Chapter 2 - Masks of Blackness

Summary

Chapter 2 offers a visual paradigm for representations of black people in the ancient Greek world. It considers fifth-century BCE janiform cups that depict black and brown faces on opposite sides. Contemporary ideas are all the more pronounced when dealing with visual constructs of skin color in Greek antiquity and therefore require continual interrogation. Disputing the uncomfortable ease with which some art historians presume a fixed connection between black people and bumbling inferiority, this chapter argues that the black face serves as part of a repertoire of sympotic performance. Similar to masks, janiform cups enable drinkers in the symposium to adopt new identities. The discourse about the chromatics on janiform cups leads to a broader examination of black skin in ancient Greek art. Close scrutiny of museum displays reveals the temporal clash that can occur when audiences encounter iconography of black people in Greek antiquity. In particular, scrupulous inspection of the British Museum unearths a troubling tendency to privilege ancient Egypt as an indication of legitimacy and legibility, contrasted with Nubia.

In fifth-century BCE Athens, the symposium provided a convivial space for various polis inhabitants, including poor Athenian men, metics, and perhaps women, to indulge in boisterous activities.¹ More than a homogeneous drinking party, the symposium was a pseudo-microcosm of the polis that reflected its heterogeneity.² Public performance, an integral part of the city, found its counterpart in the private world of the symposium. Within this world, guests played games and professed their erotic desires, sometimes at the same time. For instance, kottabos, ostensibly a game of skill that measured how accurately a drunk person could fling wine from a vessel onto a specific target, offered symposiasts a way to profess their love for someone in whose name they dedicated their throw. Participants engaged in these lively pursuits, all the while consuming copious amounts of wine from a variety of cups. Among these cups, revelers came face to face with various characters depicted on their drinkware, including janiform³ (two-faced) drinking cups which fused brown and black faces together. In addition to functioning as vessels from which drinkers could imbibe alcohol, these cups allowed symposiasts to try on different faces within the privacy of their party. Through their use of cups, carousers came into close contact with brown faces, black faces, gods, and satyrs. The physiological effects of the wine within the janiform cups further blurred the sharp distinctions between the drinker and the life-like faces in his or her midst.

Millennia after their production, many of these janiform cups are now housed in American and European museums. Curators have struggled to extricate a suitable label for these objects, sometimes opting to delineate one face of the cup as “White” and “beautiful,” and the other as “Negroid” and “humorous.” The tendency among Classicists and art historians to slip between the categories of (ancient) black people and (modern) Black people further exacerbates these imprecisions.⁴ More broadly, the whitening of ancient Greek bodies has created a pervasive hierarchy that relegates black bodies to its lowest rungs. Moving towards a balanced treatment of blackness, in this chapter I offer a reparative account of the iconography of black people on Attic pottery, in particular fifth-century BCE janiform drinking cups used in symposia. Visual representations of black people on Attic janiform cups invite viewers to the stage of the symposium, a site where performances of blackness occurred.

At the beginning of this chapter, I probe the scholarly inclination to apply modern categories to Attic janiform cups. Namely, my proposed nomenclature for janiform cups, brown and black faces, resists contemporary attempts to divorce these cups from their historical context. Next, I investigate janiform cups in their current location: museums. Various museums become performance spaces where ancient iconography meets contemporary reception. Both the objects themselves and paratextual details, such as their captions, contribute to the entanglement of (ancient) blackness and (modern) Blackness in the twenty-first century. As part of this inquiry, I examine the British Museum’s display of objects from Nubia, a historical region associated with black people. I close the chapter with a look at recent museum exhibits and exhibitions that reinforce the importance of critical curation, particularly when displaying the iconography of historically overlooked groups.⁵

2.1 Seeing Brown and Black Faces

Twenty-five centuries after its production, a two-handled janiform drinking cup that might have been used in a convivial symposium sits in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (MFA, Figure 2.1a–c). It affords numerous observations, not the least of which is its name: kantharos.⁶ I refer to this object as a “cup,” rather than kantharos, because “cup” prioritizes its function in the symposium. Furthermore, “cup” transports the object out of the museum, out of the sole purview of art historians, and away from the limitations imposed by disciplinary boundaries. The museum’s label of this cup reads: “high-handled kantharos in the form of two heads.” From bottom to top, the cup features a short base and a stylized body shaped to resemble two conjoined faces gazing in opposite directions. Loose curls peeking out of a black headband (sakkos) frame the face on one side, and tight curls sit atop the other. The delicate eyebrows and lack of facial hair on both faces suggest that they represent women. Greek text runs along the rim of the cup (ΚΑΛΟΣ Ο ΠΑΙΣ, Ο ΠΑΙΣ ΚΑΛΟΣ, “attractive is this boy, this boy is attractive”), and a neat arrangement of palm fronds appears on the neck’s central section. A pair of handles is fused onto the sides of the cup: the handle bases are located directly above the ears on both of the faces, and the upper ends of the handles are fused with the palmettes. Finally, geometric square designs decorate the lip of the cup.

Figure 2.1a–c High-handled kantharos in the form of two heads, Attic black-figure ceramic, attributed to the London Class, c. 510–480 BCE. H. 19.2 cm, 98.926.

© Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Over time, presumptions about skin color have bled into scholarly commentary about this janiform cup. Popular labels for the left-hand side of Figure 2.1c include: “white,” “White,” and “Greek.” A proponent of the term “white,” Frank Snowden, Jr. defends his preference: “It is likely that many Greeks referred to the blacks of these [janiform] vases as melanes and the white as leukoi, a terminology that would have been a natural development of the dramatic contrast between the black glaze and white paint, as well as a logical extension of the melas–leukos antithesis of the environment theory.”⁷ Upon closer inspection, Snowden’s melas–leukos (“black–white”) model falls apart. Barring the sclerae of both sets of eyes and the teeth of the right-hand face, the color “white” does not account for the visual composition of the cup at all. Even more, the term leukos (“white”) is not an adequate signifier of skin color for all depictions of Greek people.⁸ Greek iconographic tradition attributes white skin to Greek women and girls, not Greek men, and environmental treatises pair Scythians and white skin (Aer. 20). Snowden’s conflation of the visual experience of seeing the color “white” and the constructed categorization of people as “White” (uppercase) ignores the historically specific context of the latter term.⁹ The Black–White binary does not have an ancient visual referent. “White,” an imprecise label that folds the amorphous category of “Greeks” into a contemporary group made up of a range of skin colors, reflects modernity’s fixation on artificial categories. From the fifteenth century onward, careful policing of the parameters of “Whiteness” has enabled a subjective category to gain currency. Expanding this language of economics, Harryette Mullen compares Whiteness to legal tender.¹⁰ Within Mullen’s model, Whiteness operates as a transactional category in which power is doled out to select individuals. Its historical roots date back to the advent of the transatlantic slave trade, during which people formulated imbalanced equations of power that resulted in the supremacy of Whiteness. Due to this relatively recent timeline of calculated “Whiteness,” it remains an ill-suited term to apply to ancient Greek iconography. Another popular label, “Greek,” may initially seem promising because it coincides with an ancient group of people. Even with the temporal relevance of “Greek,” this designation suggests a singular, fixed phenotype associated with “Greek” people that does not address the contested nature of this term.¹¹

My proposed label for the face on the left-hand side of Figure 2.1c, “brown face,” resists anachronistic presuppositions. Closely related to its material referent “clay-colored,” “brown” subsumes different shades of color (i.e. light brown and dark brown) into one category. Although the lowercase “brown” loosely overlaps with “Brown,” a modern social categorization used to describe people of South Asian descent among others, the lowercase term focuses on color while also alluding to metamorphoses of chromatically inflected language.¹² In other words, the emphasis on the visual composition of “brown” sidesteps the warped mutations of “white.” I use the second word of this description, “face,” to acknowledge the anthropomorphic imagery on the cup. “Face” refers to the two-dimensional subject of my investigation, the frontal area that spans from the forehead to the chin, whereas a term like “head” encompasses the three-dimensional body part above the neck. Taken together, “brown face” resists the impulse to consider the left-hand side of the cup as historical evidence of a particular group’s phenotype. Instead, this designation highlights the limited color palette in the artist’s workshop. More broadly, this nomenclature pushes back against a project of erasure that has overlooked what is immediately visible for the sake of mapping contemporary binaries onto ancient Greek iconography.¹³

Descriptions of the color associated with the cup’s right-hand face (Figure 2.1c) oscillate between “African,” “black-glazed,” and “Black.”¹⁴ Again, these terms include a neutral color marker and a highly polemic label. The first proposed label, “African,” is unsuitable because it has no clear assignation in the fifth century BCE. Even still, the geographical prominence of one region ignores black people’s literary presence in Greece (Chapter 5), India (chapters 4 and 6), and Colchis (Hdt. 2.104; Pyth. 4.212). The technical term “black-glazed” reflects the manipulation of oxygen during the cup’s firing process. Potentially appealing because of its focus on color and material composition, “black-glazed” nonetheless lacks the ideological heft needed to confront the onslaught of modern bigotry associated with this color. The next label, “Black,” promotes an anachronistic understanding of skin color in Greek antiquity. Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields help to (re)visit this vocabulary with their coinage of “racecraft,” the mode of thought that consists of the unseen and vivid, the imagined and real, what Fields and Fields deem “invisible ontologies.”¹⁵ This framework applies to the application of “Black” to this cup’s right-hand face, in that racecraft immediately summons the modern hierarchy of skin color when examining the deep past.

The term I offer for the right side of the cup, “black face,” aims to bring together the world of color and that of people (who have faces), thereby humanizing representations of black people in Greek antiquity. My orthographic practice, using lowercase “b” and a single space between “black” and “face,” aims to distinguish “black face” from nineteenth-century minstrelsy. Although it is naïve to imagine that “black face,” paired with this face’s full lips and broad nose, does not evoke comparison with “Blackface,” a term used to describe nineteenth- and twentieth-century White minstrel actors, there can be meaningful dialogue between the two terms. Despite their wildly different historical settings, both exist within the world of performance: Blackface actors in front of theatrical audiences, and black faces on janiform cups before an eager group of symposiasts. In addition, both introduce their audiences to a diverse array of characters in a jovial atmosphere.¹⁶

Scholarship about janiform cups of the fifth century BCE benefits from a continual push against an oversimplistic Black–White model of skin color. The notion that Black people are a “prototypical minority group” against which all non-Black minority groups are weighed is irrelevant to any interpretation of these cups. Emily Greenwood cautions against the dangers of adopting a modern hierarchy: “The conjoined head vases speak to the desire on the part of many modern scholars, from the civil-rights era and the era of decolonization onwards, to realign and to level the social and political hierarchies that existed between raced bodies.”¹⁷ Contemporary ideas are all the more pronounced when dealing with visual constructs of skin color in Greek antiquity and therefore require constant interrogation. The scholarly tendency to slip between time periods creates an inaccurate and potentially damaging picture of Greek antiquity. For example, in J. D. Beazley’s discussion of “negro heads” of extant janiform Attic cups, he explains that a black face on a single-handled cup wears an expression “of one born to serve, and to suffer confusedly: a drudge.”¹⁸ This linkage of skin color and abject subservience reflects perspectives that dominate Beazley’s historical context, not that of the cup. More than eighty years later, Beth Cohen echoes Beazley’s sentiments. In her appraisal of iconography of black people carrying large birds on fifth-century Attic cups, she concludes that these representations would have been amusing. There is an uncomfortable ease with which Cohen assumes a fixed association between black people and bumbling inferiority. To be sure, there are depictions of enslaved black people in ancient Greek art, and there is a correlation between small stature and humble status.¹⁹ Cohen’s assured reading, however, exceeds the speculative basis of her observation.²⁰ Her cited evidence does not adequately substantiate her argument, in that she bases her argument on uncritical scholarly remarks.²¹ Her commentary ignores ancient Greek iconography depicting black people in numerous roles as soldiers, followers of Isaic and Bacchic rituals, and musicians.²² Lopsided readings like Beazley’s and Cohen’s stand to gain from contextualized evaluations of visual representations in Greek antiquity. In this vein, I offer this reading to replace infiltrations of contemporary color dynamics with historically informed analyses of iconography of black people in Greek antiquity.²³ Although gender coding by skin color was pervasive on Attic pottery, Greek women depicted with white skin and their male counterparts with black skin, janiform cups depicting faces of different colors were more than supplemental illustrations of subjugation.²⁴ A careful inspection of these cups within their specific contexts offers alternative ways to read these brown and black faces.

2.2 Facing Blackness in the Symposium

When people gathered for social activities and entertainment in the symposium, they utilized a variety of decorated pottery to aid with their consumption of wine: a mixing bowl (kratēr) to mix the wine with water in order to ensure its potency was not overwhelming, a wine cooler (psyktēr) to keep the beverage at the appropriate temperature, and a variety of drinking cups. Of the approximately ninety-five extant head-shaped cups, seventy-five are janiform (see Table 2.1).²⁵

Table 2.1 Distribution of janiform cups

	brown face (female)	black face27	satyr
satyr	23	1	-
brown face (female)	21	11	-
Hercules	13	2	2
Dionysus	1	-	1

The process of making these janiform cups began with the preparation of the clay. Attic clay, rich in iron (which contributed to its reddish-brown color), came from nearby clay pits. In order to purify the clay, workers used the pits as settling basins in which they mixed the excavated clay with water. This allowed the impurities, such as sand and small stones, to fall to the bottom. After skimming the top layer and pouring it into a new basin of water, and repeating the process numerous times, workers left the mixture untouched in order to allow some of the water to evaporate. Damp blocks of clay were later mixed with older clay, then partially dried before use. Once the clay was malleable, the shaping process consisted of three steps: forming the object, decorating it, and firing it.²⁶ First, the potter shaped a piece of clay on a wooden wheel to form the cup’s body and molded another piece of clay to form the foot. To make the faces and handles, the potter pressed clay into a hand-shaped terracotta mold and shaped the handles by hand. The potter then used slip (a mixture of clay and water) to attach the cup’s various components. During the decoration process, the shaped clay was painted with additional slip. If the painter chose to give the faces curly hair, this procedure included pressing clay dots into the surface of the cup and coating the dots with slip as well.²⁸ Following this step, the kiln master carefully fired the cup, oscillating between preventing air from entering the kiln and allowing it to enter. Upon removal from the kiln, the oxygen-rich parts of the cup had a matte finish and the oxygen-poor parts a black-glazed finish. It is worth stating that this glossy black exterior differs from “black face,” a term I use to denote the iconography of people with black skin, a broad nose, and full lips on janiform cups. The former focuses solely on material composition, and the latter relies on a combination of chromatic and phenotypic features.

In addition to symposiastic ware, ongoing intersections between the iconography of black people and performance exist throughout antiquity.²⁹ Four examples elucidate the numerous stagings of blackness among artists who predate and postdate fifth-century potters.³⁰ First, a wall painting in the palace of Knossos includes one of the earliest visualizations of black people in the Mediterranean. A twentieth-century reconstruction of this palace, which flourished between 1700 BCE and 1400 BCE, features the “Captain of the Blacks” fresco of three figures in flight. From left to right, three men run in close succession towards the right side of the frame. They are almost identical, except for skin color and height: the two men in the rear have black skin, as is visible in the legs of both figures and the head of one, and are taller than the leader of the trio, who has brown skin. Barring a piece of fabric around their waists and two bands around each of their ankles, they are all naked. The shorter man leading the group holds two long, narrow objects in his right hand, and he wears a feather in his hair. Arthur Evans, the lead excavator at this site, concluded that the fresco portrayed a Minoan commander leading Nubian soldiers to fight against Greece.³¹ Viewers gazing at the fresco would presumably marvel at the men’s shared performance of military might.

Approximately seven centuries later, on a relief carved onto the eastern staircase in the Apadana (palace hall) of Persepolis, three short men march behind a man who dwarfs them. From right to left, the tall man bears a staff in his left hand and holds his right hand behind him, the first diminutive figure holds the hand of the lofty man in front of him, the second one holds a cylindrical jar, and the third wields a curved object that resembles an elephant tusk in his left hand and the leash of an okapi that trails the group in his right. Alongside other political imagery in the Apadana, this relief is a visual microcosm of Persian imperial might. In other words, it enacts a performance of Persian domination.³² Eric Schmidt understands the gifts in this scene – an okapi, an elephant tusk, and a vessel presumably filled with gold – as proof that the three figures are Aithiopians bringing tribute to the Persian ruler. In its current state, this relief does not retain traces of color. Therefore, Schmidt relies on the figures’ gifts, curly hair, and what he deems to be “Negroid features” to support his claim.³³ While the animal imagery and hairstyle of the iconography suggest affiliation with Aithiopians, people whose skin color is frequently associated with blackness, it is unclear what undergirds Schmidt’s assertion of the figures’ “Negroid features.” Schmidt perhaps bases this label on their rounded noses and their prominent chins, but their physical appearance does not differ greatly from the figure identified as Persian on this relief. Even so, if both Evans’s and Schmidt’s identifications are correct, the fresco and relief endorse the Minoans’ and Persians’ empire-building initiatives. As these superpowers co-opt their warrior neighbors into the world of political performance, the skin color and portable items in the “Captain of the Blacks” fresco and the Apadana relief, respectively, translate into costumes that help viewers identify the figures.

Three-dimensional depictions are another part of the iconographic tradition of performances of blackness. Horn-shaped cups (rhyta) depicting a black person engulfed in the jaws of a crocodile enhance the performative atmosphere of the symposium.³⁴ As revelers drink wine from these cups, they bring animals onto the lively stage of the symposium. The horn-shaped cups grant them a sense of security, allowing them to witness black people trying to escape the clutches of reptiles without putting themselves in danger. In fact, the sight of the violent fate of the black figures on the horn-shaped cups perhaps encourages drinkers to curb their drinking habits to avoid drowning in wine. Alternatively, a travel warning may lurk behind this iconography: any reveler who intends to travel across the Mediterranean may find him or herself caught in the mouth of a hungry crocodile whose appetite has been whetted by human flesh.

An implicit call for restraint among wine-guzzling symposiasts also appears on scenes painted onto wide-mouthed cups (skyphoi) from the sanctuary of the Kabeiroi in Thebes (Boeotia). At this site, five of these cups recall a memorable scene from the Odyssey, in which the nymph Circe coaxes Odysseus to drink a potion that will transform him into a pig (10.302–47).³⁵ On one of these late fifth-/early fourth-century cups, both Circe and Odysseus are depicted as squat, black figures (Figure 2.2). Barring some fabric draped over his left arm and his brimmed hat, Odysseus is completely naked. His erect penis, pronounced nipples, and potbelly are on full display. Holding a sword in his right hand and its sheath in his left, he seems poised to attack Circe. Unlike her nude houseguest, the curly haired Circe wears a chitōn-like dress. Abandoning the loom behind her, she holds a wide-mouthed cup in her left hand and a stick with which she mixes a potion in her right. Even though Odysseus shares Circe’s skin tone and phenotypic features, Kirsten Bedigan construes Circe as a “Negro[,] an object of derision” and Odysseus as a symbol of Greek superiority.³⁶ Bedigan’s conclusion ignores the unusual portrayal of Odysseus as a chubby and lustful houseguest, and it also disregards the heady combination of wine and magic at Circe’s disposal. Circe’s modest appearance disguises the power with which she transforms Odysseus’s men into utterly helpless creatures, thereby taking on the role of omniscient director who supervises an unfolding drama. The contrast between her unassuming looks and her cunning talents mirrors the deceptively powerful role of wine in the symposium.³⁷ In the event that revelers underestimate this seemingly innocuous drink, the depiction of Circe on these wide-mouthed cups gently cautions drunken symposiasts to pace themselves, lest they risk transgressing acceptable limits of intoxication and ending up in dire straits like Odysseus’s men-turned-pigs.³⁸

Figure 2.2 Skyphos depicting Odysseus at sea and with Circe, Boeotian black-figure ceramic, attributed to the Cabirion Group, c. fourth century BCE. H. 15.4 cm, AN1896–1908 G249.

© Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.

As was the case for the four visual renditions of black people discussed above, janiform cups do not require the physical edifice of a theater to be part of a performance. In their own right, they wield transformative power. A drinker reaching for a two-handled janiform cup encounters a pair of eyes looking back at him or her. This direct gaze casts the drinker in the role of an audience member who watches the face on the cup. As the drinker brings the cup to his or her mouth, the face-as-actor becomes less and less visible. By the time the drinker’s lips touch the rim of the cup, the drinker is rendered mute and blind, his or her throat filled with wine and his or her gaze obscured by the interior of the cup. At this moment of physical contact between the drinker and the mask-like face, the interactive performance is underway. Although most cups do not indicate whether there was a preferred way in which the drinker should hold them, one janiform cup currently held in the collection at the Fitzwilliam Museum at the University of Cambridge provides some clues. Labeled “janiform kantharos belonging to the Class G of the head vases,” this cup features two female faces: the black face is wearing a fitted headdress and her slightly open mouth reveals her teeth, and the brown face wears a headband from underneath which her loose curls escape (Figure 2.3a–c).³⁹ This cup has a slight indent on the lip directly above the black face (Figure 2.3a), which suggests that the drinker turned the black face of the cup towards himself or herself and the other guests observed the brown face. In this way, the black face of this cup morphs into a mask for the drinker. The metamorphosis extends to the symposium, which is recast as a stage on which the drinker’s companions turn into the drinker’s audience.⁴⁰ Emboldened by liquid courage, the symposiasts enter a world of alcohol-induced mirth and performance.

Figure 2.3a–c Janiform kantharos belonging to Class G of head vases, Attic red-figure ceramic, attributed to the London Class, c. 470 BCE. H. 20 cm, GR.2.1999.

© Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge.

Close scrutiny of another janiform cup foregrounds the realm of performance in which these cups existed. One cup currently in the Princeton University Art Museum’s collection (Figure 2.4a–c), labeled as “janiform kantharos with addorsed heads of a male African and a female Greek,” presents two female faces. A curly haired black face with full lips and a broad nose appears on the left-hand side, and a headband-wearing brown face with thin lips and a narrow nose on the right (Figure 2.4c). The fused clay, most apparent at the neck of the cup, draws attention to the inexorable connection between the two faces. On the whole, the cup invites multiple versions of difference, in that viewers may understand the two faces as opposing or complementary. In my effort to redress the scholarly tendency to elide difference and inferiority, I regard these two faces as complementary masks. They reinforce the jocular atmosphere, in that they invite many performers to the party. Moreover, the interconnected faces circumvent cultural chauvinism. As a unit, the two faces embody an intertwined performance in which the symposiasts partake.⁴¹ Separately, each face resembles an actor performing for an audience of symposiasts. When the drinker lifts the cup, he or she subsumes this role of actor. The depiction of two faces fused onto one janiform cup simultaneously provokes and cuts across any permanent hierarchy of color that viewers may be tempted to map onto Greek antiquity. Skin color works in tandem with other visual markers to serve as a mask for symposiasts. In the minds of modern viewers who are not aware of the ways that cultural conditioning can infiltrate their perspective, there may appear to be an imbalanced presentation of the different faces on these cups. The sharp lines that distinguish each face from the other may mislead them to perceive the cup as a vivid antecedent of nineteenth-century Jim Crow laws. In spite of this problematic shorthand, there is no simple Black–White binary at work here. To be sure, color was part of a larger apparatus of distinction on Attic pottery, but its valence was not perpetually fixed. Instead, the faces on these cups represent semiotic markers of the diversity and flexibility at play in symposiastic performances.

Figure 2.4a–c Janiform kantharos with addorsed heads of a male African and a female Greek, Attic red-figure ceramic, attributed to the Princeton Class, c. 480–470 BCE. H. 14.9 cm, 33.45 (y1933–45).

© Princeton University Art Museum/Art Resource, NY.

2.3 Interrogating Claims of Beauty and Humor

It is curious that none of the documented janiform cups, with the exception of Figure 2.5a–c, discussed below, features a brown male face on either side of the cup. Jeremy Tanner argues that the brown male face, a visual representation of a “Greek man,” stands in contrast to different modes of alterity present on these cups.⁴² This merging of many groups into a “not Greek male” category requires probing. There is little evidence to support Tanner’s claim that Greek people, a contested grouping in and of itself, have a specific phenotype or that all non-Greeks shared enough similarities to warrant their grouping in the symposium. Furthermore, Tanner’s desire to extrapolate historical fact from Attic pottery undermines the flexible nature of performance in the symposium. In line with Tanner’s treatment of the cups’ faces as historical relics, François Lissarrague states that the brown faces reflect Greek women’s position as wine pourers at the symposium, and the black faces represent servants at the symposium. Here, Lissarrague does not reflect on the conjectural nature of his assessment. The twin assumptions that the iconography of black people always depicts subjugation and that this visual iconography consistently corresponds to historical evidence misrepresent the evidence at hand.⁴³ If such misconstrued conclusions remain unchallenged, it is all too easy to translate a subjective stance into an unalterable fact. Even still, the inaccurate notion that the conflation of inferiority and skin color has a historical antecedent could easily morph into a justification of bigotry. Conversely, Claude Bérard proposes to render both faces on janiform cups with a brown and a black face as a shared site of unmarked and exotic beauty.⁴⁴ Based on his exploration of a wine jar (amphora) depicting Memnon receiving battle equipment from his black squires and a rotund wine jar (pelikē) portraying Andromeda flanked by black servants, Bérard deduces that skin color is a malleable tool that localizes people to Aithiopia.⁴⁵ While Bérard’s use of these cups as evidence regarding people’s beauty standards or geographic specificity is speculative, his scrutiny of each face of the cup in its own context offers a refreshing alternative to the conclusions posed by Tanner and Lissarrague.

Figures 2.5a–c Kantharos with the heads of a young woman and a negro from Akanthos, Attic red-figure ceramic, c. 480–470 BCE. H. 18.6 cm. Archaeological Museum of Polygyros, I.D.Y. 8.

© Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports, Ephorate of Antiquities of Chalcidice and Mount Athos.

The need for even-handed coverage extends to inscriptions on janiform cups. Various types of inscriptions appear on Attic cups: signatures of artists, captions that identify figures, dedications, and acclamations.⁴⁶ Kalos inscriptions are found on roughly 1,000 extant pieces of Attic pottery.⁴⁷ They appear in a number of locations, including the base of a cup’s neck (Figure 2.1a–c) and its lip (Figure 2.5a–c). These inscriptions indicating beauty, kalē for women and kalos for men, were usually painted onto cups in the workshop.⁴⁸ The generic formula ho pais kalos (“this boy is attractive,” Figure 2.1a–c) was a popular inscription that enabled an older lover (erastēs) to offer a romantic compliment to a younger lover (erōmenos), a fitting gesture at the convivial symposium.⁴⁹ With this combination of stunning imagery and textual labels, inscribed cups catered to all levels of literacy.

A janiform cup currently held at the Archaeological Museum of Polygyros (Figure 2.5a–c) described as a “kantharos with the heads of a young woman and a negro from Akanthos,” reveals the lopsided treatment of inscriptions in modern scholarship. From left to right, a light brown female face wears a headband over loose curls, and a dark brown male face with sideburns sports a mustache and beard that frame an open mouth. An inscription running horizontally along the lip of the cup reads:

Ἐρόνασσε εἰμί καλὲ πάνυ[.] Τίμυλλος ὡς τό[δε τ]ὸ πρόσωπον καλὸς[.]

I am Eronassa, the most beautiful … Timyllos is as handsome as this face.

The text describing Eronassa runs above the light brown face, and that describing Timyllos runs above the dark brown face. It is instructive to examine first the scholarly labeling practices applied to the dark brown face (hereafter referred to as “Timyllos’s face”). Despite the presence of two brown faces of different shades on this cup, scholars tend to distance Timyllos from Eronassa, whose skin color they conflate with “Greek.” The Archaeological Museum of Polygyros likens Timyllos to an “African man”; the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki, where the cup was held before it moved to Polygyros, identifies him as a “a negro”; the Beazley Archive, a comprehensive online database for Attic pottery, lists him as a “black youth”; and Lissarrague categorizes him as “black.” Aware that Timyllos is “a deep reddish brown color, rather than the usual shiny black,” Ada Cohen nonetheless insists that he is a “black man.” She provides a rationale for Timyllos’s appearance by arguing that his non-black skin offers a color contrast to his black facial hair and eyebrows.⁵⁰ Although the full lips and broad nose of Timyllos’s face correspond to those on the black faces of other cups (figures 2.1a–c, 2.3a–c, and 2.4a–c), classification as “negro” or “black” is an oversimplification. Scholars import hypodescent laws into Greek antiquity when they describe Timyllos’s face with these terms.⁵¹ By prioritizing their historical present, they have elided (ancient) blackness into (modern) Blackness. Nomenclature benefits from self-reflexive labels that historicize the unavoidable preoccupation with color dynamics in the twenty-first century without reproducing it. Therefore, my decision to refer to Timyllos’s face as brown encourages viewers to pair him with Eronassa rather than superimpose the appearance of a Black man onto him.

In his analysis of the inscriptions on the janiform cup at the Archaeological Museum of Polygyros (Figure 2.5a–c), Lissarrague understands the inscription associated with Eronassa as a compliment and that of Timyllos as an ironic twist.⁵² Lissarrague insists that the potter has caricatured the features on Timyllos’s face because of Timyllos’s prominent teeth.⁵³ Exposed teeth are a popular feature of archaic Greek pottery, but there is no consensus about them indicating a simple and/or ugly person.⁵⁴ Even so, Lissarrague identifies Eronassa as Greek and therefore not subject to ridicule. His inclination to construe only Timyllos’s face as a parody resonates with twenty-first-century labeling of Black people as “other.”⁵⁵ His insistence that Timyllos’s face can only exist in inadequate response to Eronassa’s traps the viewer in a modern historical conundrum without consideration of the world in which the cup existed. The lack of convincing evidence to support Lissarrague’s claim that Timyllos is inherently comedic leaves viewers to draw their own conclusions about this conflation, which may lead them to make uninformed connections between Timyllos’s exposed teeth in the fifth century BCE and the iconic teeth-baring grin of Blackface actors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Admittedly, the presence of the first person (“I am Eronassa”) and third person (“Timyllos is handsome”) adds a playful quality to this cup. The variability may emphasize an interpersonal play between the reader of the inscription and the face on the cup.⁵⁶ Taking this switch between persons further, Eronassa may be the speaker of both inscriptions. If this is the case, she remarks on Timyllos’s appearance after she admires her own beauty. This reciprocal exchange fits in well with the general theme of malleability that dominates the metatheatrical stage of the symposium.

Despite Ada Cohen’s argument that Eronassa’s face represents a hetaira who is teasing her companion because of his dark brown complexion, the relationship between hetairai and prostitution is more complicated than Cohen acknowledges.⁵⁷ Mapping an egalitarian stance onto both sides of the cup, I interpret the inscriptions as attempts to highlight the plurality of performances without privileging either side. Whether humor is part of this cup’s pictorial value is unclear. Nonetheless, if there is a comedic element, it applies to both faces. The potential etymology of their names hints at this balance: Eronassa as “lovely duck” (ἔρος + νᾶσσα) and Timyllos as “honorable Egyptian mongoose” (τιμή + ὕλλος).

The art historical perspectives discussed above deny modern viewers a contextualized understanding of black skin color on janiform cups. Counteracting the historical lapses in their arguments, I treat the cups’ black faces as masks that people adopted during symposia. Whenever symposiasts wielded these janiform cups, they were able to enact performances in which new characters entered their private party. Altogether, my analysis prompts viewers to look beyond the facile renderings of skin color. Furthermore, my recasting of the iconography of black people in Greek antiquity as performances of blackness offers contemporary audiences a new model for confronting their own historicized positionality without immediately grafting it onto antiquity.

2.4 Ancient Blackness in Modern Museums

As is apparent in art historians’ lopsided treatment of black and brown faces on janiform cups, contemporary influences contribute to the uneven treatment of iconography of black people in public-facing settings. For instance, in the Beazley Archive, the world’s largest online database of photographs of ancient Greek pottery, descriptions generally concentrate on the color of the black face and female gender of the brown face, thereby nullifying the gender of the former and the color of the latter.⁵⁸ This reductive shorthand invariably privileges the male gender and brown faces, the latter of which many art historians liken to a Greek phenotype. In this way, the Beazley Archive reinforces the popular notion that the Greek male is the artistic norm. Other faces are remarkable only in comparison to this standard. No label provides a singular “correct” or “accurate” insight into the world of the fifth century BCE. On the contrary, they flag the multiple layers of comprehension that collide when modernity and antiquity interact. Indeed, it is impossible to isolate the past while living in the present, but it is the responsibility of curators and academics to confront twenty-first-century notions of Blackness before making conclusive remarks about the representations of blackness in Greek antiquity.

The inconsistent analysis of janiform cups reaches its apex in the labeling practices of contemporary museums. In the authoritative guide for museum professionals Exhibit Labels: An Interpretative Approach, Beverly Serrell exhorts label writers to avoid generalizations based on singular examples.⁵⁹ In this vein, in the remainder of this chapter, I rely on new museum ethics, a subfield of museum studies that calls for museums to create democratized social spaces and amend ideological barriers that perpetuate subjugation based on skin color.⁶⁰ Nascent attempts to achieve this goal are apparent in the Princeton University Art Museum’s online description of a janiform cup with a black face and a brown face as presenting “a male African and a female Greek” (Figure 2.4a–c). Combining a metaphorical and literal approach to color, the online catalogue of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) notes an unusual “joining of black and white female heads” on another janiform cup (Figure 2.1a–c). In the MFA’s entry, the cataloguer situates the cup within the wider context of “white (i.e. Greek) women.” The cataloguer’s parenthetical inclusion “(i.e. Greek)” anachronistically collapses the distinction between white and Greek while also creating a false color dichotomy that ignores the cup’s color palette. In fact, there is more white on the black face than on its brown counterpart.⁶¹ The Fitzwilliam Museum’s online catalogue eliminates any mention of color or gender with a generic label: “Class G of the head vases; the London Class” (Figure 2.3a–c). The cataloguing practices of the MFA and the Fitzwilliam Museum deny the viewer contextualized information about the cups. Even the color- and gender-inclusive categorization of the Princeton University Art Museum’s online catalogue poses challenges due to the historical variations generally attributed to the term “Africa.” Altogether, these labels reveal the complex interactions between modernity and antiquity that occur within museums.

Returning to the language of performance, I construe the museum as another stage on which performances of blackness occur. Quotidian productions ranging from the smallest captions to the most expansive layouts can have a lasting impact on the general public.⁶² These performances of blackness appear in the greatest numbers in museums’ Nubian collections.⁶³ In concert with the unequal treatment of skin color on janiform cups discussed above, museums situate Nubian iconography in ways that subvert a clear understanding of their relevance. Generally, Nubian objects are part of a Greco-Roman exhibit, an Egyptian exhibit, or have their own display.⁶⁴ The display of Nubia and Egypt together is understandable since Lower Nubia, the northern region of Nubia, and Upper Egypt, the southern region of Egypt, shared a border. This emphasis becomes problematic, however, when Egypt functions as a legitimizing force in the presentation of Nubian objects. Tracing a visitor’s experience in the British Museum highlights the visual cues that can subordinate Nubia to Egypt.⁶⁵

Upon entering the British Museum, the visitor almost immediately becomes aware of Egypt’s looming presence (Figure 2.6). Centrally located beyond the main entrance, a gift shop, and a room featuring Assyrian sculptures (Room 6), the “Egyptian Sculpture” (Room 4) consist of three interconnected rooms that display the Egyptians’ artistic prowess from 2686 BCE–395 CE.⁶⁶ Here, massive lion sculptures, temple pillars, and busts of pharaohs appear alongside sarcophagi, tomb reliefs, and the Rosetta Stone.⁶⁷ It is easy to overlook the small area in the third segment of Room 4 (furthest from Room 6) that addresses Egypt’s relationship with Nubia. Off the main walking path and up a short ramp, the more determined visitor encounters a small area entitled “Political Fragmentation: Third Intermediate Period (21st–25th Dynasties).” The term “Third Intermediate Period” suggests that the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty (c. 720–664 BCE), in which Nubian rulers Shabaqo, Shebitqo, and Taharqo successively ruled Egypt, was a brief anomaly between the New Kingdom and the Late Period.

Figure 2.6 Ground floor layout of the British Museum, 2016.

© The Trustees of the British Museum.

A closer look at interpretive remarks on the panel titled “Political Fragmentation” reveals the implicit assumptions that the curator passes on to viewers:

King Piankhy of Kush took advantage of Egypt’s division [into multiple regional kingdoms] and invaded. He and his successors, the 25th Dynasty, imposed themselves as overlords on the local rulers. Napata was the capital in Kush, and Memphis became its Egyptian twin. The Kushites embraced Egypt’s culture and artistic expression, as their own had been transformed by past pharaonic domination.⁶⁸

This wall text foregrounds Egypt and pushes Nubia to the periphery, which in turn renders Nubia’s rule of Egypt an irregularity. According to the author of this text, Nubia gained power because it “took advantage” of preexisting conditions. Therefore, unfortunate political circumstances, rather than Nubia’s military prowess or Egypt’s inadequate efforts to unify itself, led to the end of Egyptian rule. The characterization of Nubians who “imposed themselves as overlords” likens them to ruthless invaders whose sinister plots threatened to destroy the political landscape. These Nubians disregarded the position of “local rulers” and forged ahead with their deceitful rule. The writer of this text implies that Nubian rulers could not even create their own northern capital; they merely appropriated an Egyptian one. A superficial glance at the extent of the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty (approximately sixty years) may buttress the argument that brute force and sheer luck fueled Nubian rule since the Egyptians regained control of their kingdom to found the Twenty-Sixth Dynasty (c. 664–525 BCE). But even with Egyptians’ periodically successful local uprisings, it is impossible to ignore the centuries of Persian and Greek domination of Egypt that followed.

The reverence for Egyptian rule extends to the closing words of the wall text, in that the violent Nubians somehow “embraced” Egyptian culture. Here, the writer intimates that Egypt’s “culture and artistic expression” compelled the Nubians to take a “transformed” perspective. These comments are especially puzzling in light of the panel’s earlier account of pugnacious Nubians. It is difficult to make sense of brutal and luck-driven Nubians, as the wall text characterizes them, who somehow set aside their belligerent ways and welcome their former oppressors. The repeated glorification of Egypt in Room 4 prevents a contextualized understanding of the relationship between Egypt and Nubia. Even though archaeological evidence points to sustained cultural exchange among Nubians and Egyptians, especially those living in proximity to each other near the First and Second Cataracts of the Nile, the false impression of a one-way stream of culture from Egypt to Nubia overshadows the realities of acculturation.⁶⁹ Outside of this “Political Fragmentation” display, the presence of Nubia in Room 4 mostly serves to aggrandize Egypt.⁷⁰ The omission of the two-way exchanges among these neighboring groups robs visitors of the opportunity to view Nubia as a region rich with its own history. The intense focus on Egypt is understandable since these objects are part of the “Egyptian Sculpture Galleries.” Nonetheless, the direct and indirect emphasis on Nubia’s perceived inferiority detracts from the educational value of Room 4 as a whole. Regardless of whatever the curatorial team’s goals may have been for this room, this layout reduces Nubia to a primitive outpost of Egypt and promotes an Egyptocentric understanding of Nubia.

Coinciding with its limiting portrayal of Nubia in the “Egyptian Sculpture” gallery, the British Museum presents a skewed display of visual representations of black people in Greek antiquity. For a visitor interested in this iconography, a short walk from “Egyptian Sculpture” through “Assyria: Nimrud” (rooms 7–8), “Greek and Roman Sculpture” (Room 23), and “Nereid Monument” (Room 17) leads to a series of rooms (14–16) displaying ancient Greek pottery. In “Athens and Lycia” (Room 15), the British Museum’s only janiform object with a brown face and a black face on display is a stout perfume bottle (aryballos).⁷¹ Part of a glassed collection entitled “Africans,” the label for the perfume bottle reads: “5th-century Athens was dominated by citizen males. Foreigners and women were both therefore political outsiders.” Comparable to Tanner’s observations,⁷² the description presumes selective political resonances. This collection features other objects from the fifth century BCE: a bronze statue of a kneeling boy holding a sponge in his right hand and a boot in his left, a terracotta figurine of a boy sitting cross-legged with his right leg propped up and his hands folded over his right knee, and a mixing bowl (kratēr) depicting a brown Andromeda with her servants. Barring the mixing bowl, these objects all feature renditions of people with a broad nose and full lips. The general caption portrays a semi-divine group of people who swiftly descend into the substratum of society:

The Mediterranean sea washes the shores of north Africa where Greek colonists came into contact with the native peoples of the African continent. Ethiopia (the land of burnt faces) held a special fascination for the Greeks as a fabled land, favoured by the gods and the presumed source of the Nile. Africans enter Greek art as figures in myth or as studies in human physical type. African residents in fifth-century Athens will have been mostly slaves.⁷³

In her survey of the British Museum, Page DuBois astutely points out curators’ myopia regarding ancient Greek and Roman slavery.⁷⁴ These blind spots lead to swift elisions, as is evidenced in Room 15’s pairing of African residents and an enslaved status.⁷⁵ The decision to categorize the four objects in the “Africans” display as depictions of enslaved people unhelpfully applies a restrictive modern lens to the diverse enterprise of Greco-Roman slavery. Although the attribution of some black people as enslaved in the fifth century BCE is plausible, there is no sure signification among these objects of their enslaved status. The bronze statue may reflect a person of humble means, and the pose of the terracotta sculpture bears similarities with a pondering philosopher. The physical distance between the Nubian objects in “Sudan, Egypt and Nubia” (Room 65, two levels above Room 15) and those in Room 15 reinforces the inaccurate conflation of black people and servitude. The humble presence of Nubia against the backdrop of monumental Egyptian objects in Room 4 further heightens this divide. A trip upstairs to Room 65, a room dedicated to Nubia, provides a more thorough assessment of the iconography of black people on display in the British Museum.

The panel at the entrance of the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Gallery “Sudan, Egypt and Nubia” (Room 65; see Figure 2.7) recognizes the importance of Nubia beyond its association with Egypt.⁷⁶ It reads: “[Nubia] was a vital link between central Africa, Egypt, and the Mediterranean world.” This bidirectional connection with its northern and southern neighbors frees Nubia from the shadows of Egypt into which it was previously thrust on the ground floor. Walking through the room, a visitor comes across stunning pieces that highlight Nubia’s long-lasting presence: rock art of a long-horned cow that dates to the second millennium BCE, a remarkable reproduction of a frieze from the thirteenth century BCE in which black Nubians carry tribute to the Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II, and a first-century BCE sculpture of a defeated enemy with an ironic inscription in the Meroitic language: “This is the king of the Nubians.”⁷⁷ The gallery’s title conveys the geographic scope of Nubia (spanning Sudan and modern Egypt) without presuming that Nubia depends on Egypt for political relevance.⁷⁸ The displays in this room reveal a somewhat expansive coverage of Nubian history including burial practices in Kerma, Pan-grave culture, Meroitic writing, the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty, and rescue archaeology in Abu Simbel. Some panels, however, promote a one-sided relationship, such as “Towns and Temples in Occupied Nubia” and “Egyptian Fortresses in Occupied Nubia.”⁷⁹ These curatorial choices do not acknowledge that Nubia was a powerful entity in relation to all of its neighbors. In particular, the omission of Aksum (also spelled “Axum”), Nubia’s southern neighbors who annexed Nubia in the fourth century CE, risks providing viewers with an incomplete picture of Nubia’s history. None of the text in Room 65 mentions Aksum’s contentious encounters with Nubia or its prominent role in Nubia’s demise. Instead, the wall text explains that the collapse of Meroe, Nubia’s capital city from c. 300BCE–300CE, was “apparently brought about by a decline in trade and persistent raiding by desert nomads.”⁸⁰

Figure 2.7 Level 3 layout of the British Museum, 2016.

© The Trustees of the British Museum.

The British Museum’s placement of Augustus’s bronze head from Meroe further downplays the might of Nubia. Rather than use this piece to elevate Nubia as a powerful nation that literally trampled on the Roman emperor (due to the bust’s original location, buried underneath the steps leading to a temple in Meroe), the British Museum treats this bronze head as a relic of Rome and places it in Room 70, “Roman Empire,” eight rooms away from Room 65, “Sudan, Egypt and Nubia.”⁸¹ With this layout, only informed visitors are able to situate the bronze head among other Nubian objects and envision Nubia as a formidable region in its own right. For those determined to contextualize this head in its findspot, a brief side trip to Sudan reveals the relativity of the categories “center” and “periphery.” Currently, a replica of Augustus’s head is on display at the Sudan National Museum in Khartoum. The object’s label omits any discussion of the head’s replica status or the current location of the original bust.⁸² It was only during a tour of the Royal City of Meroe, the site from which the head was excavated, in January 2020, that I was able to ascertain any information about the object’s current location. Upon my inquiry, the local guide, Ms. Neema, located it “somewhere in England.”⁸³

The location of “Sudan, Egypt and Nubia” in Room 65 frames Nubia in relation to its northern neighbors: one literally walks through Egypt (in rooms 64 and 63) in order to travel from Nubia (Room 65) to its southern neighbor, Ethiopia. In “Ethiopia and Coptic Egypt” (Room 66), located in a narrow corridor between Room 63 and the north stairs, curators leapfrog over Nubia to pair two countries (Ethiopia and Egypt) whose people cannot access each other without traversing Nubia. “Ethiopia and Coptic Egypt” highlights the prominence of fifteenth-century CE Ethiopian crosses and Christian art alongside objects from fourth- to sixth-century CE Wadi Sarga in Coptic Egypt. Despite the religious overlaps in this room, the chronological leap unfortunately perpetuates the perception that Egypt alone has a meaningful ancient history. The British Museum’s rendering of Egypt as a singularly remarkable country remains undisturbed, as the sole exhibit featuring objects from modern Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia is located in the Sainsbury African Galleries.⁸⁴ Only a brief note in “Ethiopia and Coptic Egypt” invites viewers interested in Ethiopian textiles to visit the African galleries.⁸⁵

A visit to the basement brings this museum adventure to an end. Located in Room 25 on Level -2, “Africa” displays objects from over forty African countries (including four pieces from modern Egypt and nineteen from Sudan). Ivan Karp and his colleagues Fred Wilson and Corinne Kratz assert that the display of African objects in a museum’s basement encourages visitors to perceive non-European civilizations as nebulous tributaries that feed into “the great stream culminating in Western civilization.”⁸⁶ The British Museum unfortunately reinforces this troubling current with its presentation of the Benin Bronzes (c. sixteenth century CE) in Room 25. Stolen from the royal palace in Benin City (southern Nigeria) as part of British troops’ punitive expedition in 1897, the British Museum treats these brass plaques as exotic war booty. The title wall sanitizes the British troops’ destruction of Benin City and reflects imperial arrogance with the introductory title: “The Discovery of Benin Art by the West.” The panel continues to identify positive aspects of the British invasion: “Benin treasures caused an enormous sensation [in the West], fuelling an appreciation for African art which profoundly influenced 20th century Western art.” The exploitation extends to the final lines of the caption: “Between the 1950s and 1970s the British Museum sold around 30 objects to Nigeria.” This closing comment underlines the continued profiting of former colonial powers that occludes an egalitarian relationship between African and European nations.⁸⁷

2.5 Conclusion: Critical Curation

Invisible ontologies pervade contemporary scholarship about ancient Greek iconography. Any exploration of blackness calls to mind broader histories of skin color, but representations of blackness in Greek antiquity need not mirror modern connotations of skin color. In referring to janiform cups with black and brown faces as portable performance pieces within the symposium, I refrain from making general claims about the occupation of black people in the general iconographic world or in Greece as a whole. Adopting a new identity in a symposiastic setting is not the same as learning about or interacting with foreigners. Rather, my focus on a subset of artistic renditions of black people has aimed to encourage a wider exploration of the theatricality and flexibility of blackness. When symposiasts interact with a variety of faces on their cups, they tap into the performative nature of the symposium. In turn, the faces become part of a drinker-turned-actor’s repertoire. This act of transformation reflects the power of performance, in that it enables drinkers to adopt, and guests to accept, a new identity.

Writ large, modernity’s inconsistent fixation with skin color translates to museums’ unequal presentation of black people in Greek and Nubian antiquity. At the British Museum, the general portrayal of Nubia promotes a rigid hierarchy that relegates it to a secondary position under Egypt. This limiting approach is tempered with a slightly more impartial handling of Nubia in “Sudan, Egypt and Nubia” (Room 65). On the whole, I question not the intentions of the curators, but the implementation of their goals.⁸⁸

In their brilliant evaluation of museum exhibits, Ivan Karp and Corinne Kratz outline the net positive results of critical curation:

Ideally, exhibitions created with such recognition [that all people, even museum curators, are members of other cultures] would not only tell visitors about cultural diversity and include several perspectives, but also show the process through which curatorial judgments were made, that those judgments are contingent and contestable rather than final, and that there are other stories that were not included but might have been.⁸⁹

Karp and Kratz exhort curators to think rigorously about categorizations of material culture and the issues they implicitly flag with their classifications. Otherwise, curators can too easily overlook the privileging of their own perspectives in their exhibits and exhibitions. Identifying blindspots in curatorial practices can address some of the dangerous consequences of slippage between different time periods. A reciprocal gaze that erodes the power dynamics in museums is especially important for any visual display of the iconography of black people in Greek antiquity.

Recent projects that promote equitable museum practices have begun to bear fruit. In 2019, Marenka Thompson-Odlum spearheaded “Labelling Matters: Activating Objects”, a collaborative project that identifies colonial language in the Pitt Rivers Museum’s labels. This endeavor culminated in a series of podcasts featuring fifteen- and sixteen-year old students from Oxford Spires Academy, a state-funded secondary school in England, who scrutinized the museum’s curatorial practices.⁹⁰ Another instance of critical curating appears at the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford. This museum houses the Christian Levett Family Gallery “Dynastic Egypt and Nubia,” which presents Nubia’s vast relationships with its neighbors in a balanced manner. The wall text in this exhibit underscores Nubia’s interactions without any Egyptocentric fanfare. The placement of the Nubian ruler Taharqo’s massive shrine in the middle of the exhibit pushes back against the portrayal of Nubia as an appendage of Egypt. In a tripartite display that examines Egypt’s encounters with Nubia, the Levant, and the Mediterranean, a subheading entitled “Conflict” emphasizes the trilateral balance of power in this region of the world.⁹¹ At the Oriental Institute Museum at the University of Chicago, the Robert F. Picken Family Nubian Gallery provides visitors with a balanced assessment of Nubian history through its chronological series of displays, including “Meroitic Pottery,” “Nubian Archers,” and “Dress and Adornment in Meroitic Nubia.” The panel “New Kingdom,” which encompasses the period of Egyptian occupation of Nubia from 1550 to 1069 BCE, emphasizes the two-way traffic of goods and people.⁹² This evenhanded methodology applies to the variety of objects on view, such as a Qustul incense burner with Egyptian iconography and wheel-made (Egyptian-style) pottery with Nubian designs.⁹³

The exhibition “Ancient Nubia Now,” which ran from October 2019 to January 2020 at the MFA, offers a final example of critical curation.⁹⁴ In possession of the largest Nubian collection outside of Sudan, the MFA highlighted Nubia’s extensive networks via displays of imported Egyptian, Greek, and Roman objects found in Nubian tombs. Wall text throughout “Ancient Nubia Now” outlined Nubia and Egypt’s intertwined history without subjugating the former. Near the entrance of the exhibition, the museum incorporated its own history into the narrative. Part of the “Nubia, History, and the MFA” panel, the wall text read:

Until recently, Nubia’s story has been told in large part by others – beginning with the ancient Egyptians, whose propaganda cast their enemies in a negative light. In the early 20th century, scholars and archaeologists often brought racial prejudice to their work, influencing interpretations of Nubia for decades. This exhibition, drawn entirely from the MFA’s collection, examines some of the ways in which Nubia’s history has been obscured and misinterpreted – and the Museum’s own role in that particular history.⁹⁵

The MFA’s explicit grappling with its colonialist history serves as a model for precisely the sort of reflexive work that Karp and Kratz invoke. In other words, the museum’s accountable stewardship helps museumgoers construct their own restorative performance of blackness.⁹⁶ Channeling this bidirectional methodology, in the next chapter I explore a performance of blackness on a tragic stage: black protagonists in Aeschylus’s Suppliants (c. 463 BCE) repurpose the mask of difference that their audience foists upon them. In line with these savvy ancient performers, Black characters in nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century literature wriggle out of the straitjacket of alterity into which others have forced them.