Vortrag von Nino Luraghi (Oxford): Silencing the past: revolt of the enslaved from modern Haiti to ancient Greece

In this paper, I confront a challenge to the study of ancient slavery posed by the study of modern resistance and revolts of the enslaved. Scholars studying especially the sugar islands of the Caribbean have come to realize that robust resistance on the part of the enslaved had been marginalized both by contemporary observers and by previous research. Historians of antiquity have also occasionally observed that ancient textual evidence, emanating essentially from the slave-owning class, tends to underrepresent and explain away the more serious forms of resistance, such as flight and revolt. This awareness however has not prevented mainstream scholarship from replicating the tendency of the sources, systematically minimizing the minimalist assessment found in them without any serious attempt at unpacking its ideological presuppositions. The issue at stake is not merely that the sources underplay resistance and historians buy into their bias. The issue – a more fundamental one – is that underplaying resistance is an essential feature for the survival and coherence of any system of enslavement. Seeing this both allows for new readings of ancient resistance and is part of the new readings itself. In my paper, I will offer a preliminary exploration of these points.