George Washington University

        When Lefkowitz and Bernal had their mano a mano at
George Washington University in the fall of 1995, I was a
very interested member of the audience, and possibly the
only one who had read--and used--the works of both.  They
are very nearly opposites philosophically and ideologically,
and therefore methodologically.

        Lefkowitz's _The Lives of the Greek Poets_, while
faintly conjuring up hopes for Johnsonian biography and
criticism, is instead a very thorough compilation of all
references to the Greek poets.  Another valuable source book
is Lefkowitz and Fant's _Women's Life in Greece and Rome_,
now out in a second, enlarged edition. This too is a
compilation of all possible documents, touching all possible
aspects of the lives of women in classical European
antiquity--no one interested in those lives should be
without a copy. This, I think, is what Lefkowitz does best:
the careful excavation of historical evidence, with minimal
or no interpretation. She believes, clearly, in that sort of
history, but also that there is luminous truth accessible to
the objective scholar--never to any single person in its
entirety, but as slowly emerging, the result of the work of
centuries. As we all know, notions of shifting paradigms and
intellectual revolutions are absolutely incompatable with
this view.

        Her _Women in Greek Myth_ is an effort to counter
some of the more anachronistic features of feminist readings
of classical European antiquity, but is weakened by
Lefkowitz's inability to acknowledge the misogyny of Greek
culture, particularly after the archaic age. She goes beyond
myth, of course, and incorporates Aristotle and the
Hippocratic corpus in her discussion. Anyone who can
conclude such a discussion (not informed by psychoanalytic
theory) with "To the Greeks. . . what makes women appealing
and dangerous is not their beauty or sexuality, but their
intelligence" is not looking at women in Greek myth and
culture but is shoring up the reputation of classical
Greece, at any cost.

        This beleaguered shoring up explodes into rage in
Lefkowitz's _Not Out of Africa_, the mere title of which
sends out all sorts of denials, even possibly of the now
widely accepted view that all humankind is one vast African
diaspora. The book is unsavory in its hints, innuendo, and
represents what I call the Pandora's Box view of Bernal's
work: he is somehow responsible for the weirdness of the
views of people like Jeffreys, or, at least, terribly
culpable in giving comfort and authority to "the enemy."
She doesn't actually say so, but the accusation whispers
from every page. One tries and tries to feel some
sympathy--for a serious and dedicated scholar who is rightly
disturbed by the egregious nonsense written about
Aristotle's relationship to the Library of Alexandria, for
instance--but she sabotages all such efforts by refusing to
ask why these alternative histories are being written, to
acknowledge the equally grotesque distortions of European
historiography, and by continuing to insist that classicist
scholarship has been and is free of racism.

        _Black Athena Revisited_ shamelessly exploits
Bernal's title. (Would that Bernal had not dabbled in the
genre himself--his original "African Athena" would have
saved us all a great deal of trouble. However, it must be
said that the Euro-American hysteria over "Black" Athena
(the goddess Neit) comes oddly from the inventors of the
one-drop rule, in force for centuries, and applied
widely--but not to Egypt.) The book is interesting as a
response to Bernal, as a partial portrait of the ideology of
(largely senior)  representatives of various disciplines,
and, inadvertantly, as a tribute to Bernal. Bernal himself
questioned its validity and ethics in light of two absences:
a chapter by him, and responses by some of the scholars who
look very favorably on his work (among them distinguished
people such as John Ray, Jasper Griffin, Molly Levine, G.
W.Bowersock). And here we do indeed see the elusiveness of
Lefkowitz's truth-seeking objectivity. In response to
Bernal's comment Lefkowitz merely pointed out that the book
was too bulky as it was--there was simply not enough room to
include Bernal or anyone else.  Pathetic.

        Unlike Lefkowitz, Bernal doesn't work towards
luminous truths but towards probabiliies, and, in Volume I
at least (very different in tone from Volume II) flirts with
indeterminacy while making some truth-claims of his own. He
subscribes to the epistemology of paradigm shifts, and of
scholars' inability to transcend their own cultures. His
most serious offense is probably his virtuoso praxis of the
interdisciplinarity we all theorize (though it's doubtful
that his severest critics in the most conservative of
disciplines, Classics, Ancient History, and Egyptology even
theorize it), an element explicit or implied in all
unfavorable reviews of his work, including Roland Oliver's
disappointing review.

        His review appears to be merely summarizing the
various contributions--and this, fairly, it seems to me--but
also endorses Lefkowitz's view of scholarship and has a deep
faith in the authority of the "experts," not in
propositional statements as much as in "incidental" remarks.
The contributors are described as being not
"dyed-in-the-wool defenders of their several professional
traditions, but rather as seekers after truth. . . ."

Oliver doesn't distance himself from the view of the
critics: "The classicist and linguistic contributors to the
volume are noticeably less tolerant of Bernal's lack of
professional rigour in handling his evidence." He accepts
the judgments of the "experts" at face value, and on the
question of whether or not he has himself read Bernal's
work, he maintains a dignified silence. Judging from the end
of the second paragraph (about whether or not the Egyptians
were black), he hasn't, or at least not very carefully. I
suspect this to have been very often the case, after Volume
I especially: people hadn't read it and took the title as an
encapsulated thesis, or they watched each other, to see
whether or not to take Bernal seriously, or perhaps
attempted to read it, but gave up when they realized that
they could not evaluate Bernal's use of evidence (it takes a
committee).

        Even the usually measured Mudimbe dismissed Bernal
as someone merely riding on the coattails of Cheikh Anta
Diop and others and getting too much attention for it, when
I asked him a question about Volume I at the Harvard English
Institute in 1989;  in _The Idea of Africa_ Mudimbe
nonetheless pays Bernal handsome tribute. In a TLS review of
Volume II, John Ray, the Cambridge Egyptologist, writes:
"Bernal is a civilized man, who is close to being a one-man
university. If he awarded his own degrees, it would not be
outrageous."  Ray is one of the few scholars, who is not
threatened by Bernal's erudition; most others are unable to
evaluate all the evidence of Bernal's stunning achievement
and therefore find it more congenial to circle the
disciplinary wagons.

        Bernal expected to be ignored and reviled by
academics and hoped for a readership among the general
public, but he clearly also set out to shift the paradigm.
Now he has become embroiled in academic controversy, and
with the scholarly right wing, at that. Last Year when I
rang Rutgers U Press, inquiring about Volume III, I was told
it would be out within the year. In the fall, at GWU, Bernal
said he had to put it aside to work on "Black Athena Writes
Back." I think that's a serious mistake. What do you think?

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