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 (Cornell University) 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 Hamilton
College spoke about the racial politics involved in translating Latin literature. Our fifth keynote
speaker, Professor Valentin Mudimbe (Duke University), 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 York University), 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.