Black Feminisms and Roman Archaeology

Over thirty years ago, Shelley Haley (1993) asked if there is a role for Black feminist thought in Classics. She argued that ‘through Black feminist thought, classics can be radically transformed from a discipline into a multiracial, multicultural, multivalent field which better reflects the ancient world it studies’ (Haley 1993: 38). Over two years ago now, I reflected on the fact that Black feminist scholarship would be a most suitable subject for the panel at the Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference (TRAC) at University College London (UCL) on ‘A Feminist, Postcolonial Roman Archaeology’ because it sits exactly at the intersection of postcolonial and feminist theory. However, it is also doubly marginalized within western systems of knowledge: by race and gender. I wondered if it would be again at the conference, asking myself, will anyone submit an abstract about Black feminisms and Roman archaeology? Ultimately, I did present a preliminary version of the arguments gathered here.

Now I ask, is it possible to do Black feminist Roman archaeology? I reflect on how effectively Black feminist thought has been integrated into the study of the Roman material past, with some theories and methodologies, such as Saidiya Hartman’s (2008) critical fabulation, gaining more traction than others. How can this rich body of scholarship be employed by archaeologists, and scholars in adjacent fields, to better understand blackness in the Roman world and, even, can it be applied outside studies of race? In this introductory section, I delineate the space, or lack thereof, that Black feminist thought occupies within the academe, as well as its relationship to Black Studies more broadly and, finally, to Roman studies. I outline my own Black feminist methodology, which is also hauntological (with origins in Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (1994)), reflecting critically upon and moving beyond critical fabulation. Then, in subsequent sections, I turn to two case studies for applying Black feminist approaches to the archaeology of the Roman past, one from Pompeii and the other from Hadrian’s Wall. Finally, I offer concluding remarks on the implications of doing Black feminist work amidst the political moment in which we find ourselves.

Black feminist thought, along with scholarship from Black Studies more broadly, has had a greater impact on the study of antiquity in the United States than in the United Kingdom, even though a rich tradition of Black British studies exists (Warmington 2014; Andrews and Palmer 2016), including its own understanding of feminism (Mirza 1997). It must be granted, however, that Black Studies originates from a theorizing of the African American experience and its roots in transatlantic enslavement, stemming from the writings of the so-called father of the discipline, W.E.B. Du Bois (1904). Much of the work of scholars across the Black and African community outside of North America responds to the dominance of an understanding of blackness rooted in, or dependent on, an African American experience — including by those who might be considered giants of the Black British tradition: C.L.R. James (James and Grimshaw 1992), Stuart Hall (2021b) and Paul Gilroy (1993). It must also be noted that James and Hall were born in British colonies in the Caribbean, Trinidad and Jamaica, whilst Gilroy is of Caribbean heritage with maternal ties to Guyana, like this author herself. Black British studies is therefore a product of the colonized Caribbean and primarily articulates that experience, between the colonies and the imperial centre, in the twentieth century (see Robinson 2000: 252–270 on Black scholars in the metropole). Some might suggest that the relevance of this experience to contemporary British society is ageing out, and perhaps this is why the field is less vibrant today, but the Windrush scandal (see Gentleman 2019; for the Windrush generation in their own voice, see Matthews 2018; Grant 2019), has proven that, if anything, the issues articulated by these scholars are all the more prevalent and pressing (see Wambu 2023). Classical studies, for its part, continues to have a troubled relationship with British history in the Caribbean (Greenwood 2010; Bhalerao 2023a).

Black Studies in the United States also has a long institutional presence, with numerous dedicated programs and departments,¹ aided by the existence of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) where many prolific scholars have built their careers, including the notable Black classicist and scholar of race in antiquity Frank M. Snowden Jr. (1970; 1983). Indeed, the tradition of Black classicists in the United States dates to the nineteenth century with William Sanders Scarborough (et al. 2006), thought to be the first African American classical scholar (Ronnick 2021) and John Wesley Gilbert, who was the first African American to study at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (Lee 2022).

In contrast, Black Studies in the UK has been de-institutionalized since the abrupt closure in 2002 of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham, founded by Stuart Hall and Richard Hoggart in 1964, which was not only the hub for scholarly activity in this field, but also supported and promoted the work of Black academics in Britain (Warmington 2014: 98). Birmingham City University (BCU) pioneered the UK’s first Black Studies BA degree, but it was officially discontinued in 2024, and subsequent postgraduate Black Studies programmes have also been axed due to low recruitment. As of 2016, there have been no named Black studies degree programmes, departments or centres located within the British university system demonstrating, as Lisa Palmer (2016: 10) argues, that ‘Black lives and Black intellectual thought are seen as inconsequential to British society and to the production of knowledge within the British universities’. Therefore, it is rare for Classics and Archaeology to coexist with Black thought on a British university campus and students at UK institutions are less likely than their counterparts in the US to go between a Black theory class and a Roman archaeology seminar (as I have during my American graduate program, unlike my undergraduate degree in the UK). That being said, there are still universities in the UK where this is possible — such as Leeds, to give one example — and the current political climate in the United States is hostile to Black Studies, with critical race theory becoming a particularly resonant target for populist right-wing politicians, and so, at the time of writing, it is difficult to predict how much longer it will continue to exist at American universities (along with the humanities in general).

It is not inconspicuous that all the scholars I mentioned immediately above are men, which points to how women and feminist thought have been excluded from the Black scholarly tradition. Hazel Carby (1998: 25), who was affiliated with CCCS, critiques Black Studies, going back to Du Bois as being patriarchal and quasi-patrilineal, concerned with ‘the reproduction of Race Men’ in the continuity of intellectual generations. She argues not only that Black male scholars are not interested in mentoring, promoting or working with women but also that they are not concerned with the advancement of Black women in society, seeing racism as a burden shouldered primarily by Black men and the route to overcoming it through their education and uplift. In particular, she critiques Du Bois’ retelling of the myth of Atalanta (as a metaphor for the city of Atlanta) in The Souls of Black Folk (Du Bois 1904; see also Aigbedion 2019) as conveying the idea of women as an unproductive site for shaping a Black future that is political, intellectual or social, and for his lustful, sexually charged description of the figure (Carby 1998: 19–20). Twenty years on, Jennifer Nash (2019: 22) shares Carby’s concern about the place of Black women within the discipline, stating that as Black Studies moves towards theorizing death as central to black subjectivity, ‘the dead are always figured as black men, and black women are those who mourn, who grieve, and who make visible black male suffering’ — this too whilst Black women labouring within the academe are dying young from being overworked.

Black feminism, therefore, remains marginal within Black Studies, as Nash (2019: 4) argues, but she is more concerned about its treatment within the field of women’s studies, arguing that Black women are used as symbols for the field’s progress whilst it ‘retains little interest in the materiality of black women’s bodies, the complexity of black women’s experiences, or the heterogeneity of black women’s intellectual and creative production’. This demonstrates Sara Ahmed’s (2012: 33–35) critique of the diversity agenda, that if it (like colour) becomes something that is added to organizations — or, in this case, fields of study — it reifies the whiteness already in place and allows it to be reproduced without being perceived as problematic. Nonetheless — and crucially for my question of whether it is possible to do Black feminist Roman archaeology — as methodologies and theorizing from Black feminist thought have become fashionable and gained currency across academic fields amid a trend to uncover ‘lost’ voices or tell ‘marginalized’ histories, Black women scholars have voiced concern about their work, the products of their labour, being deracinated and appropriated, especially by white women scholars, to gain a credential or meet a diversity criterion in an ever-increasingly competitive academic market (Nash 2020; Kotrosits 2024).²

It can be tempting for non-Black scholars to couch their employment of Black feminist methodologies in positionality statements and acknowledgements of their privilege. However, these can serve to exonerate the author from any criticism for not doing their due diligence in citing and recognizing the contexts and authors from which the work they are using originates, which becomes a political act when transposing Black feminist scholarship into other fields, such as Roman archaeology. As Ahmed (2012) argues for the diversity agenda, positionality statements also, conversely, centre whiteness and allow white scholars to assert legitimacy and authority, especially over women of colour (Gani and Khan 2024: 1). I make this critique of positionality statements having previously used them myself; instead of providing one here, I shall articulate what Black feminism means to me.

Black feminism arose from the marginalization of Black women from both Black and women’s liberation movements. As an academic field, therefore, it is inherently and necessarily political. Rather than a skin-color identity, the ‘Black’ in Black feminism can denote a political identity inclusive of other non-black women of colour (Mirza 1997; Ambikaipaker 2018; Nash 2019: 5). Black feminist studies as a field has been built by the labour of women scholars from the Americas to the African continent, Britain to the Caribbean, to Australia and New Zealand, to articulate experiences of womanhood that have been coloured by violence, exploitation, colonization and enslavement. However, it also attempts to elucidate a fully sensory understanding of Black womanhood beyond subjugation and marginalization — encompassing the erotic, intellectual and creative (Nash 2019: 5; see also Hartman 2019) — to reclaim her humanity (Jackson 2020) and challenge what Sylvia Wynter (2003), another CCCS affiliate, terms the over-representation of Man. Black feminist thought, therefore, contains multitudes; it is capable of doing a lot, as Haley (1993) claims in my opening quote, but it is not a fix-all for issues of diversity and under-representation that each field may face of its own.

In addition to the double isolation of Black feminist thought within the academe, my project in this article faces the issue of the marginalization of black women in the material record we study. Following Sarah Derbew (2022: 14), I distinguish between lowercase ‘black,’ as a skin colour identity, and uppercase ‘Black’ referring to a modern, socially constructed identity. In this case, uppercase ‘Black’ is also a political identity that can include other non-black, non-white people. In reference to antiquity and ancient material, lowercase ‘black’ will mostly be used to separate ancient understandings of blackness from modern racial categorizations. It is very difficult to find representations of dark-skinned women in Roman material culture. Not only are women rarely depicted with dark skin in Roman art, as skin colour was gendered with women represented in lighter tones, but where black women do occur in the material record, they have been discarded or overlooked. In her poem Voyage of the Sable Venus, the poet Robin Coste Lewis (2015: 44–45) highlights the literal fragmentary presence of black women in Roman art:

‘Statuette of a Black Slave Girl

Right half of Body and Head Missing,’

 

‘Vase with Neck in the Form of a Head

 

of a Black Statuette of a Female

Figure with Negroid Features

 

Figure’s Left Arm Missing Head

of a Female Full-length Figure

of a Nubian Woman

the Arms Missing’

 

‘Partially Broken Young Black Girl’.

The effect is striking, with the descriptions broken across line breaks, as we are forced to confront the literal dismemberment of black women in our museums and exhibition spaces.³ They are instrumentalized at best, dehumanized at worst.

While the recent volume Gendering Roman Imperialism (Cornwell and Woolf 2022) effectively presents the construction of gender in the Roman world as multi-faceted and diverse through a range of case studies that examine various regional and ethnic identities across the empire, it lacked a robust discussion of skin colour, particularly dark skin, and its intersection with gender. Even the material included in volume one of The Image of the Black in Western Art (Bindman and Gates Jr. 2010), particularly Snowden’s (2010) monograph-length chapter, focusses mainly on depictions of black men in antiquity. The ‘Race Men’ tradition in Black Studies is mimicked in this approach to studying race in antiquity. In fact, similar to Carby on Du Bois, Haley (2009: 41) critiques Snowden (her colleague at Howard University in the 1980s) for being overly sexualizing in a racializing way in his translation of the Pseudo-Virgilian Moretum, claiming that his description of Scybale was ‘reminiscent of a description from 1837 of a “Hottentot” woman’. Our field, too, therefore has not cared about the materiality of black women’s bodies. How could a discipline built, from its foundations, around the Greco-Christian Man, whose dominance in the production of knowledge Wynter (2003) argues against, be otherwise?

In this piece, I attempt to navigate the politics of how, or even whether, to do Black feminist Roman archaeology. Readers might sense in that question some ambivalence and equivocation on the part of this author, which sit at the heart of the politics in this discussion and to which I will return in the concluding section. Nevertheless, I heed Haley’s (1993: 38) exhortation that through Black feminist thought, the discipline can be transformed, and we will be able ‘to re-member, to re-claim, to re-empower the ancient African woman’. In doing so, I reflect on critical fabulation, which is the methodology from Black feminist scholarship that has gained the most traction in ancient studies (Kotrosits 2024; Gaskey Johr et al. 2025: 201). Critical fabulation was developed from Hartman’s (2008: 11) attempts to reckon with how to reconstruct the stories of African women whose lives were lost to the Transatlantic Slave Trade, in order to read beyond the archive and ‘tell an impossible story and to amplify the impossibility of its telling’. A more lengthy discussion and critique of critical fabulation will follow when it is evoked in subsequent sections, but here it bears emphasizing that it has become the central focus of debates about Black feminist thought being deracinated and appropriated as it becomes fashionable (Kotrosits 2024), alongside concerns that uses of Hartman’s work come at the expense of a robust engagement with other Black feminist scholarship (Nash 2019: 20). I myself have reservations about how critical fabulation has been employed within the study of the Roman past — by Deborah Kamen and Sarah Levin-Richardson (2022) in regard to the graffiti at the so-called brothel at Pompeii, to give one example — and I remain cautious in my own engagement with it. Nevertheless, as I will demonstrate, I believe it has the potential to understand womanhood in the Roman world as a multiplicity of experiences and should be explored as a powerful tool with which to reclaim and re-empower ancient women from Africa and beyond.

The Black feminist framework I construct here is also hauntological.⁴ The term hauntology (or hauntologie) derives from Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (1994) and has become a historical method to articulate how the past and unrealized futures haunt history, as something that hovers between presence and absence (Davis 2005; da Silva Ramos 2017; Kleinberg 2017). Like a ghost, the past is unstable; it is an Other; it upsets our ways of knowing — but it should be heard (Davis 2005). Just recently, Yannis Hamilakis (2025: 274) characterized archaeology as a ‘hauntology of remains’ whereby we should all be haunted by material remains as it is ‘the only ethical mode of living possible’. Black feminist thought is also necessarily, intrinsically, hauntological: as in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the spectre of enslavement looms large as Black womanhood and feminism exist in the wake of that experience of violence and subjugation (Sharpe 2016). Consequently, we are all haunted by the Black female body, and the liminal position between human and bestiality into which it has been forced (Jackson 2020: 1) — from Black Studies and Women’s Studies to Roman archaeology, from Coste Lewis’ poetry to Haley and Hartman. However, Black feminist hauntology can be used as a reflexive technique, as Viviane Saleh-Hanna (2015: 3) argues, to unveil white supremacy and ‘to reach beyond the identity/body forming powers of colonizers and captors to produce a more appropriate critique of them’.

Both Haley (1993) and Hartman (2008) are haunted by African women with classical names: Hartman by Venus, Haley by Cleopatra. In her chapter ‘Black Feminist Thought and Classics: Re-Membering, Re-Claiming, Re-Empowering’, Haley (1993: 28) describes her difficult relationship with Afrocentric thought vis-à-vis Cleopatra and her possible blackness, stating ‘it was Cleopatra who haunted me’. In ‘Venus in Two Acts,’ meanwhile, Hartman (2008: 5) originated critical fabulation in order to confront how the figure of a dead enslaved girl called Venus, whose story she previously avoided telling, continued to trouble her after the publication of Lose Your Mother (2007), as ‘one who haunts the present’. Critical fabulation, therefore, is also inherently hauntological, inviting us to reconsider those figures from the historical record whose shadow we cannot escape — just as Haley’s exhortation to re-member, re-claim and re-empower encourages us to face, and embrace, the spectres circling us. Therefore, in constructing a Black feminist Roman archaeology, I will confront my own personal hauntings from Roman material remains: the first, a dark-skinned woman from a wall-painting at Pompeii; the second, the so-called Regina tombstone from Arbeia Fort along Hadrian’s Wall. Sceptical of how much they can be authentically re-empowered, I will nonetheless engage in my own reframing and reclamation of these ancient women through Black feminist scholarship. In this piece, therefore, I allow contradictions to come to the fore — in my own employment of critical fabulation alongside critiquing its dominance and deracination; the optimism of Haley versus the pessimism of Hartman; and between my own attempts at constructing a Black feminist Roman archaeology and my ongoing ambivalence about the suitability of that task to meet our current political moment — and, in all their incongruity, let them stand.

Black Feminisms at Pompeii: A Dark-Skinned Woman with the Queen of Carthage

This fresco (Figure 1), uncovered from the atrium in the House of Meleager at Pompeii when it was first excavated in 1829, depicts a mythological scene: Queen Dido of Carthage is seated on her throne, slightly off centre, as the hero and future founder of Rome, Aeneas, sails away in a ship depicted in the background. It is the moment before she died by suicide after being abandoned. However, that is almost the least striking element of this painting. The viewer’s gaze is immediately drawn not to Dido but to the figure standing to her right: a dark-skinned woman with black hair who appears to be holding an animal tusk. She is one of three women flanking the queen and appears to be in closest proximity to her, offering her the tusk. She also wears a fine tunic with a gold necklace and earrings. Who could blame a viewer for focusing on this figure instead of the queen? Not just because her composition is better preserved, but also because, as established, the presence of dark-skinned women in the Roman material record is sparse. The viewer might easily think: have I seen anything like her before? No. Why is she there? Who is she?

Figure 1: Dido abandoned by Aeneas. Fresco, first century AD. House of Meleager, atrium 2, north wall, central section, Pompeii. National Archaeological Museum of Naples, MANN 8898. (Photo: Marie-Lan Nguyen, Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain).

This figure has haunted me for over four years since the painting was on display in the exhibition ‘Pompeii in Color: The Life of Roman Painting’ at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World in New York,⁵ where I am based. I worked as a docent for the exhibition, leading general tours, and it often fell to me to attempt to answer these questions for members of the public. Like Hartman with Venus, beyond the run of the exhibition I was troubled by my own inadequacy in obfuscating explanations of her presence and by the discomfort I felt talking about her. Discomfort, why? Not only did I think the in-gallery didactics were insufficient to reclaim and re-empower her but, however well I might have prepared for a tour, nothing could quite prepare me for how people would respond to the figure and what comments they might make. Stating the obvious, visitors often remarked that she has much darker skin than the other figures. However, it was often followed by a qualifying statement: ‘and yet she is still so beautiful’. A docent must suppress the urge to respond, ‘Why shouldn’t she be?’ Some visitors made more problematic comments about her physical appearance, such as saying she has ‘kinky hair’, and many made the flawed and poorly worded assumption, ‘she’s black so she must be a slave’. As with Snowden’s description of Scybale (1970: 6), these comments racialize the dark-skinned figure in a way that is also sexist, which in this case we might describe as misogynoir.

On making their observations, visitors to the exhibition would ask ‘Who is she?’ and ‘What is she doing in the painting?’ It is my responses to these questions that continue to haunt me and, four years on, I remain uncertain on whether there is a clear answer. In trying to answer those questions we are, in fact, caught between Haley’s (1993: 38) exhortation ‘to re-member, to re-claim, to re-empower the ancient African woman’ and Hartman’s (2008: 2) warning against ‘committing further violence in [our] own act of narration’. Nonetheless, just as Patricia Kim (2025: 217) uses postcolonial feminisms to dissect personified, feminized depictions of provinces in friezes from nearby Boscoreale, I employ Black feminist theory to understand the representation of this dark-skinned woman at Pompeii. In doing so, I hope to navigate this tension and reach some answers authentic to an experience of womanhood in the Roman world.

We must first attempt to untangle her visual representation. As Emily Hurt (2025: 129) states in her recent article, there is much debate over the identity of the women surrounding Dido. When the painting was first unearthed, it was interpreted as an allegory for the three continents, with the dark-skinned woman representing Africa (Snowden 2010; Grimaldi et al. 2021: 116), but what does it mean to make one woman stand for a whole continent? To our group of docents during the run of the exhibition, this was an unsatisfactory answer because it does not recognize the diversity of the African continent and misleadingly conflates blackness with Africanness, especially in the case of modern-day Tunisia. Furthermore, as Hurt (2025: 130) argues, in no other context have scholars identified a dark-skinned female figure as a personification of Africa. She could also represent the city of Carthage, as the exhibition label stated. Indeed, the painting was also earlier misidentified as the apotheosis of Alexandria (Snowden 2010). However, these are still generalizations that interpret the figure as a personification rather than as an individual person. The question also remains, which Hurt does not address, why depict her as black?

The darkness of her skin is further emphasized by its contrast with the white of the ivory tusk she holds, the inclusion of which is additionally perplexing. The figure on the other side also wears what appears to be an elephant scalp. Hurt (2025) interprets this figure as a north African version of Juno Caelestis, positioning the elephant headdress iconography in a long tradition of imagery associated with the goddess, but she does not address the tusk held by the dark-skinned woman. It could serve as a facet of personification (Maritz 2004), evoking an African animal, but its inclusion as adornment also Others the female body. Zakiyyah Iman Jackson (2020: 4) argues that black female flesh constitutes ‘the limit case of “the human”’, subject to bestialization and persistent raciality. In this framework, could the proximity between the dark-skinned woman and animal parts be understood as an early form of racialization of the black female body? An effort has certainly been made to depict the dark-skinned figure as distinct from the others. Nonetheless, Jackson (2020: 4) encourages us to ‘look beyond recognition as human as the solution to the bestialization of blackness’ by ‘lingering on modes of being/knowing/feeling that gesture toward the overturning of Man’. In the case of this figure, I ask if this can be achieved by reaching beyond the allegorical and seeking to reclaim and re-empower her as more than a human, as an individual. In doing so, ever cautious of deracination and appropriation, I turn to critical fabulation.

Critical fabulation consists of ‘a series of speculative arguments’ in fashioning a narrative that can produce ‘a critical reading of the archive that mimes the figurative dimensions of history’, to ‘simultaneously tell an impossible story and to amplify the impossibility of its telling’ (Hartman 2008: 11). It originated as a response to Hartman’s own experience reckoning with the archive of slavery in the process of writing Lose Your Mother (2007) and continues a strand of developing an expansive form of writing to articulate the Black female experience that has defined her career from Scenes of Subjection (1997) to Wayward Lives (2019). Critical fabulation exists in the subjunctive mood, a grammatical dimension perhaps more familiar to their ancient Greek- and Latin-speaking subjects than to the Anglophone scholar (though archaeological interpretation is frequently framed in terms of possibilities and likelihoods), that is inhabited by possibilities and wishes but also uncertainties and doubts of what could have been. This too is a liminal and haunted space, occupied by unrealized futures.

It has been applied to material from the Roman world, particularly to uncover the perspectives and experiences of the enslaved. Deborah Kamen and Sarah Levin-Richardson (2022), for example, reconstruct the perspectives of enslaved women mentioned in the epigraphic record, including from the manumission records at Delphi and graffiti at the so-called brothel at Pompeii, the same social and historical context as my dark-skinned woman here. However, they do not show the narrative restraint that Hartman (2008: 12) demands, ‘respecting the black noise’ of loss and violence, instead creating narratives that veer on the fantastical. Candida Moss (2024) demonstrates more reticence in constructing the lives of the enslaved scribes who wrote the Bible, accompanied by a substantial online resource of sources to support her more imaginative interventions.⁶

Recent ventures into critical fabulation by scholars of antiquity have aimed to restore, recover and reconstruct, demonstrating that, as Maia Kotrosits (2024: 3) argues, our fields are primarily interested in its recuperative potential. However, existing in the subjunctive as it does, critical fabulation is not supposed to be a method of recovery or restoration, it also leaves space for loss and the voids of history. The preservation of this space is where the method’s hauntological and Afro-pessimist dimensions are clear. As Hartman (2008: 11) states, the goal is not to recover the lives of the enslaved or redeem the dead, but ‘laboring to paint as full a picture of the lives of the captives as possible’. Indeed, she explicitly asserts that ‘the intent of this practice is not to give voice to the slave’ (Hartman 2008: 12). Yet we might find a subtle contradiction in these two modes of narration, one that, I would argue, scholars of antiquity who attempt to employ critical fabulation wrestle with and often fail to grasp, giving too much voice and agency to their subjects (e.g. Kamen and Levin-Richardson 2022). Archaeologists are accustomed to speculating about the past, but critical fabulation provides us with guidelines and boundaries on how and when to do so — and, crucially, to know when to speculate no further. In respecting the black noise, we must fight our recuperative, restorative urges and refrain from projecting emotions and reactions onto our subjects or offering them a path, towards emancipation from the violence of the archive, that did not exist. Critical fabulation thus accepts the social death of the subject (Patterson 1982); it does not seek to undo it through processes of narration.

It is, therefore, the act of the labour itself, and reckoning with the contradictions and tensions facing the task, that matters more than the result. In a deft employment of apophasis (or praeteritio, for the Latinists), Hartman (2008: 8–9) does not, in fact, commit to a reconstructed narrative for Venus, as those who follow her do in their fabulations, instead modelling a handful and then retracting them. In this labour, to my understanding, critical fabulation is predicated on the historian being personally haunted; on the archaeologist knowing the limits to their evidence and their own abilities; on the writer asking, ‘If there were words, would they be appropriate?’ It is a self-reflective, interrogative exercise in critical writing, in stretching the bounds of unemotive but evocative prose. The reflection that comes from committing to that exercise can provide valuable interventions for the historian and archaeologist of the Roman past, encouraging us to accept the virtue of uncovering a variety of possible, authentic lived experiences in antiquity whilst recognizing violence.

What could I say in a critical fabulation about this dark-skinned woman? In fact, it could easily be said one would not be appropriate, as we are dealing with a visual representation, not a textual archive, and the subject is not a real, historical individual. However, it should not take much convincing to scholars of a past with a scant textual, historical record that we are demanded to expand the scope of our archive to include visual material, including mythological scenes. We can read art, and visual representation, as an archive that speaks to some historical experience. In this case, it is revealing of a very real Roman perception of Carthage, whether in their own period or projected onto an earlier one. Furthermore, though the character may be based in a mythological scene, how do we know that the figure is not a real individual? The painter could have drawn on someone they saw in their daily life, whose experience — especially as a dark-skinned woman — we would otherwise have no chance of uncovering. Therefore, in this case, I would argue that critical fabulation can help us to cut through these overlapping layers to capture a sense of a real, lived experience of which we know little due to underrepresentation in the ancient archive, allowing us to move beyond personification to an understanding of this woman as a person.

Would that it were so easy to locate ourselves in the subjunctive in Anglophone academic prose, but I shall try. I could say that were she Dido’s sister (De Caro 1994: n. 118), it would explain her proximity to the queen and her fine adornment. I could project their closeness from Virgil’s Aeneid book 4 onto the composition and fashion a narrative about the bond between two sisters in one’s final moments. I doubt, though, that she would be Dido’s sister, because why would the artist portray them so physically different? Were she Phoenician Dido’s sister, her presence as a black woman would remain uncertain and inexplicable.

To stay within the Virgilian tradition, I could say that she may be the Massylian priestess whom Dido consults, who Haley positions as black African, as the Massylii may have been the ancestors of the Maasai in east Africa and her rituals described have strong parallels to traditional Yoruba rituals (Haley 2009: 38; see also Giusti 2023). We could similarly imagine her guiding the queen through the rituals and preparing her for death. If she were the priestess as understood by Haley, it would also explain both her attending position to the queen and why she is depicted with dark skin — perhaps too conveniently. We might wish it were so. However, it could also be argued that this interpretation collapses the diversity of African peoples and traditions, between antiquity and modernity, in a way we would want to avoid.

I, personally, wish she could be just a local woman. Why, when we find a rare depiction of a dark-skinned woman in Roman art, must we attribute some greater significance to her? It is not unfathomable — in fact, it is probable — that a black person could have lived in Carthage, which has recently been characterized as a diverse and multicultural city (Dridi 2019; Hobson 2019) and so she could be a local Carthaginian woman whom the artist added to the scene, alongside others who happen to be light-skinned, to convey the city’s milieu.⁷ I thus wish to reclaim and re-empower her beyond personification not as a character, but as one example of what a local Carthaginian may have looked like and testament to the racial diversity of the ancient Mediterranean world.

In that narrative, though, where is the space for the violence and inequalities of the material archive? However much we might wish to, we cannot dismiss the possibility that she could be enslaved. She is still in a servile position and acts as a human prop, holding the animal tusk, fitting Noel Lenski’s (2018b) ‘working model’ framework of enslaved people being depicted in functional roles in Roman art (for a counter approach, see Bielfeldt 2018). If she were, we could think of her being transported across the Saharan traffic routes (see Fentress 2011; Schörle 2012) with goods such as gold (Desanges 2010) and then, even, traded onwards north to Sicily, Italy or Spain (Leclant 2010; Lewis 2018: 262).⁸ Again, she may be based on a local Pompeiian woman whom the painter sighted, having made her way to the city via these routes. This demonstrates how art functions as historical archive and also contributes to our understanding of diversity in the Roman world. However, unlike Kamen and Levin-Richardson (2022) do for their Pompeiian women, I prefer not to imagine what my dark-skinned woman’s inner monologue of thoughts and emotions about her situation might be; that does not respect the black noise intrinsic to an enslaved experience. Contradictions thus remain in how to approach this figure and she may continue to haunt me. For now, I prefer that we leave her as a local Carthaginian woman, perhaps with an history of enslavement, in the service of attending to the queen. Through critical fabulation, nonetheless, we have elucidated a variety of experiences of ancient black womanhood that should be held together, at the same time, in our understanding not only of this image but of the Roman past.

Black Feminisms at Hadrian’s Wall: A Woman Called Queenie at the Final Frontier

This second woman from Roman material culture has lurked in the back of my mind for over a decade, just as her presence has intrigued and troubled British classicists and archaeologists since being unearthed in 1878. Regina, fondly called ‘Queenie’ (Beard 2015: 509) by this same group of scholars, is commemorated in a second-century monumental tombstone (Figure 2) found at Arbeia Fort along Hadrian’s Wall, in modern-day South Shields on the River Tyne, near Newcastle. The tombstone was erected by a Palmyrene man, Barates, to commemorate his wife — and freedwoman — from southeastern England (modern Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire and Cambridgeshire). I have been familiar with Regina since I was a teenager studying Latin at a school in north London, as she, and Barates, regularly feature in public programming on Roman Britain and its diversity.⁹

Figure 2: Tombstone of Regina. Stone, AD 100–200. Arbeia, South Shields Roman Fort. On display in the exhibition ‘Legion: Life in the Roman Army’ at the British Museum, 1 February – 23 June 2024. (Author’s photo 2024, licensed under CC BY NC in accordance with British Museum guidance).

There are several iconographic elements to the tombstone that gesture to different ethnic identities, evoking interest among archaeologists. Regina was a Celtic woman of the Catuvellaunian tribe, as we know from the tombstone’s inscription, and she is depicted wearing the signature accessory of Celtic identities: the torc (Hemelrijk 2023; Carroll 2014). There is one around her neck and two on her right arm. The ruffled neck is also a feature of Celtic sleeved tunics worn by women on the middle Rhine in the mid-first century and she wears a Gallic coat, commonly worn in the northern provinces including Britain (Carroll 2014). As Emily Hemelrijk (2023: 25) discusses, the practice of women being represented in native dress was common in burial monuments across the northern provinces of the Roman Empire. However, these fashion trends predate the tombstone: as Maureen Carroll (2014: 295) states, torcs were no longer worn as jewellery in Britain by Regina’s time. Whilst she is wearing British dress, therefore, it is not from the immediately pre-Roman period. Why might she be depicted in outdated clothes? I would suggest that the tombstone is deliberately archaizing in order to emphasize native Celtic culture and its pre-existence of Roman rule.

The tombstone also contains several Palmyrene elements, including the signature spindle and distaff, posturing to her husband’s heritage. Indeed, it is generally believed that this tombstone, among others found at South Shields, was produced by a Palmyrene craftsman who had travelled with the regiment (Carroll 2014: 285), though they would have needed to learn to work with different materials and forms of statuary. Iconographically, the tombstone adopts some features known from Palmyrene art such as her hairstyle (albeit poorly preserved). Are there any Roman features to this monument? The form, a tombstone, is itself distinctly Roman; as Carroll (2014: 285) states, there was no pre-Roman tradition of erecting monuments with texts and figural representation in Britain. In fact, the most common type of funerary portrait surviving from Roman Britain is full-figure representation of the deceased, among which Regina is the finest (Hope 1997: 251–252). These were popular among immigrants (Hope 1997: 257), suggesting that in erecting the tombstone, Barates was attempting to invest in some common, Roman, public tradition.

The most striking element of the tombstone, for which it is so famous, is its bilingual inscription in Latin and Aramaic (RIB 1065). It is from these archival fragments that the story of Regina and Barates has been crafted. Interestingly, though, the Aramaic inscription provides far fewer details compared to the Latin. In Latin, this ancient woman is Regina liberta et coniuge (Regina, freedwoman and wife) — in that order — Catuallauna an(norum) XXX (a Catuvellaunian of thirty years) and Barates is identified as Palmyrenus (Palmyrene).¹⁰ In Aramaic, however, she is only described as his freedwoman. This inscription is thus consistent with the phenomenon of differing multilingual inscriptions in the provinces characterized by David Mattingly (2023: 399), in relation to Roman Africa, as conveying a ‘discrepant identity’. He argues that through their epitaphs, individuals living under the Roman Empire were codeswitching between different identities, in particular between the public and civic, and the familial or local. The Latin on Regina’s tombstone certainly seems public facing, providing an outline of her social statuses within the empire, whilst the Aramaic may have been intended for Barates and his community. That still does not explain why it is so brief and does not refer to Regina as his wife.

In 2024, the tombstone was on display at the British Museum as part of the exhibition Legion: Life in the Roman Army.¹¹ I encountered it, this time, as a spectator; it was not my job to explain and communicate the object’s meaning to an audience, as it was for the exhibition on Pompeii, but to absorb and understand what the museum was trying to tell me. Having been excited to finally meet Regina after a decade (and having just spoken about her up the road at UCL), I was disappointed by our encounter. Regina has long loomed large in how Britain reconceives of its diversity and multiculturalism vis-à-vis its Roman past, as I shall discuss shortly, but those themes — along with the role of women in military life — were presented at the end of the exhibition as afterthoughts. Therefore, to me, this tombstone (and the figure of Regina herself) lost its wider resonances at the British Museum, where it was presented at the back with a minimal label, as one of many representations of women living in the military outposts. If a visitor did not already know about the tombstone or seek it out like I did, they could easily miss it (although the website would have you believe it was a highlight object). I was struck by how, in being transported from the final frontier of one empire to the centre of another — and to its repository of imperial loot no less — the tombstone had in fact been relegated to the edges (literally, at the back of The Sainsbury Exhibitions Gallery).

Fifteen years prior, in contrast, the Regina tombstone had appeared in the touring exhibition ‘An Archaeology of ‘Race’: Exploring the Northern Frontier in Roman Britain’ which was displayed in Wallsend and Carlisle, both towns along Hadrian’s Wall. According to its curators, Divya Tolia-Kelly and Claire Nesbitt (2009: 2), the exhibition aimed ‘to demythologize the northern frontier […] as a space of homogeneous English folk, shielded from flows of populations and cultural influence’. On that day at the British Museum two years ago, I reflected on the contrast between the goals of its display in 2009 versus in 2024. It no longer seemed possible to mount an explicitly postcolonial exhibition, and so I asked myself: what has changed in fifteen years? Politically, a lot. That period saw seismic shifts in British politics of multiculturalism: from what is, in a neoliberal framework, regarded as the peak of British optimism in celebrating our diversity and multiculturalism during the London Olympics in 2012, to the results of the referendum on whether to leave the European Union a mere four years later in 2016 and the embittered debates that followed, the immigration policy of ‘hostile environment’, the refugee crisis, the Windrush scandal and, lest we forget, the culture wars and the ‘anti-woke’ agenda. Britain’s Roman past was not exempt from the reactionary politics against diversity and multiculturalism of this period: in 2017, the BBC faced backlash for a cartoon for children about life in Roman Britain that featured a high-ranking soldier with dark skin as the father of a mixed-race family (Dwyer 2017; Higgins 2017). In 2022, meanwhile, the Cambridge Latin Course, for schoolchildren learning Latin, was criticized for giving into the ‘woke agenda’ for making changes to better reflect the empire’s ethnic mix and the harsh realities of enslavement (Weale 2022). Considering how the presentation of the Regina tombstone has changed, it seems it too has been ensnared in these political shifts, with the British museum minimising the presence and role of foreigners at Hadrian’s Wall (for similar criticism of the exhibition, see Millington 2025).

As Andrew Gardner (2026) has recently argued, throughout this turbulent period in national politics, modern British self-identity has constantly wrestled with the Roman past and how this resonates with later imperial history. This involves fashioning a narrative that neatly and continuously repositions Britain from the periphery of one empire to the centre of another. I argue that this was done by emphasizing exactly that characteristic of Roman Britain with which the political right now takes issue: its diversity. Hadrian’s Wall, where Regina and Barates lived, as the ‘debatable lands’ (Hingley and Hartis 2011) between civilization and barbarism, with its diverse population from across the empire unified by one, imperial, identity, can be positioned as a template for Britain as a natural centre of the world, where people come from near and far. However, this idea of Britain’s enduring diversity and multiculturalism neglects to recognize that, in both antiquity and modernity, it has been the result of imperialism.

From the moment the tombstone was unearthed in 1878, it became an emblem in service of this idea. When first published, it was described as ‘a curious illustration of that most colossal of all political creation — the Roman empire, that this man of Tadmor [Palmyra] province marries a British maiden in the extreme north of the Roman province of Britain’ (De Gray Birch 1878: 493). It thus also came to stand for the Roman Empire at large, but here the idea of Britain as a diverse place, a microcosm for empire, resurfaces. As the tombstone was excavated, British industrial production and imperial power were reaching a zenith. It was also forty years since the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, allowing for lesser focus on Regina’s enslavement and a more sympathetic portrayal of her relationship with Barates.

Transported from a black-skinned woman depicted at Pompeii to an English woman living at the final frontier of the Roman Empire, one might wonder, what does this have to do with Black feminisms? In many respects, Regina is a more appropriate ancient woman to attempt to recover and reclaim with Black feminist thought, despite what colour her skin may have been. As is becoming clear, her history has been defined by two empires: her life’s trajectory by the Roman Empire and her afterlife, or reception, by the British Empire and its legacy. As I will argue, she shared those experiences that are foundational to understanding Black womanhood in the wake of the Atlantic era: enslavement and forced movement. It remains possible that she was born enslaved, to an enslaved mother. Her enslavement also points to another aspect of her relationality to the British empire: the tombstone appears in a 2008 report on ‘South Shields’ links to the trans-Atlantic slave trade’ (Lilley 2008) to emphasize that the town was long home to enslaved people and implicated in slavery across historical periods. Furthermore, as Saleh-Hanna (2015) argues, a Black feminist hauntology of Regina could enable us to hold a mirror to white supremacy and imperialism in Britain, reaching beyond how she has been implicated in the politics of the colonizer to critique them. The romanticization of Regina’s story with Barates also enables British classicists and archaeologists to evade the truly haunting presence in our society: the impact of imperialism. As Derrida (1994) advises, however, we must truly listen to what her ghostly presence can tell us to confront imperial legacies and reach a more authentic understanding of womanhood in Roman Britain.

The tombstone’s iconography suggests that Regina held multiple identities at once, even conflicting or contradictory ones — a state of being from which Black feminist thought was borne and can elucidate. She had a Celtic identity of her own, a Palmyrene one through her husband (as demonstrated by the inscription), and a public Roman one. This was not unusual within the subculture of Hadrian’s Wall (Hingley and Hartis 2011: 87), or even amongst the ‘biospheres’ created around bases (Mattingly 2023: 291), which encouraged a unique blend of Roman and local identities to maintain troop loyalty. To allow space for a Black male scholar, I would like to introduce the founder of CCCS, Stuart Hall, into my thinking on Regina and thereby position her within the Black British scholarly tradition. The tombstone’s inscription and iconography both convey Mattingly’s concept of discrepant identities, which is not incompatible with Hall’s theory on cultural identity. They both characterize cultural identities, shaped by imperialism, as highly mutable. Hall (2021a: 266) argued that cultural identity is not fixed — it is ‘not an essence but a positioning’— and undergoes constant transformations, which has been the case for Regina throughout her life and afterlife.¹² First, Regina (under a different, unknown, native name) was a Celtic woman; then enslaved; freedwoman; wife; then, in her afterlife, a monument; now an emblem.

Despite the torcs, however, it is her initial identity that is most lost. The Celtic woman, with her native name, died with her. She is primarily monumentalized as the wife of a Palmyrene man living under Roman occupation, in the languages that speak to those aspects — there is no inscription in her native script. It is therefore not only her voice and birth name that have been lost, but her language. While the tombstone is still remarkable for its preservation of Aramaic as far as northern England, alongside Latin, it is also an example of epistemicide as the loss of linguistic diversity under the Roman Empire (Padilla Peralta 2020: 157). The use of the nickname ‘Queenie’, then, becomes a further act of violence masking the destruction and erasure that has occurred.

The violence of Regina’s enslavement has also been obfuscated by scholars who instead romanticize the narrative of her marriage to Barates (on manumission for marriage in the Roman funerary and epigraphic record, see Huemoeller 2020). The inclusion of an emotional expression akin to ‘alas’ in the Aramaic inscription can be used to support such interpretations. The 2009 exhibition, to take one example, claimed that the tombstone ‘indicates the life of the two lovers coming to the northern frontier to live and love after “home counties” Regina is freed from slavery by her “foreign” mate’ (Tolia-Kelly and Nesbitt 2009: 3). This is the Regina story that has been familiarized for the British public, not least through Mary Beard’s public-facing publications (Beard 2015) and media appearances (see note 9). In this way, Regina as an historical figure, a persona, may have survived — she has become one of the most famous women from Roman times — but, nonetheless, the enslaved woman and her name died and are lost to us. As the absent presence of this ancient, unnamed Celtic woman who pre-existed Regina haunts the Roman material record, I am reminded of another enslaved woman with a Latin name who haunts history — Hartman’s Venus, the woman behind critical fabulation. Like Venus, Regina is a real woman from the historical record who, we know, was enslaved, her native name has been erased and replaced with a Latin one, and the only record of her life survives through a mention of her death. It must be granted, though, that Regina was monumentalized and thereby a significance was bestowed to her life that Venus was never afforded.

To invoke Gayatri Spivak (1988), can Regina, as a subaltern, speak? Like the Indian women Spivak discusses, can this woman speak to us from the dead, or is it her husband speaking, through the bilingual inscription? The Afro-pessimist, Hartman-esque answer would likely be no. In any case, funerary monuments exist more for the living than the dead and Regina’s tombstone served as a means by which Barates performed his own pietas and indulgentia. Like Venus, therefore, the news of Regina’s death is mediated through the voice of a man of the slave-holding class, speaking for himself to the archive.¹³ As Hartman (2007: 7; 2008: 4) urges, we must therefore read through or beyond the archive of death to be permitted a glimpse of the lives of those women later known as Venus and Regina. Working from epigraphy concerning an enslaved woman, a critical fabulation for Regina would also be akin to those crafted by Kamen and Levin-Richardson (2022) from the graffiti at Pompeii and manumission records at Delphi.

We could think of a girl born and raised in the lands of the Catuvellauni (southeastern England), living with her tribe if she were, then captured or sold to a slave-trader and taken north to be enslaved to a man from Syria called Barates. We wish they were in love because that could be why she was freed and became his wife. How, though, would we ever know? Were Barates a soldier,¹⁴ he could have been sent to the final frontier as part of a Palmyrene regiment, along with craftsmen and merchants, and Regina could have been a military wife. What could it have been like to die far from home in the northern climes? She was young and she could have been ill; we might fear she was pregnant.

We could construct this narrative, but in this case, we truly must show restraint and leave space for the black noise. We must also resist the temptation to give her a voice of her own between the epigraphy and accept that, in the end, she cannot speak to us from beyond the archive of death. We are not able to fill the gaps left between the discrepant inscriptions (in Latin and Aramaic), but all the wishes, doubts, uncertainties, possibilities lurking there must be preserved in order to move beyond the romanticized version of her story. To commit to one narrative would also be to commit further epistemicide on the possible pasts and futures that have already been lost; instead, we must confront the ghosts and hold space for them all.

Conclusion

It seems, in true Afro-pessimist form, that critical fabulation is ultimately tied to the suppression abundant in the archive. If recovery or empowerment are the goal, is it bound to fail? As Hartman (2008: 13) states, ‘the history of black counter-historical projects is one of failure, precisely because these accounts have never been able to install themselves as history, but rather are insurgent, disruptive narratives that are marginalized and derailed before they ever gain a footing’. It is not intended to be recuperative, leaving open the question of whether the ancient woman can or should be re-claimed and re-empowered. Remembered, certainly — as much for what we do not know about her as what we do or could construct.

Hartman’s words also remind us that Black feminist work is an act of protest; it should be insurgent and disruptive to the academe. I, then, was misguided in asking if there is a place, or space, for Black feminist thought in Roman archaeology; it should not be something added or slotted in, recalling Ahmed’s (2012: 33–35) critique of the diversity agenda, and as Black women scholars look beyond seeking praise or validation from a thankless academe that takes and appropriates their work, I am inclined to believe that the project at hand is no longer about reclaiming space or seeking to be included — in the ancient material record or the modern academic landscape.

Black feminist work is most effective when insurgent; it is disempowered by being institutionalized, as Ahmed argues. This is also the issue at hand with Hartman and her scholarship: as critical fabulation is accepted — welcomed, even — by the academe, it loses its radical, political dimension (Kotrosits 2024: 3), as we have seen. Furthermore, Hartman herself has elicited criticism for becoming too institutionalized and no longer being involved in political activism, a crucial dimension to the Black feminist movement. Recently, her silence during the student protests against the genocide in Gaza, including on her own campus, was noted — especially given that many of her peers, including Sharpe (2024) and Ahmed (2023), have been outspoken, in doing so putting their careers on the line and becoming increasingly de-institutionalized.

This brings me to my final point: I have been asking if we can do Black feminist Roman archaeology amidst a political climate that jeopardizes Black and brown lives. What does it mean to ask that of a discipline complicit in genocide, including epistemicide and scholasticide? In a 2025 report, Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, stated that archaeology at Israeli universities, among other disciplines, ‘contribute[s] to the ideological scaffolding of apartheid, cultivating State-aligned narratives, erasing Palestinian history and justifying occupation practices’. Marchella Ward (2025: 1), a notable scholar of antiquity-cum-activist for Palestinian liberation, presses those concerned with the ancient past to ‘reckon with our position in the belly of the beast’, and revisit what it means to do decolonial work while our subject matter is being weaponized for occupation. As she hauntingly articulates, ‘what does it mean for attempts to “decolonise” history to have so categorically failed that Israel can continue to use the past in this way’ (Ward 2025: 5)? This is also the question behind Hamilakis’ (2025) archaeology as a hauntology of remains, and he is perhaps haunted by his own attempts at decolonial intervention coming a year and a half too early and quickly souring in light of new urgency (see Greenberg and Hamilakis 2022 on decolonizing archaeology in Greece and Israel, published prior to Israel’s escalation in violence in October 2023). Ward thus captures the reason why archaeology in this present moment must haunt us.

Furthermore, why do a Black feminist archaeology of Regina when, just weeks after the tombstone came off display at the British Museum, far-right race riots broke out across the country, with a cluster around where she and Barates once lived? Riots against the very presence of people like Barates, migrants from Syria trying to make a life in Britain. I have previously written about how the civilizational agenda of archaeology exists within nationalist-xenophobic ideologies and has been weaponized against refugees entering Europe (Bhalerao 2023b); the context of far-right riots in Britain is not removed from this political trend. To protest civilizational archaeology, I took inspiration from Françoise Vergès A Decolonial Feminism (2021), of which I am reminded while ruminating on whether Black feminist thought can exist with(in) archaeology. The warnings and lessons from Vergès are true too of the concerning political shift we are witnessing in Britain, in which the Roman past will continue to be implicated.

These have been the political and ethical questions lingering in my mind throughout the writing of this piece, as pasts and potential futures tolerant of Black and brown lives quickly vanish. We will not change this by neatly slotting Black feminist thought into our practice of Roman archaeology. Nevertheless, let us not allow the compromises and seeming impossibilities of attempting to meet our political moment with critical methodologies to prevail. As I said of critical fabulation, it is the labour itself, and reckoning with the contradictions and tensions facing the task, that matters more than the result. In that labour, I urge us to be driven by the figures and questions that haunt us to fight for those lost pasts and futures, and to use Black feminist scholarship as an impetus for a moment of disciplinary rupture (Umachandran 2022: 25; Bhalerao 2023a), of dismantlement. Whilst we protest against the academe with our writing, we should never forget that there also are forces outside to be fought against in the battle to be human, with Black and brown lives on the line. Why seek respite or comfort in critical fabulation and the theories of Black feminist thought if we won’t engage and stand up for those lives? In doing Black feminist scholarly work, therefore, be haunted, insurgent, and be activist.

Abbreviations List

RIB      Roman Inscriptions in Britain – Collingwood, Robin George and Richard Pearson Wright. 1965. The Roman Inscriptions of Britain. Volume I. Oxford: Clarendon.

Acknowledgements

I would first like to thank the convenor of our TRAJ Special Issue, Mauro Puddu, as well as the TRAJ Editor, Emily Hanscam, and peer reviewers for their feedback and encouragement. I would also like to express my gratitude to Sebastian Heath, Hallie Franks, Dan-el Padilla Peralta and Greg Woolf for their comments on earlier versions of this paper and their support of this project at large, as well as John N. Hopkins, with whom this idea originated. The article here came together from pieces originated elsewhere, including an essay that received an honourable mention in the 2023 Gruen Prize of the Society for Classical Studies, and a paper delivered at the 2025 conference Embodying Women’s Colonial Experiences organized by the Women’s Classical Caucus; I would like to thank the judges of the Gruen Prize, as well as Erich S. Gruen for the recognition, the organizers of the WCC conference, and NYU Madrid for the space and time to conduct this research. This paper was written for the other women of colour in my life who bolster me every day — above all my mother, Razia Karim, whose career fighting for equality unfolded against the political backdrop described here and who taught me everything I know about race and womanhood. Finally, to my students of the Spring Semester 2026: keep thinking critically, you will prevail.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.