The Invention of Race and the Status of Blackness

Cord J Whitaker

doi:10.1017/pli.2021.39

Abstract

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Highlights

The scholarship in question has focused on a wide range of subjects—from the roots of Greco-Roman knowledge and culture to the presence of Africans in those established centers of classical antiquity to the role of Africans in the Old World’s exploration of the New
Of the six full-length monographs—including my own—that take as their primary inquiry the nature, development, and salience of race in the European Middle Ages, Invention is the most ambitious and proceeds from the “thoroughly interdisciplinary vantage required of a concept as ideologically powerful and multifaceted as race, one whose study defies disciplinary divisions between literature, history, biology, sociology, and anthropology, among other fields.”[1]. Praise has been swift
Martin Bernal’s 1987 Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization was followed by subsequent volumes in 1991 and 2006 and called for a sea-change in our understandings of the Western civilization that traces its roots to GrecoRoman antiquity

Summary

Introduction

Martin Bernal’s 1987 Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization was followed by subsequent volumes in 1991 and 2006 and called for a sea-change in our understandings of the Western civilization that traces its roots to GrecoRoman antiquity.

Results

Conclusion