Martin Bernal

Martin Bernal teaches at Cornell University. Black Athena was published in 1987.

Letter

Whose Greece?

12 December 1996

Philip Hoy (Letters, 23 January) laments my failure to discuss the substance of Mary Lefkowitz’s criticism of my work as opposed to the ‘alleged agendas of the people responsible for them’. In my review I drew a sharp distinction between the contributions to Black Athena Revisited, which I see as academically conservative, and the intentions of the editors, who combine this with undoubted political...

Whose Greece?

Martin Bernal, 12 December 1996

The term ‘Afrocentrism’ was invented relatively recently, by Molefi Asante, a professor in Philadelphia, who described it as a way to escape from Eurocentrism by looking at the world from an African viewpoint. Since then, the label ‘Afrocentrist’ has been attached to a number of intellectual positions, ranging from ‘All good things come from Africa’ or, as Leonard Jeffries, the outspoken professor of African Studies at City University in New York, put it, ‘Africa creates, Europe imitates,’ to the many who merely maintain that Africans, or peoples of African descent, have made significant contributions to world progress and that, for the past two centuries, these have been systematically played down by European and North American historians.

Aryan Warlords in their Chariots

Edmund Leach, 2 April 1987

I attended English boarding-schools from 1919 to 1928, aged eight to 18. I there learned that, despite the slaughterhouse of the 1914-1918 War, European civilisation was without any question the...

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