Content note: racism, in particular anti-Black racism, and white supremacy (this note also applies to all linked articles); ableism Slight departure from the usual Linear B-related content around here, but I want to share a fantastic collection of photographs depicting the Olympian gods – which I already shared on social media, but here I have more space to reflect a bit on these photos’ significance and also share some relevant resources. The photo series is entitled “20 gods and goddesses for 2020” (in Spanish: “20 Dioses y Diosas para 2020”) by photographer Ana Martinez and stylist Mario Ville Kattaca. …
Most of the positive comments I’ve seen about these on social media have tended to focus, as I also initially did when sharing them, on aesthetic features like these. However, in the context of the current urgent need for Classics as a subject to address its own racism as well as its use by and complicity in white supremacy more widely – a subject on which a lot of important work is being done by Classicists of colour in particular: see more below – it feels important to say explicitly that this series’ portrayal of ancient Greek deities as Black is also a reason to love it. Not that this is actually separable at all from the artistic choices I referred to already – all of these features combine to simultaneously affirm these Black models’ connection to the classical past (the white drapery, the canonical items associated with each god/goddess), while undermining traditional conceptions of that past (the contemporary clothes) and in particular its supposed material and ethnic whiteness (on the connection between the – incorrect – view of ancient status as entirely white and white supremacist views of the classical world, see this article by Sarah Bond; on ancient Greek artistic representations of people with black skin, see this article by Sarah Derbew).
