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Sarah F. Derbew, "Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
01:04:09
An interview with Sarah F. Derbew
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New Books Network Host
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Amanda Joyce Hall
Hi everyone and welcome back to New Books in African American Studies, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I am your host, Amanda Joyce Hall. Today in my interview with Dr. Sarah Deribo, we discuss her new book entitled Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity. The title is currently out with Cambridge University Press. Dr. Derebo is a teacher, a writer, and an advocate of Ancient African studies. She is an Assistant professor of Classics at Stanford University, where she is also affiliated with the center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity as well as the center for African Studies. We hope you enjoy our conversation about Dr. De Beau's book and her rich examination of Black representations in antiquity. Sarah, welcome to the show. We're so glad to have you here with us today.
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Dr. Sarah Deribo
Thank you. Thank you, Amanda. Lovely to be here.
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Amanda Joyce Hall
Congratulations on your new book. I'm excited to speak with you about this critical contribution to classical studies and to Black studies. I think in particular, your method of untangling is useful for us in Black studies and and beyond. Really, people who are seeking to kind of like Tighten our analysis by challenging assumptions when it comes to race and racial formation and anti blackness in the ancient past. So before we get into that and what it means to untangle blackness in Greek antiquity, I want to start off by asking you about your journey to the study of antiquity. Were there challenges or revelations along the way? Especially since you're working from a discipline or from within a discipline that has at times reified modern concepts of anti blackness onto the ancient past. So just tell us a little bit about that.
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Dr. Sarah Deribo
I appreciate that question, Amanda. And I would say that to really think about the roots of it, I would have to talk a little bit about my family or the role of education in my family. So I'm from New York City, shout out to Brooklyn, and I grew up going to a public school when I was younger, and my brother was there as well. He's older than me by two years. And when he was in fourth or fifth grade, he got a flyer for a program called Prep for Prep, Preparing Students for Preparatory Schools, which was wonderful. Continues to be a wonderful program based in Manhattan, created by someone who really wanted to give students at Title 1 schools, really bright students of color opportunities to study at elite private schools. Because of that flyer, getting into my brother's book bag, then him bringing it home and showing it to my parents, he ended up sitting for a test. And when he started, by the time he started fifth grade, he was going through IQ programs and all of these different tests to assess whether or not he had, I guess, what it takes to make it in a private, incredibly academically rigorous school. By the time he was in the summer of fifth grade, he had to start doing language programs. He had to learn Latin. I think he had to learn French as well. And from there, the idea of studying classics or studying ancient languages became something that was part of the educational curriculum in America at least. My family's from Ethiopia. And while there are church schools where you can learn ancient languages of Ethiopia, Latin and Greek hadn't quite come into the family yet. So once my brother is going into this program, prep for prep, he gets put into a private school for seventh grade. My mom decides that I'm going to private school for seventh grade too. So that's where I begin studying Latin. I go to a private school school in New York City, friend, seminary, shout out to them too. And I start studying Latin when I'm 12. What I've learned now that I've started teaching Latin and I'm teaching Greek in. In graduate school, I teach it for undergraduates and graduates But I'm realizing that the earlier you start these languages, the more facility you have. So I started studying Latin when I was 12. I started studying Greek when I was maybe 20. And even now, the familiarity I have with Latin is so different because I was learning it before I had even hit puberty. I mean, I was learning it when I was a kid, and having that exposure at such an early age, and being able to go to a school where I could study it and it was mandatory, and also being able to afford this school through scholarships was really powerful. So that's where my journey really began in terms of studying this language of a community whose capital was based in Rome in modern day Italy, but ended up expanding throughout parts of the ancient world. And in terms of starting to really think about graduate school, school, and a career in this field, it wasn't until I studied abroad, When I was 19 or 20, I studied abroad in Rome, in Italy. And that's when there were a lot of programs and meetings about, if you want to go to grad school, if you like studying, if you want to keep going, these are different tips that we have for you. And in that program, they told me, you need to learn Greek, otherwise you can't make it in graduate school. And I thought, okay, modern Greek, not a problem. And they said, no, no, no, it's the ancient version. And I was like, okay, that's a little humbling, but let's. Let's go with it. And so I ended up doing an intensive program the summer before senior year of college to learn Greek at the City University of New York Graduate Center's program. And this was eight hours a day of studying Greek, getting through chapters in a day, and then at the end of the day, having three or four hours of homework. So it was boot camp, the most academically rigorous thing I've done to this day. But I remember the instructors telling us that if you can get through this, you can get through graduate school. And I thought, okay, then let's go to graduate school. And so as I continued studying and reading and preparing for exams and being exposed to different materials, I realized, wait a minute, I'm seeing some references to black people in these texts. I'm not always seeing it discussed in ways that I feel like are responsible or rigorous. So let me start trying to find ways to engage with this work. And I will say I've been fortunate that the feedback that I've gotten within my own field has been either curiosity or support. And I'm sure that, I mean, haters, haters. Can hate. And I don't doubt that there are people who maybe don't like my work or don't think it's rigorous. But I have been fortunate that I've been shielded enough and maybe I've been lucky enough that in terms of the challenges, it's been more of the challenges of being in any discipline where sometimes you feel like there are not enough hours in the day, or you just feel like there are too many texts and there are too many people you need to contact and there are too many gaps, or you feel like I published something and I wish I had just added that one sentence that would have changed it. But I think no different than any other field in terms of the challenges.
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Amanda Joyce Hall
Right, Right. And so you told us about kind of like your foundation for being prepared to or your preparedness and training as it comes to being in ancient studies and being in classics. So how, like, what is the origin story of this book? How did you come to write Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity?
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Dr. Sarah Deribo
It began with needing to have a dissertation topic in graduate school. I was taking a survey course where in graduate school for most classics programs. I would say it's starting to change now, but traditionally you had to read a bulk of literature in the ancient Greek language of various authors as part of your first or second year training. And so when I was going through this blitz of everything that everyone has ever written in the past, there was one week where I was reading a lot of Greek history, a lot of texts from the ancient 5th century BCE, roughly 2500 years ago, of people who were writing about their world, what they knew, where they traveled in the ancient Greek world, broadly speaking. And one author, Herodotus, who wrote a 99 book tome called the Histories, where ostensibly he's looking at a war between Greece and Persia, but he's just really giving the tea on everybody. He's kind of a gossip blog meets a travelogue, meets a historical text. He gives a lot of really juicy stories that help you vividly feel like you're in the text. But then he'll also give you very straightforward and sometimes dry geographical references, too. So there's a. There's something for everyone in this text. But in this text, I remember meeting people called Ethiopians. And the the Greek etymology, the history of this word, Ethiopia or Ethiopia, comes from two Greek words, eitho, which means I blaze, and ops, which means face. So this combination of the people of blazed faces really drew my attention because I thought about the ways in which the relationship between the sun and Skin color is something that we also recognize and sometimes can grapple with in the modern day. So I thought, I need to get into this text some more. As I continued reading, he mentioned these Ethiopians as having black skin in other parts of the book, in other parts of the tome, rather these nine books. He discusses Ethiopians as being blameless and tall and incredibly handsome and semi divine. They kind of kick it with the guys, but they kind of don't. They are mortals, but there's something about them that just seems to be magical. And I went straight to my dissertation advisor and I said, I have to write about this. This has to be my dissertation topic. And she politely looked at me and said, sarah, this is not enough for a full dissertation. You cannot focus on 10 references in one Greek text to write a hundred page dissertation. But then she gently and helpfully told me, but there are other ways we can think about this. If you want to focus on blackness and antiquity, or Ethiopians and Greek antiquity, think about critical race theory as a really important foundational jumping off point. Think about other instances in which black people appear in ancient Greek literature. Think about the ways in which maybe we can make this visual. And so I think together, because of the ways that my graduate program was, and there's a lot of. You meet with professors and you talk through ideas with them. A lot of conversations with her really helped me think about how expansive, how capacious, how wide this project could become if I free myself from not only working on one author, but thinking about blackness as a thematic project and then finding other texts that would help me understand blackness in different ways. I will say that I was very much indebted to performance studies coming into my work early because it freed me from thinking about having to somehow notate all of the thousands of instances in which blackness appears in the ancient Greek corpus and instead choose almost case studies, almost five case studies that allow people to view blackness being performed in different ways. So this freed me from needing to be comprehensive and really let me give different viewers different snapshots of what blackness was performed, like in the genre of history, as I've spoken about with Herodotus, or the genre of. And instead of genre, I think about these as stages. So the stage of history with Herodotus, or the stage of theater with aeschylist suppliants, a play that's about 50 black Egyptian women who need to prove that they're Greek in order to be granted safety in a particular city. Moving to the stage of satire, moving to the stage of the novel. What I call the Ethiopia novel, or the stage of actual physical objects, as well the stage of art history. So I found that having the freedom to use the theory that I was getting from different events in African American studies that I was going to in graduate school was really important. And I could couple that with the linguistic skills, the literary skills that I was honing in classics, and bring the two together to write Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity.
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Amanda Joyce Hall
Well, I think the. Yeah, the idea of stages and thinking about, okay, well, how. What are the different stages through which are. On which we could understand blackness? That definitely comes out throughout the text. And I'm excited to get into some of the questions about the chapters. But before we do that, let's talk about how. Let's talk about the interdisciplinarity of your work, which is incredible. Can you share with us a little bit more about the types of sources that you used? I think this is the first time on this podcast that we're going to be talking about, like pottery and gender form cups as a type of source or a type of text that should be read. So I'm excited for you to share with listeners a little bit about that. And maybe you can also share while you're doing that, about some of your favorite research or archival moments and just your process in general towards conducting the writing and research for this book. And did any of that experience lend you towards this methodological concept that you give us, which is really important, this concept of entanglement.
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Dr. Sarah Deribo
I will say, entangling that idea. And the concept I mentioned at the end of the book is straight from Gwendolyn Brooks. And I am someone who reads. I try to read really widely. And my attention is a lot of the times drawn to black feminist scholarship, but also black feminist joy work. I mean, texts that are not maybe always considered academic, but texts that I find really useful. So it's been enjoyable to be able to end each of my chapters with a more modern text that speaks to my interest in African and African American studies and also the ways in which we can create canons with work that we publish. And so I want to bring different voices into the field of classics. Not to say that Gwendolyn Brooks doesn't get her flowers in other spaces. And I know there are people writing on her and that she is someone who is canonical in other fields. But I do want to bring out these sorts of voices and theoretical and these theorists actually into my own work. So I use Gwendolyn Brooks poem to all my sisters who have kept their naturals And I really wanted to think about the ways in which naturals. She's referring to Afros, but it seems more like a metaphor for just living in sitting in loving your blackness. I really thought that that was a beautiful way to. To signal to readers who make it to the end of the book or maybe who jump to the end to know that this is a book by someone who loves blackness. This is not some sort of defense for the field of classics, or this is not a sort of anti black text that I want people to then feel like they've done their homework and can wipe their hands clean. But I really wanted to signal that the people that I'm. That I'm building off of and the people who inspire my work are the ones who are so unapologetically pro black in the ways that they're thinking about communities and spaces. They really want inclusion to be at the center of what they're doing, rather than exclusion. So that's more about the untangling. In terms of the first part of your question, the types of sources that I use, you're absolutely right. I have a mixed media project that I've delivered to the world. I have literary sources. And the parts of my book that I think will be maybe most legible to people in the field of classics is the close reading of texts from different genres, from the ancient Greek corpus, from tragedy to historiography to satire to the novel. The ways in which I engage with the art historical pieces came about because of a research trip that I took. I spent four months in London at the University College London when I was in graduate school. And I was doing a lot of work really close to the British Museum. So I would sometimes go there for lunch and then check out some of the exhibitions. But I really found myself struck at the placement of objects in the museum. I would go from the main floor to looking at the Parthenon marbles, which is very much considered part of the ancient Greek world, the ancient classical canon. And then I would go into the basement and I would look at the Benin bronzes and think about 1897 and the punitive expedition by the British to take out a lot of these objects from Benin City and bring them to Britain as part of a punishment or retaliation because of colonizers being told get out when they were in Banan City. So these were both in my mind thinking about how I can see Africa downstairs and I can see Greece upstairs. And so I kept trying to bring them together. And I found that the both came together on the top Floor of the museum. So now we're traveling a bit. But on the top floor of the museum, in room 65, there's a room that's all about Nubia, all about this region that was an ancient civilization is a modern one now that roughly spans from the first to the six cataracts of the Nile. So we're thinking southern Egypt and northern Sudan. And I thought, oh, this is Africa, too. So the British Museum has Africa in the basement, and they have Africa on the top floor, and then in the middle, we have Egypt. And so I started thinking about reading the museum as something that I had already been doing, but I could put pen to paper and really start explaining these thoughts in a more. Maybe in a more productive way, rather than trying to figure out if there's a guy that I can talk to at the museum who can help me understand these different layers of where is Africa, where is antiquity? It might help to write about it. So that's what really pushed a lot of the second chapter of the book, where I look at Genoform cups, these cups that have a black face, a face that has a black color on one side and a brown face or a face that has a more clay color on the other side. Looking at these cups from 2,500 years ago, made in Greece, and really thinking about, where do they fit? Where do they fit in museums? Where do they fit in antiquity? What sort of a performance are they giving to viewers, and in what ways do we engage with them? Now, if you look on YouTube, sometimes these cups are used to argue for a very Afrocentric inspired history. And they also are sometimes used in the opposite light when white supremacists can look at it and say, this shows that black people were subjugated forever. So it's curious how we continue to manipulate, or perhaps we continue to read into these cups sometimes what it is that. That we want to see without always paying attention to the context. So through this work, I started realizing how important it is to treat objects, to treat sources as historical relics in their own right. And contextualizing them in that way is really important, but also thinking about how they speak to us today and not treating this as right or wrong, but trying to see the different ways in which people engage with it and what can be the preconceived notions behind it.
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Amanda Joyce Hall
Right. Oh, I'm just. Oh, I'm just so grateful that you shared the story about. I'm just kind of like envisioning you walking around the British Museum now and thinking about the end. I'M thinking about. Yeah, that part in the book. The part in the book was one of my favorite parts, where you have the maps of the museum and you're talking about the different places that you see Africa, and you're highlighting kind of like the logic of curation, but also the illogic of curation in that moment. So, yeah, that was awesome to hear about. I want to start off the beginning of my next question with something you just said, which is that we can create our own canons. We can create our own canons. I thought that was something that was powerful. I wrote it down. I'm going to stick it on my wall. But, you know, I noticed that at so many moments in this book, your analysis is deeply in conversation with Black Studies. So can you tell us a little bit more about scholars who. Black or black scholars or black Studies scholars who've written on antiquity and just more generally how Black studies scholarship, theories and methods informs this work? You've spoken to it a little bit already, but maybe we can go a little bit deeper.
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Dr. Sarah Deribo
I talk in my book introduction about the two theorists who I really feel help situate me and ground me. And I've been fortunate that I've been able to see them discuss their work live. I've been able to speak with one of them about my work. So there's something really useful and productive about engaging with scholars who are alive, who are thinking through ideas, who have so much more experience and knowledge than I do, but who are generous enough to publish their works and to make it visible. So I begin by talking about Saidiya Hartman and the ways in which she theorizes quotidian performances. This idea of everyday performances not needing to have a stage to have a performance really helped to free me from feeling like, oh, if I don't find a physical stage in one of these texts, I can't use this metaphor. But when she talks about the ways in which enslaved people in the antebellum south, for example, would bare their teeth or would refuse to smile when they were on the auction block as a way to perform a theater, an act of resistance on the stage or the theater of the marketplace, I thought this is a really beautiful way to give some agency or to recognize that there is something that someone can perform outwardly that can deliver a message that words don't always. That people don't always have the words to give because of the constrained context they find themselves in. So as I kept working through scenes of subjection and looking at Dr. Hartman's piece about Venus in two acts I realized there's so much we can do when we free ourselves from trying to find the right way something happened or the exact historical way something happened, and instead think a lot about giving people agency and trying to imbue them with voices of respect, but also using some creativity that's responsible to really help readers or viewers understand that these are subjects that we care for and that we really want to help other viewers understand in ways that's not just exploitative, but that can be actually productive. So I will say that that helped me, in one regard, to really think through this idea of performances that I wanted to bring into my work. And the other scholar is Daphne Brooks, who really, in her work Bodies and Descent, really thinks about the ways that for people who are on an actual physical stage, they also are finding ways to subvert expectations as well. I thought that bringing these two together gave me an academic or a literary freedom to really be bold and creative in terms of thinking about what a performance could be and combining the ways, combining Black studies into this project and thinking about black performances. Black with a capital B, Black. The social identity that we have today was a really useful framework because I benefit from scholars who have thought so much about blackness in modernity. And it helps me when I'm trying to think about blackness with a lowercase B, blackness of antiquity. Because I don't want to conflate the two, but I want to recognize that I stand on the shoulders of many, and I don't need to recreate the wheel. There are ways that they've theorized care, they've theorized color, they theorized performance. And I can build off of that as well. As I recently finished reading Tia Miles's all that she Carried, this book about Ashley Sack, A particular item that was found that had an embroidered text in which a woman says that her grandmother received this sack from her mother. So this is a writer's great grandmother. Because they were being sold, they were being separated, the family. And the great grandmother wanted to give her daughter. It was a braided hair, a braid of hair, a sack of pecans, a tattered dress, and my love always. So seeing the ways that from this one object, Tia Miles creates a beautiful, phenomenal, loving, rigorous take on what this represents and what we can learn from this, really, that pushes me forward and reminds me that Black studies is a field I need to stay invested in, and I need to stay up to date in and engaged with. Because there's still so many creative ways of thinking about blackness, through blackness, with blackness, along blackness, that I find incredibly, incredibly powerful and provocative.
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Amanda Joyce Hall
Yeah. Wow. I just. I just felt the spirit of so much of what you were saying.
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Dr. Sarah Deribo
Yeah.
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Amanda Joyce Hall
Let'S. Let's. Let's move on to talking about terminology. So I really love the methodological precision that you bring to your work and to the book. And I see this throughout, especially with the orthography of blackness that you lay out in the beginning. So can you tell us more about this and what are the stakes of getting this right when we're thinking about antiquity, especially when we have people who are maybe might be unfamiliar with kind of like the standards, or just how dialogue and terminology might change as we move back through the past?
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Dr. Sarah Deribo
Thank you for recognizing this work because it is labor to finish the book and then to think about how do I make this more accessible to broader communities, but how do I also hold my feet to the fire and make sure that I'm doing what I set out to do? So part of my creating even a note on nomenclature at the beginning of the book was really a suggestion from my copy editor, who said, if you want this book to be legible to people outside of your field, and if you also want this book to be something that people can pick up and automatically know, this is something that I can use as a reference. It's useful to have a dictionary of sorts at the beginning, a laying out of what you mean by different terms. So I found that really useful to think about the reader as opposed to the writer when moving through this process. And I tried really hard to be specific about black with the lowercase b versus black with an uppercase b in particular, because I know that people picking up the book, and I've been that reader picking up a book sometimes can feel let down. You pick up a book and you think it's about one thing, but it moves to another. Or you might think it's about black people, but it ends up being about black pottery or about black daffodils or whatever, whatever else it is because of the ways that we have slippage in English between uppercase b, black for a people, and lowercase b, black for a color. So I wanted to find a way to signal to readers that I know I live in a world in which these two are different, but I want to find a way to use one word for the past and one word for the present so we don't constantly ally the two and assume that we. What is Ethiopia in the past, is Ethiopia today? Or what is black in the past, is black today. So I use the modulation between Uppercase and lowercase to signal a change in time. Lowercase B is blackness in Herodotus world. Uppercase B is blackness in Daphne Brooks's world. Really trying to let the reader know that. I want to be responsible and I don't want to assume one equals the other. But I also recognize that when we say black, you don't know which letter is capitalized. You don't know what I'm doing with that first letter. And that's part of the slipperiness in our modern parlance, and that's part of the beauty. And that I could tell you that somebody's. I could tell you that something is black. But if you know that something is an object and not a person, you may color it with the color black. But if I tell you she is black, automatically you give someone a shade of brown ranging from light to dark. So it's curious how this word is so slippery but so powerful in our own language. And I wanted to find some way to engage with that, to engage with terms like race, race and modernity and race and antiquity, or to engage with things like classics, classics with a capital C versus a lowercase c. These problematic stand ins sometimes I mentioned in my, in my introduction, after I go through all of my different terms, racism, thinking through Karen and Barbara Fields, race, craft, all of these really useful terms. I say at the end, not as a cop out, but as an invitation, I say this is a work in progress. My language is not the only language. 20 or 30 years from now, we may not even find this useful. I think about the ways that Robert Steptoe talks about language as a family tree. And if we think about this as both a physical tree but also a family tree, different branches can. Some can end, some can keep going. It can be unpredictable when one continues and one dies out. But I very much feel like language is the same way. From color to Negro to Negro with a capital N to Afro American to African American, all of these terms are in constant flux. And they require communities to affirm them, to choose to use them or to not choose to use them. So nothing would make me happier than to have someone in black studies or someone in classics or a related field say, these terms might have been good in 2022, but it's 2040 now. And this is the new language that I think helps us understand even more, with more precision, the theory and what's going on in these texts. The beauty of humanities is you don't have to be right or wrong. It's more just make the best argument with the sources that you have at the time and with the knowledge that you have at the time. So I try to, while I'm really wanting to be precise, I try to also be open and to let readers know that they are part of the journey too. And if they want to write a rebuttal or if they want to push back against my work, as long as they are looking at the sources and the material and the arguments and that's what they're pushing back on, be my guest. If it's an ad hominem attack, if you're trying to give a weak argument about I'm from here, so I don't know this or that, then I would say I would need to see more rigor behind it and more respect in order to really take it seriously.
- [32:28]
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- [33:39]
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- [34:10]
Amanda Joyce Hall
Yeah, I think that part of the book is the way that it works for or worked for me as a reader was that it was so tight in how you just your thinking on nomenclature and just how terms are going to appear, whether they're going to be capital or if they're going to be lowercase, capitalized or lowercase. It just really invites readers to kind of grapple with throughout the entire book because we have to pay attention to, oh, are you using a lowercase C for classics or using an uppercase C for classics here? And then with Ethiopia, are we talking about Ethiopia with an E? Are we talking about Ethiopia with a. It just provided. Just reading through the book provided a really nice moment whenever I saw those words to reflect on how tightly you laid this out in the introduction. But I want to go to, I want to get into some of the chapters. So. Let's talk about how does the study of artistic renditions of black people in antiquity challenge both ancient understandings and modern receptions of Greek iconography? And what do these representations of blackness reveal?
- [35:32]
Dr. Sarah Deribo
And thank you for pushing us into this next chapter. So after the introduction, I do begin with thinking about these gender form cups. I've discussed trying to understand both what their context was then and what it is now know. I've given a couple of talks, virtual talks. So there are ways to find images to help visualize what it is I'm talking about. But the way I can describe it for the sake of the podcast, is to to think about your hand or the length of your hand as the length of a cup. And these cups would have been drinking cups. So they would have been used in formalized drinking parties and symposia where people were gathering together 2500 years ago. The ones that I'm looking at mainly probably Athenians were using them, people in Athens. But these were really rowdy parties. Maybe frat parties would be the closest equivalent that we have. But people were drinking, laughing, sex was going on, games were happening, music was there. There was a lot of licentiousness and debauchery, but this was considered part of, part of the culture, part of being an Athenian man. And with these cups that again, are no bigger than your hand, there were a number of different scenes painted onto them. The ones that I talk about in particular are cups that are shaped to look like two faces that are conjoined. So each face is looking out in a different way. And if you use the handles on the side of the cup, you can drink. And one face will be looking at you, the other face towards your audience. The cups that were really striking to me and that drove this chapter are cups that have a black face on one side and a brown on the other. Because these are two different skin tones that we're getting in this space, but also two different faces, two different masks that people can engage with, two different identities maybe that can be put on. So in this chapter, I really lean on the idea of performance to say that these parties, these symposia, are stages on which performances occur. And these cups that look sort of like masks can help push this performance forward. In this chapter, I also really tried to untangle or push back against scholars in my own field or scholars in our history who sometimes, when they look at these cups, don't have that moment of radical hesitation, that moment where they say, let me remember that my present day conceptions of color and my conceptions of past color don't necessarily have to be the same. So for a lot of descriptions of these cups that I was finding in museums and also in text were such that one side was considered beautiful and the other side considered a caricature or ugly. And I'll leave you to decide which one you think got which assumption. The lighter face versus a darker face being beautiful. But I found that this was a very. This was a very unfair way to read these texts, to read this object as a text, because then it helped to reify or to confirm maybe some people's notions that blackness has always been connected with the lack of beauty, which is not the case, as I mentioned earlier, with Herodotus and Ethiopians being described as being the most beautiful people. So I had to sit for a minute with these objects and with these references, with these descriptions in museums or texts from art historians, and really try to think about how I can engage with their ideas. These are people who are scholars in their field well beyond where I am or where I may ever get. But it's also people who are humans, and humans have blind spots that sometimes they don't always know about. So I wanted to find a really respectful, responsible way to say I disagree with some of these terms. And I think that recognizing beauty on both sides might be really useful. Or if we don't want to talk about their beauty elements, let's move to thinking about this as a performance so that we can really try to give viewers, try to give readers or listeners a more comprehensive, well rounded picture of what's happening with these objects, rather than just copy and paste how blackness was treated, for example, during the blackface era in the 19th century and just pasting that onto the past.
- [39:43]
Amanda Joyce Hall
Ooh, radical hesitation.
- [39:47]
Dr. Sarah Deribo
Yes. And Siga Taganti, they talk about it in an essay, so I can't take credit, but thank you. Thank you.
- [39:52]
Amanda Joyce Hall
Okay, I like that. Okay, let's talk about representations of blackness through theater and performance in antiquity. What do Greek plays tell us about blackness in antiquity?
- [40:07]
Dr. Sarah Deribo
Greek plays really bring out the pluralities of performances of blackness that can occur. So in the next chapter, I look at a text that was performed probably in 463 BCE. Again, we're still 2,500 years in the past, but this play in particular by a tragedian, Aeschylus, who's known for his Oresteia, for the story of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra and Orestes, he writes another play that ends up winning first prize at the great Dionysia at a big festival in Athens. And this play is all about a group of black women. And we don't pay as much attention to their skin color because, well, when I say we, I mean in the field of classics. This was never taught to me as a play about black people. But also because these women are less concerned with their skin color in the text, and they're more concerned with the fact that they need to flee a forced marriage to their cousins in Egypt. They do not want to marry them for reasons that are some somewhat unknown, but they flee to Greece. And in order to be accepted as refugees or as people who can live as medics in Greece, they say that they have a claim to Greek identity because their great, great, great, great great grandmother was someone who is from this, who eventually traveled to this region. So as the story unfolds, you see these women, these 50 black Egyptian women arrive in a city in Greece. And they're confronted with the ruler who says, you don't look Greek. And this is the point of the text where I really explicate what does it mean to look Greek. And I talk about this in my chapter. He mentions their clothes as being the most marked difference. They're wearing clothes that are considered not Greek. And the Greek word is meaning not. Elena, meaning Greek, stolon, meaning clothes. So their clothes are not Greek. And this is very striking. But they, when they describe themselves, they say, you're right, our clothes don't look Greek. But they also describe themselves as having skin color, that is heliotupan, genos. So their skin is struck by the sun. Helio meaning sun, Tupan meaning struck. So they're sunstruck. Genos meaning people. They're sunstruck people, so they're aware that their skin color is black, or at least the robes that they're wearing is black in this play. But there is no. There is no distinction between their skin color being black. Therefore, they can't be Greek. It seems like the main difference between them not really fitting into Greece is the fact that they're bold women and they're not submissive women, the way this particular Greek ruler is used to. Or they seem to be traveling on their own and not with a man, which is not what this Greek ruler would be used to, but they really push back, and they eventually are granted asylum. So there are women who successfully are able to have been Egyptian, but are also Greek and have black skin. And I thought this was a really beautiful way to give an example to readers of black Greekness being an identity and not trying to anachronistically or out of history, use whiteness and graft it onto the ancient Greek world, but to really think through what different visualizations we can imagine, at least in a play. And a play is not lived history. So I also try to make sure I keep the two separate and not say that what happens in a text is what happened in real life. But there is something to be said for the creativity of the people living. To be able to imagine someone who's Egyptian and black and Greek and to have those three coexist. It's a plurality that I don't think we're always even able to imagine. I'm thinking about the ways that John Boyega got so much pushback when he played a character in Star wars, or the ways that having Achilles be played by a black British man by David Jassy was something that was so controversial in England. So this. This freedom in the creative realm is something that I find really inviting and something that perhaps we can tap into more when we try to envision spaces that maybe are not our lived experience, but are another realm. And there's a freedom in that.
- [44:17]
Amanda Joyce Hall
Yeah. Wow. Indeed. Beautiful. Let's talk about this in relation to Greek historiograph, the writings of Herodotus and his histories, which you. Which you mentioned in the beginning. How does blackness operate at multiple levels within this text? And how do these representations challenge helenocentrism? I think that's how I'm saying it correctly. But tell us about what that is and how your reading of Herodotus changes.
- [44:57]
Dr. Sarah Deribo
Some of these things or challenges. Thank you for your question, Amanda. And I would say, and I usually tell my students, if you say something with confidence, if you don't know how to pronounce it. Nine times out of 10 people will say, that's it. Or that's a French way of pronouncing it. So we used to play around with different words. But Hellenicentrism is how I pronounce it. This idea of putting Greece at the center. And that's exactly what I was trying to push back against in my work. Not always centering everything on Greece, even though I'm looking at Greek literature, but trying to find subversive ways to hear other voices. And this is where black studies got really helpful. I wanted to figure out how can I give a voice to those who are unvoiced in the text, even though their history is not the same as, for example, in Venus in Two Acts, said he, Hartman talks about this woman on a ship that's traveling from, I think it's from England, maybe to parts of the Americas. But thinking about how we don't know her story, we just know she was flogged to death. How do we try to give a story to this person? And maybe an act of care, rehabilitation. This is not the same history for these characters that Herodotus is writing about in his histories. He's writing about Ethiopians, about a people who he would not have visited. He didn't make it that far south in Africa, but he did make it to roughly modern day Egypt near the first Cataract, near the Aswan Dam. And from there he got stories about other people. So I really tried to mine the text and find ways to unearth some of those voices that we don't get unmediated access to. So I go through a particular, a particular episode, a particular story in Herodotus's histories in book three, where there's so many layers of mediation and I won't get into the details because we'll be here until Tuesday at 4pm But. But in the text we hear about a Persian ruler who wants to invade Ethiopia. And so he goes through Egyptians and they come back and report the, the story. And you get so deep into the story sometimes that you forget who said what that he said then and where. It's a game of telephone that just seems to go awry. But it's done in such a skillful way that you start forgetting that you're within a story. Where Herodotus said that Cambyses said that, the fish eater said that the Ethiopians said. And it's a really skillful way of storytelling. And I don't think we always give storytelling the respect it deserves. We tend to sometimes push it outside of the academy or the canon. But I wanted to find some space in the book to highlight the masterful storytelling that goes on, but also the various ways in which Ethiopians in which black people in Herodotus histories are depicted. He calls them black and beautiful earlier in the text, but in a particular episode, the one that I write the most about in this chapter, where the Persian rulers trying to figure out a way to invade and annex Ethiopia to his kingdom, their skin color is not mentioned at all. Instead, the fact that they are semi divine, the fact that they have access to an eternal source of food and a spring of water that ends up making you live a really long time, that's what drives him to this country. That's what drives him to an act of violence that eventually doesn't benefit him. And. And he ends up going mad anyway. Spoiler alert. He does not have. Have a happy life after the story. This Persian ruler who tried to invade Ethiopia. So with Herodotus, I really recognize the ways in which even being written as black being a representation. And again, these are representations and not cut and dry historical figures. But being represented as black in the text was not a monolithic identity. You are black and other things. So these Ethiopians in Herodotus histories were black and semi divine and incredibly politically savvy and also great warriors. Very different full depictions that we get that can help to push back against the ways that some cherry picks instances of Ethiopians as enslaved and let that be the only ways that people understand them. There are other writers, and Theophrastus is one who writes about 100 or so years after Herodotus, who does describe an Ethiopian who's enslaved and who a particular Greek man has as property as a way to show off that he's nouveau riche. But that's one example. And I'm always eager to let people know that if we're going to think about examples of blackness, let's give a more full picture rather than just reifying this idea of blackness at the bottom, which is a more modern phenomenon, one that was very much beneficial for European slave owners. And let's instead think about the ways in which we can expand this more if we look at sources from the ancient Greek world with a sharper eye.
- [49:50]
Amanda Joyce Hall
Right, Right. But I talk about. Yeah, how the flattening interests of white power structures. So, yeah, so let's move on to talk about black Greeks or. Or let's talk about this chapter where you're. Where you're grappling with this. And you use satire to kind of help us understand. Understand representations of blackness, or we look at representations of blackness within satire. So tell us about who the final.
- [50:25]
Dr. Sarah Deribo
Chapter, or rather the. The third to last chapter, this chapter where I engage with Lucian, a writer from the second century CE who's writing from ancient Syria. So he's someone who is not Greek. He is not growing up speaking Greek in the ways that some other people may have been. He's a fascinating character because he plays with so many different categories. He makes fun of Herodotus in some texts, he talks about traveling both to the heavens, but also into the depths of the ocean. And another, he's someone for whom there are very few boundaries or areas that he doesn't feel like he can poke a little bit of fun at and also be incredibly witty in what he says. But I discuss a particular text in which he stages a conversation between two men, one who's from Scythia. This is near the Black Sea region. So this would be roughly. Actually, it spreads out to a few different countries. So this would be, let's say, Georgia, for the, for the sake of this conversation, roughly in that area, the country of Georgia is where this Scythian would have been from. And he's chatting with a wise man from Athens, from Solon. And they're having a conversation while they watch Athenian athletes prepare for. Prepare for whatever is coming in their future, either battle or a game. So they're sitting here, and I mean, the way I picture it is with two older gentlemen almost in Adirondack chairs, sipping tea and just making comments about the young people in their midst. This is my, my vision of it. There's no Adirondack chair in the story, but it's. It's great to see what each of them pay attention to. And there's one back and forth that I mentioned in the chapter where Anacharsis is Scythian talks about these wonderfully muscular, virile men practicing in the gymnasium. And he talks about the range of their skin color as a solon. So this idea of them being from a deep red to a kind of deep black as their color is something that they remark on. They talk about why being dark skinned is really good because it shows that you've been outdoors and you've been exercising and you're not afraid of the sun. And if you need it, you can put mud on your body to protect yourself. I found this really exciting because this is an example of black Athenians. And in the field of classics in the Field OF Ancient Greco Roman Studies Athens and Rome are the two cities that get the most attention because of how much power they had in their. In their own imperial ways. So thinking about people at the seat of this kingdom having black skin really excited me. And I thought this was an important intervention because it reminds us that the black white dichotomy is absolutely a more modern phenomenon in terms of black being bad and white being good. And that in this scene, in this image of athletes preparing for battle or for a game, their blackness was something that was beneficial. It helped to protect them from the sun. And the story continues. And the Scythian says, well, I need to get my hat because I don't want my head to get dark because I'm very sensitive to the sun. And so we can see the ways that they continue using the sun as a way to make fun of each other. But a really important intervention. I feel for thinking about what happens when we graph a color that maybe we don't always expect to graph. What happens when we graft it onto Athenians? Does it make the field of classic spear feel more accessible? Does it help people break down or even acknowledge the ways in which maybe they've been assuming that the Athenians were white this whole time? So these are the sorts of questions I wanted the chapter to tease out a bit.
- [54:07]
Amanda Joyce Hall
Yeah. And then it has. It has broader implications for how we. I mean, I just thinking of. I'm thinking of movies and who's. How movies about antiquity are cast. So, yeah, I think that it's just really important for challenging some, again, some of our modern understandings. So you also introduce us or you talk about this trope of skin color manipulation in Greek literature. So can you tell us a little bit more about this in antiquity and help us to think about this trope in terms of contemporary racial passing or if we should even do that at all.
- [54:48]
Dr. Sarah Deribo
There's a great article I referenced in the final chapter by Judith Perkins where she discusses the novel I discussed in the chapter, the one that's written in Ancient Greek as the first instance of passing. And while this is a very. It's a very attractive way to imagine what is happening in this novel. And I'll give a brief bio, a brief synopsis of it soon. I think that we always need to give the caveat of what passing means today or what passing meant in the 18th, 19th, 20th centuries is very different in that there was so much perceived privilege that happens when you pass as white when you're black. And we can't step outside of that history. It's important to contextualize that. I think about Alison Hobbs book A Chosen Exile and the ways that she really points out how you are exiling yourself from a community when you join the white community, when you are someone whose parents are black, but you choose to pass as white. And that painful separation, I think, is something that is very much that cannot be separated from the history. So I do want to say that if we are going to use passing as a term to think about the ancient Greek world, we need to be very careful to recognize that there are different contexts that these. That this word can sit in. So now, jumping to antiquity, this text that I analyzed, written probably in the 4th century CE. So less than 2000 years ago, this text was written by Heliodorus, and it's called Ethiopica. This Aethiopica novel is a really rich story. It's a travelogue meets a soap opera. It's a rich story of one young woman who is Ethiopian. Her mother and father are king. Mother and father are queen and king of Ethiopia. And they have black skin. She doesn't. Her skin is white because her mother was looking at a painting of a white goddess at the right, right at the moment of conception, and the colors imprinted into her womb. But because this main character, this protagonist, is not black, her parents don't raise her. She's left to fend for herself. Different foster fathers help her eventually become a young woman, and she eventually makes her way home. This novel blew my mind when I found it, because it's one of the earliest instances that we have of blackness constituting cultural privilege in this text. If this young woman were black, she could have lived a cush life being an Ethiopian princess. But because her skin is white, she has to go through so many trials and tribulations. She's almost raped at different times, she's almost killed. She has to use all of these different skills that she develops in order to make it back home. She's traveling with her boyfriend, who is Greek, who was a bit hapless, to be honest. He doesn't really help her. If anything, she helps him survive. So you see her becoming the princess, really adopting this role of being a leader that she eventually ends up getting to live out in its fullest when she arrives home, and her parents receive her as their daughter. But the fact that her skin color is white makes it so hard for her to pass as Ethiopian. And there's a scene where she's trying to hide. And so she colors herself with soot and with mud to darken her appearance. This scene and then some other scenes really help us think through different ways that disguise of skin color can play out in a context where black and white don't mean what they mean today. So I found this a really fun way of trying to engage with this skin color, this chromatic manipulation, but also to stay within the context of this Ethiopian novel and to really think through what passing might mean if we first contextualize it in the present, but then think about how it can apply to the past in a very different context.
- [58:49]
Amanda Joyce Hall
Indeed. That chapter, mind blowing is the best word for it. And so I'm so excited for readers to just experience it because it just, you know, I just feel like things start coming up for you internally when you're realizing how shaped we are by modern times and modern understanding, things of race and racism. But when you see this, it takes you out of that. So. So, yeah. So, Sarah, you've given us this wonderful book. What are you. What are you doing next? Can you tell us a little bit about what you're working on now?
- [59:26]
Dr. Sarah Deribo
Absolutely. I will say I took a break after writing, and I definitely am a proponent of taking breaks sometimes. Easier said than done. And I will say some people will call me out and say, you told me to take a break, but you didn't. So I did. And I encourage anyone who has finished an exam, whatever it is, take a break. But after my break, I got back to work, and I'm currently working on two projects. One is an edited volume that I'm working on with two colleagues, Danarels and Firoz Visunya, both based in the United Kingdom. And this volume is a reader. It's roughly, tentatively called Classics and Race, A Historical Reader. And what we want to do with this is to really not just write essays or have phenomenal, phenomenal minds write essays, but instead, we wanted to think more about canon formation and what needs to be included in the canon of classics. So we tasked the team of 16 to 18 contributors with the assignment of choose one text from anywhere to 20 years ago to 2000 years ago. Choose one text that's not part of the classical canon. Give us this type so we can give it to readers and write an essay explaining why you think it's part of the classical canon. So this is a really expensive, fun way for people to, number one, show us different. Show us access to different writers that we may not know about, but also for us to see how it can be done, how scholarship can be done when people are thinking really critically and rigorously and with respect about those who are maybe not part of the folds of the traditional parameters of classics. So that's one project. The other is me putting a lot of what I've said into practice and really thinking about expanding classics or expanding the study of the ancient Greek world to talk more to the present. So I'm currently finishing up an essay where I use satire and some of the work I did on Lucian. In the book, I use satire as a thematic way to link modern Ethiopian literature and ancient Greek literature. So satire is the umbrella. And through it I look at linguistic. Linguistic games that two authors are playing. Hamatuma, which is the pen name of Yasu Alamayu, an Ethiopian writer, and Lucien, the writer that I mentioned in one of my chapters, who's writing from ancient Syria in roughly the second century ce. What I really want to do in this project and what I'll continue to do in future, in future projects, is to both think about troubling or unsettling this time map that we have this idea of geography or timelines always needing to be exactly the same to talk about different scholarships. And I'm also deeply invested in pushing forward ancient African studies. This idea of studying antiquity or the ancient world, but studying it from the perspective of Africa, from Nubia, from Aksum, from all of these different civilizations that were interacting with the Greco Roman world, were giving the Greco Roman world a run for their money a lot of the time, but are not always included in what is considered classics. Wow.
- [62:46]
Amanda Joyce Hall
Canon formation. Work on satires. Ancient African studies.
- [62:51]
Dr. Sarah Deribo
Who?
- [62:52]
Amanda Joyce Hall
Sarah, you know, I've always been. I've always, always been for many years, a fan of you. And I'm so excited to see all of these projects come to life. I have one more question for you before we go. For people who are interested in finding you and keeping up with your work, is there any, any place online or elsewhere where. Where they can find you?
- [63:16]
Dr. Sarah Deribo
Absolutely. My website is the best way to find all of my writings and videos. My website is my first name, my last name. Dot com. Sarah Durovo. D as in David. Erb as in boy. EW sarahdettavo.com Also on Twitter, my handle is blackantiquity. I do not tweet often. I probably. Yeah, so you go there. But go there maybe once every five months and you'll find something juicy. Also, if you order my book on Cambridge University Press, you can use the discount code UBGA B as in boy. G as in Georgia. UBGA 2022.
- [63:59]
Amanda Joyce Hall
Okay, fantastic. We'll make sure that we link all of that in the show notes and on the New Books website. But for now, Sarah, I want to thank you for being on the show with us, for sharing your study, for sharing your wisdom and your insights with us, and for speaking with us about your new book, untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity.
- [64:21]
Dr. Sarah Deribo
Thank you. Sa.