Recontextualizing Depictions of Aithiopes on Ancient Greek Vases in Museum Collections (20 min)

Presenters

Najee Olya, College of William and Mary

Abstract

In composing the text of museum didactics and online object descriptions, specialists aim to offer accurate information in a clear and concise way so that it is legible for a wide audience. A difficult task for most ancient objects, it is all the more difficult with artifacts that seem to evoke modern notions of race, and perhaps, racism. In the iconography of ancient Greek vases, there are hundreds of depictions of Aithiopes, people who would today be racialized as Black; these images are often discussed using modern racial terms and uncritically interpreted as renderings of enslaved people. What is the best way to go about describing these visually arresting artifacts in a correct yet easily digestible fashion? How, for example, can one convey succinctly that ancient Greek slavery was not analogous to the chattel racial slavery of the transatlantic slave trade, and that enslaved people might originate in not only Africa, but also Asia and Europe? At the same time, how can it be emphasized that the amorphous concept of race itself, whether in its bioessentialist or socially constructed form, is not necessarily analogous to ancient Greek ideas about self and other? And further, that in ancient Greece there was no direct equivalent to modern anti-Blackness? Centering these issues, this paper aims to think critically about how best to recontextualize depictions of Aithiopes in ancient Greek vase-painting in the twenty-first century museum. Focusing on a selection of vases in North American and European collections, it considers the difficulties involved in writing on the subject for diverse audiences, the need to distill complex concepts in an engaging manner, and the limitations of approaches that focus only on the visual qualities of ancient Greek representations of Africans at the expense of recognizing their multisensory characteristics.