UCLA Lecture: Masks of Blackness: Reading Iconographic Representations of Black People in Classical Greece

Sarah Derbew (Yale University) will be giving a lecture at UCLA tomorrow on the iconographic representation of black people in ancient Greece. The paper will examine objects of the ancient Greek world where black people are depicted, potentially shedding light on how Greeks viewed their southern neighbors.

The issue is fraught with controversy, though. Benjamin Isaac, an ancient historian and professor emeritus at Tel Aviv University, argued in his landmark 2004 book The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity that skin color played a part in forming racism in the ancient Greek world, though others have disputed this, calling attention to the ancient preference for cultural practices trumping biological heritage. Many from the Levant, Egypt, and Mesopotamia, for example, became prominent “Greeks” in the cultural sense.

Sarah Derbew, a doctoral candidate at Yale working with renowned scholar Emily Greenwood, is researching on just this problem, looking at how the Greeks theorized race in antiquity.

The lecture will take place Monday Nov. 13 at 5:00 pm, is a part of the “Classics | Reception | Borders” series put on by UCLA, which “showcases some of the work being done by early-career scholars that explores how the ancient world negotiated cultural boundaries and conversely how classical antiquity has been received in colonial and post-colonial arenas.” Derbew’s work will fit right in.