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Race - Antiquity and Its Legacy (Paperback)
Loot Price: R629
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Race - Antiquity and Its Legacy (Paperback)
Series: Ancients and Moderns
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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How do different cultures think about race? In the modern era,
racial distinctiveness has been assessed primarily in terms of a
person's physical appearance. But it was not always so. As Denise
McCoskey shows, the ancient Greeks and Romans did not use skin
colour as the basis for categorising ethnic disparity. The colour
of one's skin lies at the foundation of racial variability today
because it was used during the heyday of European exploration and
colonialism to construct a hierarchy of civilizations and then
justify slavery and other forms of economic exploitation.
Assumptions about race thus have to take into account factors other
than mere physiognomy. This is particularly true in relation to the
classical world. In fifth century Athens, racial theory during the
Persian Wars produced the categories 'Greek' and 'Barbarian', and
set them in brutal opposition to one another: a process that could
be as intense and destructive as 'black and 'white' in our own age.
Ideas about race in antiquity were therefore completely distinct
but as closely bound to political and historical contexts as those
that came later. This provocative book boldly explores the complex
matrices of race - and the differing interpretations of ancient and
modern - across epic, tragedy and the novel. Ranging from
Theocritus to Toni Morrison, and from Tacitus and Pliny to Bernal's
seminal study Black Athena, this is a powerful and original new
assessment.
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