REPORT ON THE AFRICAN ATHENA CONFERENCE (6-8 NOVEMBER 2008) TO THE HRC, UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK
DANIEL ORRELLS
The Department of Classics and Ancient History hosted African Athena: Black Athena 20 Years On… in November 2008. It was an event that attracted almost 100 hundred delegates from Europe, Africa and North America.
The conference aimed to re-assess the contribution made by Martin Bernal’s highly controversial work Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilisation (1988). Unlike other events and scholarly publications on Bernal’s work, our conference did not intend to lionize or demonize Black Athena. Rather we were interested in investigating the following questions as points of departure: can a myth of Afrocentrism ever be a useful narrative in contemporary culture? How do Africanizing and classicizing cultures interface and interpenetrate in the arts and lives of Africans, Europeans, Caribbeans and Americans? Does Black Athena offer new possibilities for comparison between African and Jewish diasporas, cultures and struggles? How do we deal with the difficult collusion of essentialist and poststructuralist discourses in “postcolonial” thought? Should we be writing about the racist myths of modern historiography instead of the history at the core of classical mythology? Has Black Athena anything useful to teach us about the compartmentalization of disciplines in the modern research university?
We hosted eight keynote speakers: Professor Martin Bernal (CornellUniversity) opened the conference with a very interesting paper on the political and intellectual origins of Black Athena. He described his early days as Assistant Professor at Cornell where he was privy to the likes of Leo Strauss and the fertilisation of much neo-conservatist ideological thinking. Partha Mitter (Professor Emeritus of Art History, University of Sussex) was our second keynote speaker. Professor Mitter delivered a lecture on Victorian discourses of race and racism within Victorian conceptualisations of Art History. Stephen Howe (Professor of History, University of Bristol), our third keynote, delivered a paper on the intellectual history of afrocentrism, which made important adjustments and additions to his work already published in this area. Professor Shelley Haley of HamiltonCollege spoke about the racial politics involved in translating Latin literature. Our fifth keynote speaker, Professor Valentin Mudimbe (DukeUniversity), provided a highly original and creative reading of the classical myth of Libya, analysing how Greek mythology was intellectually entangled with conceptualising Africa. Our sixth keynote, Professor Patrice Rankine (Purdue University) gave a lecture that analysed the progress of Black Athena across its three volumes – indeed the last two volumes have received far less attention that the (in)famous first. Our penultimate speaker, Professor Robert Young (New YorkUniversity), delivered a paper on the way we conceptualise a continent as a landmass and suggested that we could think of the Mediterranean basin itself as a continent of interchange and interface. Finally, Professor Paul Gilroy (LSE, London) closed the proceedings with a highly provocative paper on the current state of black politics in Britain and the United States.
Framed by these contributions, a range of panels examined a variety of topics, such as: afrocentrism; Africa in early-modern history; African diasporic literary engagements with classical antiquity; the metaphor of Egypt in European thought; and African American historiography in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Oxford University Press has shown interest in publishing some of the scholarship presented at the conference. I am currently engaged in putting together a proposal for a double-volume publication. The first, edited by myself and Dr. Gurminder Bhambra (Sociology, Warwick) examines theoretical and historiographical issues around African Diaspora Studies and Classical Studies; the second, edited by myself and Dr. Tessa Roynon (English, Oxford) looks at classical and neo-classical engagements with Africa, and African diasporic literary engagements with classical antiquity. We are hopeful that the series “Classical Presences” at OUP will take on our proposals.
I would say, in conclusion, then, that African Athena was a highly successful event. It brought together people from various corners of the globe and from a wide range in disciplines, to discuss creatively and innovatively a wide range of issues. That we will hopefully be able to capitalise on the event with OUP is an extremely exciting possibility which could not have happened without the generous support from the HRC at Warwick.