Mary Lefkowitz | |
---|---|
Born | |
Spouse | Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones (m. 1982-2009; his death) |
Academic background | |
Education | Wellesley College (BA) Radcliffe College (PhD) |
Academic work | |
Institutions | Wellesley College |
Notable works | Not Out of Africa:How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth As History;Black Athena Revisited |
Mary R. Lefkowitz (born April 30,1935) is an American scholar of Classics. She is the Professor Emerita of Classical Studies at Wellesley College in Wellesley,Massachusetts,where she previously worked from 1959 to 2005. She has published ten books over the course of her career.
Lefkowitz studied at Wellesley College before obtaining a Ph.D. in Classical Philology from Radcliffe College in 1961. During the 1980s much of her research focused on the place of women in the Classical world. She attracted broader attention for her 1996 book Not Out of Africa,a criticism of Afrocentric claims that ancient Greek civilization derived largely from that of ancient Egypt. She argued that such claims owed more to an American black nationalist political agenda than historical evidence. That decade,she also entered into a publicised argument with Africana studies scholar Tony Martin.
She served on the advisory board of the conservative advocacy group the National Association of Scholars. [1]
Lefkowitz was born to a Jewish family in New York City in 1935. [2] She earned her B.A. from Wellesley College in 1957,Phi Beta Kappa with honors in Greek,and received her Ph.D. in Classical Philology from Radcliffe College (now part of Harvard University) in 1961. She returned to Wellesley College in 1959 as an instructor in Greek. In 1979 she was named Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities,a position she held until her retirement in 2005. Lefkowitz holds an honorary degree from Trinity College (1996),which cited her "deep concern for intellectual integrity," and also from the University of Patras (1999) and from Grinnell College (2000). In 2004 she received a Radcliffe Graduate Society Medal. In 2006 she was awarded a National Humanities Medal "for outstanding excellence in scholarship and teaching." In 2008 she was the recipient of a Wellesley College Alumnae Achievement Award. [3]
Lefkowitz has published on subjects including mythology,women in antiquity,Pindar,and fiction in ancient biography. She came to the attention of a wider audience through her criticism of the claims of Martin Bernal in Black Athena:The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization in her book Not Out of Africa:How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth As History. In Black Athena Revisited (1996),which she edited with Guy MacLean Rogers,her colleague at Wellesley College,the ideas of Martin Bernal are further scrutinized.
The pinnacle of Mary Lefkowitz’s controversy surrounding Afrocentrism in the classics took form in her years-long scholarly debate with Martin Bernal. Bernal is the author of Black Athena:The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, [4] a work that argues the deep influence of Egyptian (and therefore African) influence on Greek culture,language,and society. The claims that Martin Bernal argues in his text alarmed Lefkowitz to such an extent that she wrote two extensive publications. The first,Black Athena:Revisited, [5] is a collection of essays edited by Lefkowitz that responds directly to Bernal’s work with strong criticism. The second,Not Out of Africa:How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth As History, [6] is a text devoted to Lefkowitz’s anti-Afrocentrism argument,tying in her arguments against Bernal. The aforementioned work ignited what then became a continued back-and-forth between Lefkowitz and Bernal. Bernal wrote a response to Not Out Of Africa in which he attacked the legitimacy of Lefkowitz’s argument. [7] He argued that Lefkowitz “discover(s) what she wants and then fail(s) to check further”,and that her work is “sloppy”and clearly “written in a hurry”. [8] He attacked her argument,and character,by discussing her view of history as being what he calls the “Aryan Model”of history,in this way associating her argument with a word associated with Nazism and White Supremacy. This response was quickly followed up by Lefkowitz with her own response:Lefkowitz on Bernal on Lefkowitz,Not Out of Africa. [9] In this,she took a fiery tone against Bernal and defended her own claims while again working to refute Black Athena’s arguments.
This written debate culminated in a live debate when Lefkowitz and Guy MacLean Rogers joined in a discussion with Bernal,along with the Afrocentric scholar John Henrik Clarke. [10] Much like the paper responses,this debate was heated,with interruptions and intense disagreements.
The controversy continued when Lefkowitz’s Black Athena Revisited was reviewed by Molefi Kete Asante. [11] Asante criticizes Lefkowitz for her inability to believe that ancient Africans influenced Greek culture and emphasizes how although classical historians are quick to deny racism,racism is a huge part of their argument. Asante unveils what he believes is the true argument that these historians,Lefkowitz included,seek to make:“Their contention,in the face of evidence,is that it is improbable and even impossible that a black civilization could have any significant impact on a white civilization.”Asante emphasizes these arguments' connection to a history of colonialism and white supremacy,concluding that Black Athena:Revisited is a “helpful book for African scholars who are able to see in this volume all the agency that whites give to themselves and what they take away from Africans.” [12]
In 2008,Lefkowitz published History Lesson, which The Wall Street Journal described as a "personal account of what she experienced as a result of questioning the veracity of Afrocentrism and the motives of its advocates." [13] She was attacked in newsletters from the Wellesley Africana Studies Department by her colleague Tony Martin. [14] which turned into a rancorous,personal conflict with anti-Semitic elements. Martin stated in May 1994 at Cornell University that "Black people should interpret their own reality...Jews have been in the forefront of efforts to thwart the interpretation of our own history." [15] In another incident described in her book,Yosef A. A. Ben-Jochannan,the author of Africa:The Mother of Western Civilization, gave the Martin Luther King lecture at Wellesley in 1993. Lefkowitz attended this lecture with her husband,Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones. In that lecture,Ben-Jochannan stated that Aristotle stole his philosophy from the Library of Alexandria,Egypt. During the question and answer session following the lecture,Lefkowitz asked Ben-Jochannan,"How would that have been possible,when the library was not built until after his death?" Ben-Jochannan simply replied that the dates were uncertain. Sir Hugh responded,"Rubbish!" Lefkowitz writes that Ben-Jochannan proceeded to tell those present that "they could and should believe what black instructors told them" and "that although they might think that Jews were all 'hook-nosed and sallow faced,' there were other Jews who looked like himself." [16]
Lefkowitz was married to Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones,Regius Professor Emeritus of Greek at Oxford University from 1982 until his death in 2009. [17]
Athena or Athene, often given the epithet Pallas, is an ancient Greek goddess associated with wisdom, warfare, and handicraft who was later syncretized with the Roman goddess Minerva. Athena was regarded as the patron and protectress of various cities across Greece, particularly the city of Athens, from which she most likely received her name. The Parthenon on the Acropolis of Athens is dedicated to her. Her major symbols include owls, olive trees, snakes, and the Gorgoneion. In art, she is generally depicted wearing a helmet and holding a spear.
Afrocentrism is a worldview that is centered on the history of people of African descent or a view that favors it over non-African civilizations. It is in some respects a response to Eurocentric attitudes about African people and their historical contributions. It seeks to counter what it sees as mistakes and ideas perpetuated by the racist philosophical underpinnings of Western academic disciplines as they developed during and since Europe's Early Renaissance as justifying rationales for the enslavement of other peoples, in order to enable more accurate accounts of not only African but all people's contributions to world history. Afrocentricity deals primarily with self-determination and African agency and is a pan-African point of view for the study of culture, philosophy, and history.
Martin Gardiner Bernal was a British scholar of modern Chinese political history. He was a Professor of Government and Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University. He is best known for his work Black Athena, a pseudoarchaeological, controversial work which argues that the culture, language, and political structure of Ancient Greece contained substantial influences from Egypt and Syria-Palestine.
Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, published in 1987, 1991, and 2006, is a pseudoarchaeological trilogy by Martin Bernal proposing an alternative hypothesis on the origins of ancient Greece and classical civilisation. Bernal's thesis discusses the perception of ancient Greece in relation to Greece's North African and West Asian neighbours, especially the ancient Egyptians and Phoenicians who, he believes, colonized ancient Greece producing the bulk of Classical civilization. Bernal proposed that a change in the Western perception of Greece in the 18th century lead to the denial of any significant Egyptian and Phoenician influence on ancient Greek civilization.
Ahmose-Nefertari was the first Great Royal Wife of the 18th Dynasty of Ancient Egypt. She was a daughter of Seqenenre Tao and Ahhotep I, and royal sister and wife to Ahmose I. Her son Amenhotep I became pharaoh and she may have served as his regent when he was young. Ahmose-Nefertari was deified after her death.
Tony Martin was a Trinidad and Tobago-born scholar of Africana Studies. From 1973 to 2007 he worked at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and over the course of his career published more than ten books and a range of scholarly articles.
Yosef Alfredo Antonio Ben-Jochannan, referred to as "Dr. Ben", was an American writer and historian. He was considered to be one of the more prominent Afrocentric scholars by some Black Nationalists, while most mainstream scholars, such as Mary Lefkowitz, dismissed him because of the basic historical inaccuracies in his work, as well as disputes about the authenticity of his educational degrees and academic credentials.
Cheikh Anta Diop was a Senegalese historian, anthropologist, physicist, and politician who studied the human race's origins and pre-colonial African culture. Diop's work is considered foundational to the theory of Afrocentricity, though he himself never described himself as an Afrocentrist. The questions he posed about cultural bias in scientific research contributed greatly to the postcolonial turn in the study of African civilizations.
Afrocentricity is an academic theory and approach to scholarship that seeks to center the experiences and peoples of Africa and the African diaspora within their own historical, cultural, and sociological contexts. First developed as a systematized methodology by Molefi Kete Asante in 1980, he drew inspiration from a number of African and African diaspora intellectuals including Cheikh Anta Diop, George James, Harold Cruse, Ida B. Wells, Langston Hughes, Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, and W. E. B. Du Bois. The Temple Circle, also known as the Temple School of Thought, Temple Circle of Afrocentricity, or Temple School of Afrocentricity, was an early group of Africologists during the late 1980s and early 1990s that helped to further develop Afrocentricity, which is based on concepts of agency, centeredness, location, and orientation.
Runoko Rashidi was a historian, essayist, author and public lecturer based in Los Angeles, California, and Paris, France.
George Granville Monah James was a Guyanese-American historian and author, known for his 1954 book Stolen Legacy, which argues that Greek philosophy and religion originated in ancient Egypt.
Melanin theory is a set of pseudoscientific claims made by some proponents of Afrocentrism, which holds that black people, including ancient Egyptians, have superior mental, physical, and paranormal powers because they have higher levels of melanin, the primary skin pigment in humans.
The dynastic race theory was the earliest thesis to attempt to explain how predynastic Egypt developed into the sophisticated monarchy of Dynastic Egypt. The theory holds that the earliest roots of the ancient Egyptian dynastic civilisation were imported by invaders from Mesopotamia who then founded the First Dynasty and brought culture to the indigenous population. This theory had strong supporters in the Egyptological community in the first half of the 20th century, but has since lost mainstream support.
The question of the race of the ancient Egyptians was raised historically as a product of the early racial concepts of the 18th and 19th centuries, and was linked to models of racial hierarchy primarily based on craniometry and anthropometry. A variety of views circulated about the racial identity of the Egyptians and the source of their culture.
John Glover Jackson was an American Pan-Africanist historian, lecturer, teacher and writer. He promoted ideas of Afrocentrism, atheism, and Jesus Christ in comparative mythology.
Life of Sethos, Taken from Private Memoirs of the Ancient Egyptians is an influential fantasy novel originally published in six volumes at Paris in 1731 by the French abbé Jean Terrasson. An English translation by Thomas Lediard published at London by J. Walthoe appeared in 1732.
Barbara Philippa McCarthy was an American Hellenist and academic. McCarthy is mainly known for her work on Lucian of Samosata and his interactions with the Menippean satire.
Rebecca Futo Kennedy is Associate Professor of Classics, Women's and Gender Studies, and Environmental Studies at Denison University, and the Director of the Denison Museum. Her research focuses on the political, social, and cultural history of Classical Athens, Athenian tragedy, ancient immigration, ancient theories of race and ethnicity, and the reception of those theories in modern race science.
The ethnicity of Cleopatra VII, the last active Hellenistic ruler of the Macedonian-led Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt, has caused debate in some circles. There is a general consensus among scholars that she was predominantly of Macedonian Greek ancestry and minorly of Iranian descent. Others, including some scholars and laymen, have speculated whether she may have had additional ancestries.
Hoteps are members of an Afrocentrist African American subculture that focuses on Ancient Egypt as a source of Black pride. The group has been described as promoting pseudohistory and misinformation about Black history. Hoteps espouse a mixture of Black radicalism and social conservatism.
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