Race B4 Race 2024 Seminar 2: What We’re Reading and Why

See previous installments in this series here.

The RaceB4Race Mentorship Network began its work in 2022, intended to ‘offer new scholars support as they develop the research that will drive the academic conversation forward’. This Mellon-funded initiative spearheaded by Folger Institute director Dr. Patricia Akhimie not only includes individual mentorship opportunities, but also ‘a semester-long virtual reading/research group, meeting monthly to connect participants with a larger network of premodern critical race scholars.’

What are we reading?

The second meeting of this year’s seminar group occurred on Friday October 18, and featured Yonatan Binyam and Verena Krebs’ co-authored Cambridge Element, titled “Ethiopia” and the World, 330-1500 CE (Cambridge, 2024).

Yonatan Binyam is Assistant Professor of Ancient Mediterranean and Ethiopic Studies at UC Berkeley, under the umbrella of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures. Prior to his current position, he held a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, and completed his doctorate in 2017 at Florida State University. His research concerns the reception of ancient Greek and Latin works in medieval Ethiopia, particularly Josephus’ Jewish War and its many offshoots, and he is developing a second book project dealing with the question of antisemitism in antiquity in view of recent work in premodern critical race studies.

Verena Krebs is an award-winning historian and author of Medieval Ethiopian Kingship, Craft, and Diplomacy with Latin Europe (Palgrave, 2021). She holds a fixed-term professorship at Ruhr-University Bochum in Germany and co-directs the Bochum Centre for Mediterranean Studies. She obtained a bi-national PhD from both the University of Konstanz in Germany and the University of Mekelle in Ethiopia in 2014, and her research over the past decade has focused on the late medieval Solomonic kingdom of Ethiopia and its connections to the wider Mediterranean region. In 2022, she was selected for the Dan David Prize for her book on medieval Ethiopian kingship.

Why are we reading this?

This book does what might be seen as impossible: provides a comprehensive introduction to, essentially, the Horn of Africa across a period of roughly 1200 years in the space of less than 40,000 words. For that feat alone, its authors deserve to be applauded.

But what “Ethiopia” and the World also demonstrates across those 40,000 words is a depth of understanding, expertise, and care that should be more common in academia, and hopefully will be in the future. Dr. Binyam is an expert in the region during what Europeanists consider the antique and late antique periods, while Dr. Krebs specializes in the Solomonic kingdom of the medieval and early modern eras. Both authors emphasized the importance of consulting and amplifying scholars working in Ethiopia and Eritrea, and their commitment to making their work as widely accessible as possible. Although much scholarship produced in Ethiopia is actually written in English, scholars working on the region in European universities—due to employment requirements—often publish in French or Italian, thus rendering their work inaccessible to the people in the very region they are writing about. It is a common problem across academia, one rooted in the oppressive systems of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonialism that haunt us to this day, but “Ethiopia” and the World offers an excellent example of how to navigate these systems in a compassionate and ethical way.

For instance, as the authors make clear, many modern assumptions about medieval Ethiopia emerged during the Second Italo-Ethiopian War under Benito Mussolini, and were promoted specifically to support the idea that Italy had some kind of ancestral Christian claim to the region. Binyan and Krebs debunk these claims, calling attention to the heterogeneous nature of the communities living in northeastern Africa, often side by side, engaging in diplomatic, trade, and cultural interactions. Muslim and Christian polities alike, as well as groups focused on local religions, forged relationships over time with the Byzantine Empire, pre-Islamic and early Islamic groups in the Arabian peninsula, cities on the western coast of India, the Fatimid Caliphate in Egypt, and medieval European Christian monarchies, along with their own more immediate neighbors. Indeed, as both Dr. Binyan and Dr. Krebs reminded us multiple times, during the more than thousand-year span covered by the book, the horn of Africa could well be seen as the centre of the mercantile world, with access to the Red Sea, the Nile River, and the Indian Ocean.

Drs. Binyan and Krebs have also called attention to the ongoing civil conflict in the Tigray region, which has at this point claimed hundreds of thousands of civilian lives, but has had minimal coverage in the western media. Below are links to charitable organizations working there, and in conflict zones across the world.

Omna Tigray
Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders
Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund
Anera
Jewish Voice for Peace
Save the Children

While I will not be going into the particulars of the discussion, in order to preserve the seminar space as a safe and private one, below is a list of scholarship that came up at different points during the discussion.

Yonatan Binyam, ‘Anti-Judaism versus anti-Semitism: The racialization of Jews in late antiquity’, Literature Compass 20.4-6 (2023), https://doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12698.

Tales Things Tell: Material Histories of Early Globalisms, ed. Finbarr Barry Flood and Beate Fricke (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023).

Verena Krebs, Medieval Ethiopian Kingship, Craft, and Diplomacy with Latin Europe (New York: Palgrave, 2021).

———, ‘Fancy Names and Fake News. Notes on the Conflation of Solomonic Ethiopian Rulership with the Myth of Prester John in the late Medieval Latin Christian diplomatic correspondence,’ Orbis Aethiopicus XVII, ed. Walter Raunig and Asfa-Wossen Asserate (H.J. Röll Verlag, 2020-21), 89-121.

Ali A. Olomi, ‘Red Sea Wars & Pre-Islamic Arabia’, Episode 2 of Head On History Podcast, 5 June 2017.

Don Wyatt, Slavery in East Asia (Cambridge, 2022).