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 director of the Folger Institute 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 third meeting of this year’s seminar group occurred on Tuesday December 12, and featured Andrea Myers Achi’s combined edited collection and exhibition catalogue Africa & Byzantium (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2023).
Dr. Andrea Myers Achi is the Mary and Michael Jaharis Associate Curator of Byzantine Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. In addition to the Africa & Byzantium exhibit (2023), she has also directed Arts and Peoples of the Kharga Oasis in 2017, Crossroads: Power and Piety in 2020, and The Good Life: Collecting Late Antique Art at the Met in 2021. Her current exhibition projects are focused on Egyptian monasteries, Byzantine art in Africa, and material culture in late Antiquity.
The discussion was facilitated by Dr. Roland Betancourt, Professor of Art History at University of California, Irvine.
Why are we reading this?
Between November 2023 and March 2024, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City held an exhibition titled Africa & Byzantium, which brought together an incredible collection of artworks from all over the world—including many which had never been seen in public, let alone together—to highlight ‘the profound artistic contributions of North Africa, Egypt, Nubia, Ethiopia, and other powerful African kingdoms’ to the well-known artistic culture of the Byzantine Empire.
Much like Seeing Race Before Race (Newberry Library, 2023), which we read for this group last year, the book that emerged from the Africa & Byzantium exhibition is a combined essay collection and exhibition catalogue, interspersing detailed descriptions of artworks and material objects with chapters offering context, history, and theoretical framings.
We began with the introduction, by curator and editor Andrea Myers Achi, which laid out the exhibit’s structure, divided into three parts. The first, ‘From Carthage to Aksum: Africa in Late Antiquity’ introduced the kingdoms of Aksum and Nubia, putting them in the context of the Roman and Byzantine empires; the second, ‘Bright as the Sun: Africa After Byzantium’, focused on first the Orthodox Christian communities developing in Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia, and also on the influence of Islam from the seventh century onward. The final section, ‘Legacies: Black Byzantium’ juxtaposed materials from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries with modern meditations on the complicated imperial legacies at work in North and East Africa.
Sarah F. Derbew’s essay ‘Representations of Black People in Mediterranean Antiquity’ offers a deceptively simple intervention in terminology. First, she distinguishes between ‘Aithiopia’, which she describes as ‘an ancient region that maps onto modern Egypt and Sudan’ and uses interchangeably with Nubia, and Ethiopia, the ‘modern country located south of Egypt and East of Sudan’ (112). From there, she delves into the case study of a box from the Nubian capital of Meroë, which depicts two women in ivory with braided hair; she observes that calling them ‘“black” unhelpfully conflates modern and ancient perceptions of skin color’ and distinguishes between ‘black’ (lower-case) to refer to people in antiquity and ‘Black’ (uppercase) to refer to the modern day. However, she is very clear that there is no point of demarcation, that ‘in their quest to justify the violence they meted out to fellow humans, European enslavers generated socially constructed categories that assigned an abstract yet stringent chromatic valence to an objective color’ (113).
Vince L. Bantu’s chapter, ‘Bright as the Sun: Religions, Translations, and Circulation in Post-Byzantine Africa’, delves into the complex interrelationships between the many Christian and Islamic kingdoms that developed across north, central, and eastern Africa. Especially when paired with “Ethiopia” and the World, which we read for our last session, this chapter offered a vibrant visual and material addition to the historical facts, with an emphasis on the cultural exchanges going on in the region.
Finally, Suzanne Conklin Akbari’s conclusion, “Imagined Futures, Imagined Pasts,” draws the exhibition and the collection to a close, observing that the book, like other catalogues, ‘seeks to lift the exhibition out of those specific conditions into a neutral environment, where the reader has a bird’s-eye view’ (296). That bird’s-eye view, however, is far from neutral. Akbari points out that ‘each object has its own layers of provenance, and the gathering together of objects—whether in the physical space of the gallery or the virtual space of the catalogue—is embedded in layers of history’ (296). It is only by not just acknowledging, but engaging with, and learning from, those many layers of history that we can make any claims to ethical scholarship.
Our discussion this week was comparatively brief, so I am going to close instead with a list of organizations working on the ground in conflict zones and urge readers to donate if possible.
Omna Tigray (based in the Tigray Valley)
Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders
Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund
Anera
Jewish Voice for Peace
Save the Children
Avaaz (based in Syria)
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