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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 this book chapters explore the impact of the modern African diaspora 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. This book 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.

This book explores the history of medieval Nubia through the Old Nubian documentary archives excavated at Qasr Ibrim in southern Egypt. It focuses in particular on a single archive of land sales from the late twelfth century ad. It argues that the evidence from this archive alters our understanding of medieval Nubian society and economy. We should no longer see medieval Nubia as an isolated society with a primitive, demonetized economy. Nubian sales and accounts show wide levels of monetization. The accounts reveal gold-to-silver exchange rates in keeping with those of neighboring Egypt, thus tying Nubia’s economy to the wider Mediterranean. The documents from Qasr Ibrim also reveal medieval Nubia’s deep ties to Roman and Byzantine civilization. Old Nubian land sales have Greco-Roman Egyptian land sales as their historical basis. These land sales also suggest the existence of land purchase for investment by high-ranking officials who carried the expenses of the state, much like late antique landholders in Egypt. But the documents from Qasr Ibrim also reveal Nubian cultural practices along side this Roman cultural inheritance. In particular, we see evidence for public feasts as a widespread practice: Communal eating is a way for medieval Nubians to confirm the legitimacy of their legal transactions and their social hierarchies. Thus our records for medieval Nubia reveal a hybrid civilization with African and Byzantine characteristics.

This history foregrounds the most marginal sector of the Roman population—the provincial peasantry—to paint a picture of peasant society. Making use of detailed archaeological and textual evidence, the book examines the peasantry in relation to the upper classes in Christian North Africa, tracing that region's social and cultural history from Punic times to the eve of the Islamic conquest. The author demonstrates that during the period when Christianity was spreading to both city and countryside in North Africa, a convergence of economic interests narrowed the gap between the rustici and the urbani, creating a consumer revolution of sorts among the peasants. The book's postcolonial perspective points to the empowerment of North African peasants and gives voice to lower social classes across the Roman world.

This book studies the public life of an extraordinary Egyptian monk, Shenoute of Atripe, and the discourse on poverty that he put forward to promote and legitimize his active role in society. Shenoute was not only the abbot of a large monastic federation in southern Egypt but also a holy man with supraregional influence. His rise to public prominence is intimately linked to his energetic development of the care of the poor at his monastery. Many of the distinctive concerns of late antiquity—rural patronage, religious intolerance, the role of the state, gift giving—can be traced in his writings, but they are consistently articulated in terms of the care of the poor. Shenoute attacks paganism—in word and deed—not only because it is pagan but also because it oppresses the poor. His tirades denounce rural patronage as a form of exploitation, but only when practiced by rival patrons. He validates the astonishing wealth of his monastery by claiming it derives from “blessings” sent by God—not by the pious laity—on behalf of the poor. And he justifies the controversial political involvement of an abbot by acting as the spokesman of the poor, a truth-teller who does not fear power.