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The Greeks and Romans were acquainted with dark skinned people from Africa from an early stage. It has been generally accepted that such people were referred to as aithiopias; by the Greeks, and modem commentators have accepted the term to be a synonym of the English term 'Negro' . Such an assumption ignores the wide variety of connotations associated with the terms aithiops and aithiopia. Furthermore, the trend in scholarship in the field of race relations in antiquity has been to study the interaction between Greeks and foreigners based on implicit, and often invalid, theory. The aim of this study is to examine the uses of the terms aithiops and aithiopia in the context of Greek ideology. Previous studies in the field have employed naive semiological approaches to the issue of racism in Greece and Rome, whereby references to Negroes have simply been weighed up in order to determine the extent of negative attitude toward Negroes in antiquity. In this regard, the following study departs radically from the approaches of its predecessors in that, although it is not intended as a narrow linguistic study of the terms aithiops and aithiopia, the focus of the examination concerns the semantics of these terms and the connotations thereof. Through an analysis of these terms in their ideological context, not only do we gain an insight into the processes which underlie Greek perceptions of group boundaries, but we may gain a deeper understanding of our own perceptions of race and racism. The study is confined to pre-Hellenistic literature (although later works are often used to illuminate Classical and Archaic passages) since it was the perceptions of the authors from this period which shaped the ideas of subsequent authors. In addition, during the Hellenistic period, the focus of Greek literary activity shifted from Athens to Alexandria, allowing Hellenistic authors far more contact with Negroes than was enjoyed by their predecessors. For the purpose of this study, Lycophron's Alexandria has been assumed to be the last pre-Hellenistic work, although this point may be debatable. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal, Durban, 1997.

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität, Dortmund, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 129-133) and index.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1952. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [524]-543).

This thesis attempts to expose stereotypologies of black African skin as performed on the Shakespearean stage and before the Shakespearean camera. My research engages with a number of Tudor/Stuart travel narratives and plays containing imperialistic denigrations of Negritude. To accompany these early revelations of the 'unknown' black Other, I effect a close performative and historical consideration of Shakespeare's Othello (1602). By critiquing the repetitive containment of the character of Othello, the Moor, by successive theatrical ideologies, I work towards a full analysis of his twentieth-century representation on film. Here, through positioning myself within contextual, postcolonial, and methodological discourses surrounding representations of Othello by Orson Welles (1952), Stuart Burge (1965), and five other directors from 1981 to the present day, I confirm and analyse the politicisation of both genuine and masked blackness. In asserting that Welles's ninety-minute statement is powerfully emancipated from white ideological constraint, I nonetheless conclude that the Elizabethan and Jacobean tropes employed in dramatic formulations of black skin retain powerful visual significance within the contemporary film industries that interpret Shakespeare's Moor of Venice.

The view of black Africans that emerges from Renaissance drama is shaped entirely by stereotypes, and is overwhelmingly negative. There is a general reluctance in the scholarly community to challenge the stereotype as a major organising principle in shaping negative images of African dramatic characters. My argument is that the stereotype is a powerful tool in the hands of self-interested parties, and must be recognised as capable of maiming and distorting the experiences of those it sets out to construct, as the one-sided, eurocentric representations of African characters in Renaissance drama reveal. Chapter One reviews the history of European attitudes to black skin colour, focusing briefly on England's public displays of other nations, cultures, and people, on the visual art tradition, and mainly on English Renaissance travel literature which, I believe, was the largest single influence on dramatists' imaginations. The chapter establishes that English anti-black polemics and the stereotyping of black Africans was heightened during the Renaissance, mainly because constructions of otherness were a large part of England's national self-fashioning. Chapter Two explores traditional meanings of blackness as well as the aesthetic and moral aspects of otherness, and attempts to show how the stereotypical assumptions and value judgments encoded in the rhetoric of blackness are allegorically manipulated to suit the needs of Christian England while Africa suffers erasure. Chapters Three and Four foreground the idea that the physical presence of black African characters on the stage becomes a sign of an entire set of actual and imagined differences by which England constructs her view of Africans as prime, visible signifiers of cultural difference. Chapter Four goes a step further and looks at those dramatic texts in which seemingly fixed categories are revealed as unstable, especially when overlaps in race, gender, and social rank come into play. The representation of black African characters on the English Renaissance stage thus reveals a definite correlation between the dominant culture's fears and anxieties over the perceived threat posed by the black African other, its insistence on a self-representation as a distinctly superior culture, and its subsequent and systematic production of Africa and Africans as indelibly other. For the dominant culture to be able to define, produce, and maintain itself as superior, it must, of necessity, strive to keep the other in a position of chronic inferiority, hence the persistent appeal to stereotypes.

Thesis (Ph.D.) -- McMaster University, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 253-274). Also available via World Wide Web.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2008. / Vita. List of figures shows incorrect page numbers. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 670-720).

Thesis (M.A.(Afrikaans))--University of Pretoria, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references.

Canada's continued forgetfulness concerning slavery here, and the nation-state's attempts to record only Canada's role as a place of sanctuary for escaping African-Americans, is part of the story of absenting blackness from its history. Rinaldo Walcott The fact that people of African descent have had a presence in Canada for over four hundred years is not well known within the Canadian mainstream. The fact that slavery existed as an institution in Canada is another fact that is not well known. Within the Canadian mainstream writing of African-Canadian history, Blacks most often appear in historical narratives around the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, as American fugitives or refugees—either as escaping slaves or British Loyalists. Through the representative writing of the "the Black refugee," Canada is often constructed as a "Promised Land," a sanctuary or safe haven for Blacks, a place of refuge and redemption that does not speak to the complex history of slavery that existed well before the American exodus. Many Black Canadian writers and scholars argue that there is a price to be paid for this kind of representation. First, the absence of people of African descent in Canadian historical narratives, prior to the coming o f the American refugees, ignores the long presence of Blacks in Canada and the contributions that Blacks have made in the development of Canada. Second, in focusing on the American Loyalists and refugee slaves, Canadian writers and historians often construct Black Canadians as a homogenous, genderless group, ignoring the diversity within Canada's Black population and, in particular, the concerns of Black women. Finally, the mainstream representation of Canada as a 'safe haven' proves problematic for any critical discussion of racism in contemporary Canadian society, for notions of "Canada the good" and "America the evil" that arose from those crossings North still penetrate the Canadian mainstream today. This autobiocritical exploration examines the representation of the haven and offers alternative readings to contemporary mainstream writings of African-Canadian history. In part one, I track the appearance of Black Canadians, over the past fifty years, from 1949 to 2001, in a survey of mainstream and scholarly texts. Using the results of this survey, which does not see the appearance of Blacks in Canada until 1977, I examine how mainstream texts might use the works of Black writers to offer more critical and complex histories of Black Canadians and, in particular, Black women. In part two, I take up an analysis of George Elliott Clarke's Beatrice Chancy. Seen as a counter-narrative to mainstream writings of African-Canadian history, Clarke's work, which takes up the subject of slavery in early-nineteenth century Nova Scotia, presents an/Other kind of Loyalist story, one with a Black woman at its centre. In this discussion I examine how Clarke's poetic work subverts the national narrative, as he speaks to the diversity within blackness and the complexities in defining racial identities.