BLACKNESS AND ANTIQUITY: Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity. Pp. xviii + 253, b/w & colour ills, colour maps. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Cased, £29.99, US$39.99. ISBN: 978-1-108-49528-8

• Published in: The Classical review 2024, Vol.74 (1), p.253-255
• Main Author: Pandey, Nandini B
• Format: Review
• Language: English
• Subjects: Antiquity; Black people; Colonialism; Color; Ethnicity; Greek civilization; Greek literature; Middle Ages; Postcolonialism; Power; Race; Self concept; Self evaluation
• ISSN: 0009-840X; 1464-3561
• DOI: 10.1017/S0009840X2300269X

Yet I wonder if D.'s definition of race as ‘an outward-facing category of evaluation (how you conceptualize others)’, in contrast to identity, ‘an inward-facing category of self-evaluation (how you conceptualize yourself)’ (p. xv), does justice to the complexity of the subject or the ongoing problematisation of these terms. Many scholars now understand race and racecraft as tools operating within systems of dominance to control populations and naturalise socially determined hierarchies (c.f., among many others, K. and B. Fields, Racecraft: the Soul of Inequality in American Life [2012]; G. Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages [2018]). In this view, it is not outward-facingness, but rather the ideological and institutional power to impose differential value on groups, that distinguishes ‘race’ from identity and ethnicity (which can themselves be emic or etic).