[So many good things on the blog right now: the GW MEMSI calendar; a welcome for Leila K. Norako; Wan-Chuan Kao on #palefacesmatter; and more. Don't forget to scroll back! -- JJC]
It’s strange, attending papers on obscure
points of medieval literature at a moment of national crisis. Halfway through
NCS 2016, in between refreshing the
Guardian live coverage of Theresa May’s appointment of her new cabinet, I tweeted
that Brexit was haunting the conference; since the conference I’ve been trying
to collect my thoughts about what Brexit means for me as a medievalist. Oddly
enough, I can’t stop thinking about Fifty
Shades of Grey.
English people (myself included, I’m sure)
have a tendency to exaggerate their country’s importance on the world stage,
but I think it’s hard to overstate the potential impact of Britain’s decision
to leave the EU. The potential impact, I say - nobody knows what’s going to
happen. A feeling of stunned alarm echoed through every conversation I had at
NCS, and even a few weeks later the future is just as murky (although at least
we have a prime minister now). As a British immigrant living in Canada, my
immediate fears for the future are personal: for my friends who work for German
and French companies in London, for my and my Canadian wife’s long-term plans
to move to the UK, for the
repercussions upon my colleagues in UK academia from that the loss of EU
funding and people. I am ashamed of the dramatic
rise in racist attacks and abuse in the home country I used to love for its
vibrant diversity, and I’m ashamed that so
many people in my homeland would consider it my right as a white,
English-speaking person to live and work abroad, but would refuse the same
privilege to immigrants within the UK. I am afraid for the neglected,
angry communities suffering under Austerity Britain who voted Leave, and will
suffer more as a result.
Before NCS, I had not really thought
through the consequences of Brexit for medievalists, beyond my fear for the UK
job market. But in almost every panel, without there being any kind of
overarching plan or agenda, speakers and audience members kept bringing up
Brexit. It was clear it was on everybody’s mind, but there was more to it than
that. Now, this is going to seem trivializing, but I don’t mean it to be: the
only recent Medieval Studies conference I remember when discussion of a news
event has seemed to me as compulsive within
the academic discourse was at NCS 2012 in Portland, when Fifty Shades of Grey was becoming the
fastest selling novel of all time and topping (so to speak) all the bestseller
lists in the US. People could not stop talking about it. Fifty Shades came up in Q&A’s and in papers, called on for
cheap laughs and more thoughtful analogies. The tone was very different, then,
as you can imagine; amused and cynical rather than appalled and angry, but
there was the same bewilderment. It wasn’t simply that conferences tend to
reflect whatever is happening in the news - terrible and wonderful things are
happening somewhere in the world all the time, and for many attending NCS week,
the police violence in the US or the Ramadan bombings in the Middle East must
have felt more urgent than the UK’s constitutional crisis - but rather that
something was happening that struck at anxieties within the profession in a
very particular way.
What is English literature? The success of Fifty Shades pointed to the instability
of the latter term; Brexit to the instability of the former. At NCS 2016 I was
in a panel called “Mediating Italian Literature”, one of several in the
Chaucerian Networks thread on Chaucer’s continental relations. At the “Are We Dark
Enough Yet? Pale Faces 2016” roundtable, some of whose papers have been posted
on In the Medieval Middle, speakers discussed racism, alienation, outsiderness,
and legitimacy in Medieval Studies. In the “Charisma” panel, David Wallace -
editor of Europe: A Literary History,
1348-1418 - in a blistering critique of C.S. Lewis’ essay “What Chaucer
Really Did to il Filostrato”, ended with a segue into Brexit. After showing how
Lewis’ understanding of Chaucer’s reception of Boccaccio is framed by
homophobic and misogynist metaphors, Wallace pointed out that, in the spirit of
healing the divide between Remainers (in which camp Wallace placed himself and,
by implication perhaps, the audience) and Leavers (who so often appealed to the
nostalgic and imaginary England that Lewis helped create), we should
contextualize Lewis’ essay in his own ambivalent and at times hostile
relationship with Englishness as an Irishman.
The success of Fifty Shades of Grey stuck with medievalist literature scholars in
particular, I think, because it forced questions into the open about what
people want to read, about originality, ‘good’ writing and public literacy, and
also about misogyny, sexuality, and control of women’s reading. And also, of
course, there is the ongoing question of medievalists’ relationship to the way
medievalism and violence are so often twinned in the media, and how to talk in
the classroom about sexual or eroticized violence in medieval texts. At the
BABEL “Far Out!” panel at ICMS, Kalamazoo this year, Karen Cook gave a paper
about the role of Fifty Shades of Grey in
medieval music marketing. As a cultural event of relevance to medievalists, Fifty Shades hasn’t gone away yet. It’s
easy to scoff at a comparison with Brexit, but NCS 2012 fell at a moment - an
astonishing one, in the grand scheme of human history - when it was socially
acceptable for women to openly read BDSM* erotica on public transit. In its own
way, it was a watershed, a moment to look forward and back.
(*That is, erotica built on a vision of BDSM
coming from outside the BDSM community and not actually representative of its
practices, particularly as regards consent and negotiation.)
The impact points of Brexit on Medieval
Studies are very different; the victory of the Leave vote changes the way we
must talk as scholars and teachers about borders, nationality, and language;
about racism, insularity, and xenophobia; about distrust of experts, about
class and academia, and the dissemination of knowledge; about the role of the
past in the future, and about war. At “Are We Dark Enough Yet” (and I should
say that I missed this session, to my dismay, and am extremely grateful to the
livetweeters who enabled me to follow it regardless), Cord Whitaker (@profcwhit) pointed out that
medievalists are in a position to criticize and destabilize institutions of
modernity. As the slow and painful conversations begin in the UK about how we
(or they? - I’m having trouble dealing with my own complicity) imagine ourselves
as a nation, NCS 2016 brought home to me how vital - and perhaps inevitable - it
is that as medievalists we take part in these conversations.
To read the livetweeting of “Are We Dark
Enough Yet?”, the twitter hashtags were #ncs16 #1F or #s1F, or #darkenough, or
#palefacesmatter, as well as the papers posted on ITM (here and here, so far).
For reading on the Brexit referendum, and
the immediate short-term and possible long-term consequences for England, the
UK, and the EU, I recommend digging through the Guardian’s EU referendum tag.
Anna Wilson is a recent PhD and adjunct at the University of Toronto. She works on medieval and modern fans (the text-loving kind, not the air-circulating kind), affective hermeneutics, and reception. She's currently writing her first book on fanfiction, immaturity, and late medieval literature.
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