Delineating the Two Cradles: Black Discourse on Kemetic Influence on Greece
By Talawa Adodo (Temple University)
Chiekh Anta Diop and Theophile Obenga produced critical scholarship on the Afrikan context of Kemet (e.k.a Ancient Egypt). Diop focused on the historical and cultural connections between Kemet and other Afrikan cultures, while Obenga’s scholarship addresses the systematic connections between the Kemetic language and philosophy with its West and West-Central Afrikan counterparts. They showcased their research at the 1974 UNESCO conference on the racial identity of the Ancient Egyptians.
Black Athena Before Black Athena: Elision and Dismissal
By Maghan Keita (Villanova University)
“take ‘the whole question out of the hands of the Greeks’”
George B. Glidden
“I am happy to be in the excellent company of Du Bois, Mazrui, and others….”
Martin Bernal
Entangled on the Nile
By Vanessa Davies (Bryn Mawr)
Recent evidence points to the roots of Egyptian culture to the south, in Nubia (Wengrow, David, Michael Dee, et al. 2014, Smith 2020, both building on the statements of Mokhtar 1981 and Hassan 1988; also, Wendorf and Schild 2011). This work counters incorrect statements made in the 19th and early 20th century by historians who claimed that Africa had no history and by Egyptologists who claimed that the cultural remains along the Nile were not African in origin and who sought to divorce ancient Egyptian culture from its African context.
“I did not want to approach my study of ancient history directed by WHITE scholarship”: Drusilla Dunjee Houston (1876-1941) to Ivan van Sertima (1933-2006)
By Jackie Murray (University of Kentucky)
This paper explores specific instances in Ivan van Sertima’s They Came Before Columbus (1976) where the influence of Drusilla Dunjee Houston’s Wonderful Ethiopians of the Ancient Cushite Empire (1926) can be detected and it explores an inherent contradiction in their vindicationist approach to writing ancient history.
Modernist Poets at the Margins: The Prophetic Arts and Aesthetics of Kahlil Gibran and Melvin Tolson
By Yujhan Claros (Columbia University)
By comparing the artistic and aesthetic strategies of Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931) with Melvin Tolson (1898-1966), this paper argues that the strategies and approaches in monumental and visionary works by minoritized and ghettoized modernist poets situate music, art, and aesthetics at the critical center of discourses involving culture, history, and civilization, and furthermore that their oracular and mystical approaches to art and music produced radically inclusive ways of valorizing the ancient past.
Bernal, Snowden, and the Politics of Black Antiquity
By Christopher Parmenter (New York University)
Martin Bernal (1937-2013) concluded the first of his three-volume Black Athena with a gratuitous personal attack on the African American classicist Frank M. Snowden, Jr. (1911-2007). “There is no doubt,” he wrote, “that the time for the ‘old scrappers’ is past and that most Blacks will not be able to accept the conformity to white scholarship of men and women like Professor Snowden” (1987: 434-35). Bernal was hardly the first person to accuse Snowden (a widely-respected figure who had recently been elected president of the American Philological Association) of accommodationism.
Exiting Frank M. Snowden, Jr’s Anthropological Gallery: Toward an Understanding of Egyptian Influence in Ancient Greek Visual Representations of Africans
By Najee Olya (University of Virginia)
Just before the middle of the twentieth century, the late Harvard-trained Black classicist Frank M. Snowden, Jr. began what would become five decades of research on Black people in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. Over seventy years after the publication of his first article on the subject, “The Negro in Classical Italy” (1947), Snowden continues to cast a long shadow.