or repertoire of racial tropes, this chapter discusses how, in studying Greek and Roman monuments under the sign of ‘art’, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholarship attended to material antiquity in a manner that was both formed by and formative of constructions of race emerging between the ‘Age of Discovery’ and the European ‘Enlightenment’. It explores the relation of classical art historiography to other racializing discourses of difference along three key axes: ‘Culture’, ‘Differentiation’, and ‘Beauty’, attending to the role of environmental or climate theory, heredity, and physiognomy in emerging theories that sought to explain the diversity of ancient and modern peoples as evidenced by their visual and material productions.

This chapter reflects on modern and contemporary narratives surrounding the modern ‘racing’ of the inhabitants of Hellenistic and Roman Egypt by focusing on two cases, each of which pertains to a local woman. Both of these women’s bodies have become, two millennia or so after their death, a racial canvas at best, and a battlefield at worst. The first woman is the one portrayed on a funerary portrait on display at the Louvre Museum in Paris. The second woman needs no introduction: She was Cleopatra VII, the last pharaoh of Macedonian-ruled Egypt.

This chapter foregrounds recent studies on race and religion as analytic categories in the study of the ancient world. Conventional scholarly analysis of the late-antique Mediterranean world often assumes that uses of the terms race and racism are anachronistic in studies of premodern societies. By contrast, religion is often taken for granted as an unproblematic category of analysis across both modern and premodern social contexts. More recently, critical studies of race and religion have illustrated the shortcomings in the basic assumptions that undergird the uses and disuses of terms like race, racism, religion, and ethnicity in studies of premodernity. Drawing on these recent works, this chapter demonstrates the entanglements between religious and racialised conceptions of group identities and hierarchies. Race and religion are conceptually intertwined to the extent that religious ideas have been instrumental in processes of racialisation and religious groups have been targets of racialisation. The chapter concludes with examples of how theories of environmental determinism and anti-Semitism manifest in Christian ideologies and imperial policies in late antiquity.

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 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 conclusion draws together the threads of the book and elaborates on the significance of racial doubt as a category of analysis beyond nineteenth-century Cuba. Given that racism has deep cultural and affective roots, the skeptical analyses that humanistic research centers will remain vital, even as the institutions supporting such research are destroyed by oligarchic, race-baiting forces. Skepticism is a power that the Humanities share with racial doubt. It implies, counterintuitively, a hope – to question in order to get things right – and a pledge to knowledge – to avoid denial, ignorance, and false explanations. No matter how indispensable one’s convictions about race might be, clinging to them would mean forsaking this hope, this pledge, and the broad political alliances required to imagine a world better than our own.

In Central Asia and the Middle East, no less than eastern Europe, thwarted imperialist drives disrupted older patterns of rule. Germany’s imagined landward imperium of 1917–1918 was matched in 1918–1919 by Britain’s in the Middle East and Central Asia. The resulting turmoil spawned logics of imperial consolidation, anti-colonial hope, and regional state formation shaping later decolonization. If the Versailles precepts of self-determination ended at colonial frontiers, Bolshevik appeals vigorously crossed them, deepening the crisis of colonial order. British, French, and Dutch imperial thinkers responded with “indirect rule,” constitutional tinkering, and colonial development, expressed as “Commonwealth,” “Greater France,” and Dutch “ethical policy.” Boosted by the Comintern, anti-colonial nationalisms built self-confidence and organization.Négritude, a Francophone literary and philosophical movement, became the clearest generalizing departure, matched by Pan-Africanism in Britain’s imperial sphere. By “bringing empire home,” migrations from colonies to the western-European metropole joined the “colonial effect” in binding Europe and its colonies ever more intricately together.

This chapter examines the notion of racialised languaging, which emphasises that languaging practices are never assessed independently of the bodies, identities, and social positions of their speakers. It demonstrates how language is evaluated not only in terms of what is said but also through the racialised perceptions of who is speaking and how society chooses to listen. The chapter argues that accents, dialects, and speech patterns associated with racialised communities are often constructed as inferior, humorous, deficient, or even criminal, while similar features in white speakers are normalized or excused. By centring languaging as a site of racial meaning-making, the chapter exposes the ways in which communication is entangled with race, racism, and embodied identities. Racialised languaging is further situated within the broader colonial matrix of power, where Western linguistic norms and white racial identities are privileged over non-Western languages and non-White speakers.