The West

 Naoise Mac Sweeney  is a professor of classical archaeology at the University of Vienna, having previously held posts at both Leicester and Cambridge Universities. Her research focuses on the making of communities and their conceptual formation through the construction of identity.

Suitable for all audiences

The West, Race-Making, Decolonization & Postcolonialism, “Clash of Civilizations,” Classical Reception

Mac Sweeney has grounded her narrative in the lives of fourteen real historical figures to argue that #1: “The grand narrative of Western Civilization is factually wrong” (5) #2: “The invention, popularization, and longevity of the grant narrative of Western Civilization all stem from its ideological utility” (6)

“This book is not an attack on the West. Instead, I would argue that it is a celebration of the West and its central principals... [W]hat could be more Western than reimagining the shape of history?” (353)

• Is it enough to merely rewrite the history of the ‘West’? Should we use the term ‘West’ at all?
• The West is rushed at its end -- the last two chapters do not cover attempts at rewriting and challenging the ‘West’ in a complete way

• Herodotus
• Histories offers a plural and complex ancient world that stands in opposition to the picture of Greek antiquity we find in the grand narrative of the West

• Livilla
• Rome had intercontinental heritage and roots neither in a Western or European world

• Al-Kindi
• The true heir of ancient Greece could be found in the Islamic Middle East

• Godfrey of Viterbo
• The Asian antiquities of Troy and the Bible were more familiar than the world of the Hellenes

• Theodore Laskaris
• The Hellenes occupied a privileged spot in the middle of the world as the Byzantines did

• Tulia D’Aragona
• The Renaissance was a turning point in incorporating Greece into the European cultural heritage

• Safiye Sultan
• The world was increasingly divided into the 'West versus the Rest'

• Francis Bacon
• The West becomes a more meaningful identity and cultural bloc

• Njinga of Angola
• "Western identity and Western civilization became increasingly racialized” (221)

• Joseph Warren
• “Warren popularized a vision of North America as the ultimate heir of Western Civilization” (242)

• Phillis Wheatley
• Greco-Roman antiquity becomes understood as ‘classical’

• William Ewart Gladstone
• The notion of Western Civilization begins to be used to incite radical change

• Edward Said
• Inventing the Orient is crucial to inventing the West

• Carrie Lamb
• The West now has rivals

Non-Specialist Audience Reviews:

•  Washington Post 
•  The Guardian 

Academic Reviews:

• “Mac Sweeney, Naoise: THE WEST.” Kirkus Reviews. Kirkus Media LLC, 2023.
• Nixon, Lucia. “Naoíse Mac Sweeney. 2023. The West: A New History of an Old Idea (London: W.H. Allen [Penguin Random House], 2013, 437 Pp., 14 Illustr., Hbk ISBN 978-0-7535-5892-8).” European Journal of Archaeology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2023.
• Wintle, Michael. “The West: A New History of an Old Idea The West: A New History of an Old Idea by Naoíse Mac Sweeney, London, W.H. Allen/ Penguin Random House, 2023, 448pp., $32.00, £22.00 (Hardback), ISBN: 9780753558928: By Naoíse Mac Sweeney, London, W.H. Allen/ Penguin Random House, 2023, 448pp., $32.00, £22.00 (Hardback), ISBN: 9780753558928.” History of European Ideas, 2023.

Women and Classical Thought:

• Wyles, Rosie, ed. Women Classical Scholars : Unsealing the Fountain from the Renaissance to Jacqueline de Romilly / Edited by Rosie Wyles and Edith Hall. First edition. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2016. Print.
• Stevenson, Jane. Women Latin Poets : Language, Gender, and Authority, from Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Web.

On the Medieval:

• Heng, Geraldine. The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages / Geraldine Heng. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Print.
• Whitaker, Cord J. Black Metaphors : How Modern Racism Emerged from Medieval Race-Thinking / Cord J. Whitaker. 1st edition. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. Print.

On Phillis Wheatley:

• Women in the American Revolution: Gender, Politics, and the Domestic World, edited by Barbara B. Oberg, University of Virginia Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.proxy1.library.jhu.edu/lib/jhu/detail.action?docID=5744440
• Carretta, Vincent. Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage. 1st ed. Sarah Mills Hodge Fund Publication. 2011.
• Shields, John C., and Eric D. Lamore. New Essays on Phillis Wheatley. 1st ed. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2011.

On American Classical Reception:

• Winterer, Caroline. The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780-1910. Baltimore, Md.; London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.
• Winterer, Caroline. The Mirror of Antiquity: American Women and the Classical Tradition, 1750-1900. 2018.
• Shalev, Eran. Rome Reborn on Western Shores Historical Imagination and the Creation of the American Republic. Jeffersonian America. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009.

•  Oxford Classical Dictionary 
•  Classical Receptions Journal 
•  Classical Reception Studies Network 

 Mac Sweeney, Naoíse. The West : A New History in Fourteen Lives / Naoíse Mac Sweeney. Edition. New York, New York: Dutton, 2023. Print.