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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.