Racialized Commodities

For those interested in the history of race linked to perceived skin color, this book will be both a revelation and a resource. Drawing especially on histories of trade, the author charts the way the Greeks came to see and associate black skin with prestige and power and, later, the way a certain image of 'whiteness' formed to sanction chattel slavery, particularly in democratic Athens.

Auteur
Christopher Stedman Parmenter is Assistant Professor of Classics at The Ohio State University.

Texte du rabat

Racialized Commodities traces how Greece's "racial imaginary"--a confluence of thinking about cultural geography, commodity production, and human physiognomy--emerged from cross-cultural trade between Greece and its Mediterranean neighbors during the Archaic and Classical Periods.

Résumé
Between c. 700-300 BCE, the ancient Greeks developed a vivid imaginary of the world's peoples. Ranging from the light-skinned, "gray-eyed Thracians" of the distant north to the "dark-skinned Ethiopians" of the far south, as the poet Xenophanes described them around 540 BCE, Greeks envisioned a world populated by human groups with distinct physiognomies. Racialized Commodities traces how Greece's "racial imaginary"--a confluence of thinking about cultural geography, commodity production, and human physiognomy--emerged from cross-cultural trade between Greece and its Mediterranean neighbors during the Archaic and Classical Periods. It adopts the model of a "commodity biography" to investigate how trade led to the entanglement of cultures, bodies, and things in Archaic and Classical Greece. For merchants, the racial imaginary might be used to play up the "exotic" provenance of their goods to consumers. It might also circulate practical information about customs, pricing, navigation, and doing business in foreign ports. Archaic Greek attempts to explain foreign bodies were rarely pejorative, and Racialized Commodities begins with some of their earliest images of African peoples, described by Greeks as Egyptians or Ethiopians, before seeking to explain what changed in the early Classical Period. As the Persian Empire loomed and Greek cities became increasingly dependent on enslaved labor, negative stereotypes of Thracians and Scythians became widespread and coalesced into the charged idea of the barbarous--the "barbarian."