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HIST 241|ANCMED 202 Facing the Slave/Carlos Museum (Main)

The white marble statues and busts that fill the galleries of Greek and Roman art, including those of Emory's Carlos Museum, present a familiar idealizing vision of the classical past that is often also an idealizing vision of the West's cultural inherita

New interpretative label assignment and library research

Please make a consultation with me, Kim Collins, to discuss your assignment.   Let me know the art work you have chosen. 

Write a 500-1000 word biography for your object, considering these different object-human relationships and its (changing) function and significance over time. You may want to draw on the slave narratives you have read (and written), as well as your object descriptions. The biography is due Sep. 30.

Reading List, a small selection

Consider the different relationships your object may have accrued in antiquity (who made, used, and viewed it? How did they interact with it? In what circumstances?). What might the object have represented to these people? How might their perspective change its meaning, specifically in terms of how slavery and enslaved people are shown?

  • Gladiators
  • Greek funerary sculpture
  • White-ground lekythoi
  • Athenian comedy, slave’s masks, Hellenistic terracottas
  • Cinerary urns 
  • Female portraiture and hair