Denise Eileen McCoskey

The very ubiquity of race and racial discussions encourages the general public to accept the power it exerts as natural and to allow the process by which it has assumed such authority to remain unquestioned. In this study, Denise McCoskey explains the position of race today by unveiling its relation to structures of thought and practice in classical antiquity. This study thus attempts both to account for the role of race in the classical world and also to trace the intricate ways Greek and Roman racial ideologies continue to resonate in modern life. McCoskey uncovers the assorted frameworks that organized and classified human diversity more fundamentally in antiquity. Along the way, she highlights the noteworthy intersections of race with other important social structures, such as gender and class. Underlining the role of race in shaping the ancient world, she ultimately turns to the influence of ancient racial formation on the modern world as well, an influence mediated by the receptions and appropriations of classical antiquity, borrowings that serve to shore up modernity and its continuing, albeit complex, juxtapositions of past and present. In this deft study, McCoskey provides a touchstone for thinking more critically about race's many sites of operation in both ancient and modern eras.

Antiquity and Its Legacy

Race

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.

Zara M. Torlone

I hate and I love.' The Roman poet Catullus expressed the disorienting experience of being in love in a stark contradiction that has resonated across the centuries. While his description might seem to modern readers natural and spontaneous, it is actually a response planned with great care and artistry. It is that artistry, and the way in which Roman love poetry works, that this book explores. Focusing on Catullus and on the later genre of elegy - so-called for its metre, and a form of poetry practiced by Tibullus, Propertius and Ovid - Denise Eileen McCoskey and Zara Martirosova Torlone discuss the devices used by the major Roman love poets, as well as the literary and historical contexts that helped shape their work. Setting poets and their writings especially against the turbulent backdrop of the Augustan Age (31 BCE-14 CE), the book examines the origins of Latin elegy; highlights the poets' key themes; and traces their reception by later writers and readers.

Latin Love Poetry

Emily Zakin

Explores the connections between sexual difference and political structure in ancient Greek tragedy.

Denise Eileen McCoskey

About

Books

Join the club