African Athena: Discussions Surrounding Martin Bernal's Black Athena

Abstract

This thesis will explore the various ways in which Martin Bernal's peers received the first two volumes of his four-volume series, Black Athena. In Black Athena, Bernal questions the extent to which 19th-century and 20th-century historiographers not only ignored, but also intentionally excluded any allusion to or evidence of Afroasiatic influence or origin of Greek Classical Civilization as a result of racism. The responses to Bernal's Black Athena, specifically the responses to the first two volumes, has turned into what is often referred to as the Black Athena Controversy, as the arguments put forth by Bernal ignited both responses which exclude Bernal from discussion, as well as responses which engage with and include Bernal in discussion. This thesis will explore the scholarship relevant to the Black Athena Controversy, namely by those who have responded to Bernal and those who have written on the subject before Bernal, his predecessors. Bernal's questioning of 19th-century and 20th-century historiographers undoubtedly leads to a more contemporary question which will be addressed in this thesis: Why were Bernal's theories in the 1980s and 1990s so harshly dismissed in what seems to be a non-academic and exclusionary manner? The narrative created by scholars in the Black Athena Controversy is utilized in this thesis to explore such a question.