The Cambridge companion to classics and race / edited by Rosa Andújar, Elena Giusti, Jackie Murray.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Andújar, Rosa, editor.

Giusti, Elena, editor.

Murray, Jackie, editor.

Series:

Cambridge companions to the ancient world.

Cambridge companions to the ancient world

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Race in literature.

Classical literature--History and criticism.

Classical literature.

Rome--Race relations--History.

Rome.

Greece--Race relations--History--To 1500.

Greece.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xviii, 545 pages) : illustrations

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2026.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Language and race / Katherine McDonald

Race in ancient Greek visual and material culture / Naoíse Mac Sweeney

Staging race in Greek drama / Rosa Andújar

Plato and Aristotle on race, racecraft and politics / David Kaufman

Race, gender, and genocide in Apollonius' Argonautica / Jackie Murray

Race and slavery in Roman comedy / Mathias Hanses

Sensing brown in the Roman empire / Dan-El Padilla Peralta

Ethnographic discourses : Rome's racialized Africa / Elena Giusti

Whitish supremacy : thinking with skin in Roman Greece / Tim Whitmarsh

Race and religion in late antiquity / Yonatan Binyam

Navigating classics and negotiating indigeneity from Aristotle to the present / Ashley Lance

Historiography of art / Katherine Harloe

Anti-semitism and the foundations of classical scholarship / Simon Goldhill

Black Athena/Black Athenians / Maghan Keita

Race and historical writing in an age of empire / Phiroze Vasunia

Modern scientific race and the classical / Rebecca Futo Kennedy

Papyrology and race / Roberta Mazza

Bint Al-Nil : on the modern racing of ancient Egypt / Katherine Blouin

Translation, privilege and racecraft in classics / Shelley Haley

Culture and race in classical reception : West African adaptations of Greek tragedy / Olakunbi Olasope

Classical reception in/beyond Asia / Kelly Nguyen

Graeco-Roman antiquity and white nationalist conceptions of race / Curtis Dozier

Inclusion, diaspora, colonialism : movements in global classics / J. Mira Seo

Nation, whiteness, classical antiquity : another fateful triangle / Patrice Rankine.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 15 May 2026).

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

1-009-29511-X

9781009295109

9781009295123