Race: Antiquity to U.S.

Catalog description

This course will examine cultural constructions of race, moving between the ancient Mediterranean to the modern United States. Together, we will explore literary and artistic evidence to understand how the Greeks and Romans conceptualized the world and the humans within it. As we will see, ancient thinkers found numerous ways to explain human variety, none of which correspond precisely to modern notions of race. Flowing forwards and backwards in time, we will investigate how the authors of America’s racial caste system pressed Greece and Rome into the service of contemporary power structures, reimagining them as ancestors of White America. Additionally, we will study Black Americans—enslaved and free—who have pushed against this reconstruction, reclaiming the ancient Mediterranean as their own.