Identity in the Ancient World (20 min)

Presenters

Jackie Murray, University of Kentucky

Abstract

Much ado about something very important.

For centuries modern Eurocentric biases have shaped the way ancient Greek and Roman art has been displayed in museums and art galleries. Ancient Greek and Roman representations of the human form are often segregated from other non-European art and staged as the ur-spring of White European art, deliberately or inadvertently supporting white supremacist notions of ethnic and racial identity. Ancient Greek and Roman depictions of Africans in particular have been subjected to the most pernicious racist instrumentalization. They influenced modern racist stereotypes, such as the so-called tar-baby in North America and the so-call blackamoor in Europe, such that it is difficult to break the habit of seeing them within a white supremacist frame. Nowadays, few would deny the influence of Asia and Africa on ancient Greek and Roman art or that the ancient Greeks and Romans would not have considered themselves to be culturally “European.” Rather, the ancient Greeks and Romans were oriented toward the East and South in their cultural and aesthetic outlook. To break ancient Greek and Roman depictions of Africans away from the white supremacist Eurocentric anthropological gaze, this paper argues that they be curated together with contemporary objects depicting Africans from the African cultures that we have evidence the Greeks and Romans knew (i.e., Carthage, Libya, Egypt, Ethiopia, Nubia, Meroe, and Auxum) alongside objects (even if from a later period) from other African cultures. A truism of hermeneutics is that interpretation is done at the moment of reception.