The appearance of Martin Bernal's Black Athena: The Afro-Asian Roots of Classical Civilization in 1987 sparked intense debate and controversy in Africa, Europe, and North America. His detailed genealogy of the 'fabrication of Greece' and his claims for the influence of ancient African and Near Eastern cultures on the making of classical Greece, questioned many intellectuals' assumptions about the nature of ancient history. The transportation of enslaved African persons into Europe, the Americas, and the Caribbean, brought African and diasporic African people into contact in significant numbers with the Greek and Latin classics for the first time in modern history. In African Athena, the contributors explore the impact of the modern African disapora from the sixteenth century onwards on Western notions of history and culture, examining the role Bernal's claim has played in European and American understandings of history, and in classical, European, American and Caribbean literary production. African Athena examines the history of intellectuals and literary writers who contested the white, dominant Euro-American constructions of the classical past and its influence on the present. Martin Bernal has written an Afterword to this collection.

Table of Contents:
Introduction Daniel Orrells, Gurminder K. Bhambra, & Tessa Roynon.: Part I: Myths and Historiographies, Ancient and Modern 1: Maghan Keita: Believing in Ethiopians 2: Patrice Rankine: Black Apolloa Martin Bernal's The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization Volume III and Why Race Still Matters? 3: Partha Mitter: Greece, India and Race among the Victorians 4: Margaret Malamud: Black Minerva: Antiquity in antebellum African American history 5: Kenneth Goings & Eugene O Connor: Black Athena before Black Athena: The Teaching of Greek and Latin at Black Colleges and Universities 6: Robbie Shilliam: Ethiopia shall stretch forth her hands unto God: Garveyism, Rastafari and Antiquity 7: Anna Hartnell: Between Exodus and Egypt: Israel-Palestine and the break-up of the Black-Jewish Alliance 8: Toby Green: Beyond Culture Wars: Reconnecting African and Jewish Diasporas in the Past and the Present 9: Stephen Howe: Egyptian Athena, African Egypt, Egyptian Africa: Martin Bernal and Contemporary African Historical Thought 10: Robert J. C. Young: The After-lives of Black Athena Part II: Classical Diaspora / Diasporic Classics 11: V. Y. Mudimbe: In the House of Libya: A Meditation 12: Tim Whitmarsh: Hellenism, nationalism, hybridity: the invention of the novel 13: Paolo Asso: The Idea of Africa in Lucan 14: John H. Starks, Jr.: Was Black Beautiful in Vandal Africa? 15: J. Mira Seo: Identifying Authority: Juan Latino, an African Ex-Slave, Professor and Poet in Sixteenth-Century Granada 16: John Gilmore: John Barclay's Camella Poems: Ideas of Race, Beauty and Ugliness in Renaissance Latin Verse 17: Brian H. Murray: 'Lay in Egypt's lap each borrowed crown': Gerald Massey and Late-Victorian Afrocentrism 18: John Thieme: 'Not equatorial black, not Mediterranean white': Denis Williams Other Leopards 19: Astrid Van Weyenberg: Wole Soyinka's Yoruba Tragedy: Performing Politics 20: Edith Hall and Justine McConnell: Mythopoeia in the Struggle against Slavery, Racism, and Exclusive Afrocentrism 21: Emily Greenwood: Dislocating Black Classicism: Classics and the Black Diaspora in the Poetry of Aimé Césaire and Kamau Brathwaite 22: Tessa Roynon: The Africanness of Classicism in the Work of Toni Morrison Afterword Martin Bernal: Conclusion Daniel Orrells, Gurminder Bhambra, & Tessa Roynon: