a guest post by Sierra Lomuto
Along
with mainstream white America, Medieval Studies has undergone a racial
awakening over the last few years, as the Trump presidency has emboldened
and even sanctioned a
rise in openly avowed white nationalism. The recent massacre against a Muslim
community in Christchurch, New Zealand—Ĺtautahi,
Aotearoa—is the latest devastating example of white terrorism, where the shooter praised the U.S. president and was nearly condoned by an Australian senator. And as we have seen the racist medievalism in the
terrorist’s manifesto,
those of us who work in Medieval Studies have once again found ourselves
confronted with the sinister links between our work and white supremacy. As a
scholar of medieval literature, I know it is my responsibility to think about
these connections, something I have urged my colleagues to do as well. And as we do, we can’t ultimately look past how whiteness
inheres within the very construct of the medieval, and how
Medieval Studies as a thing in itself poses a problem
for all of us who believe in social and racial justice.
“Medieval”
refers specifically to the historical period between the fall of the Roman
Empire and the Renaissance, a temporal construct that is inextricably tied to
the spatial construct of Western Europe. And just as Western Europe has been
constructed through (what bell hooks has so incisively named) the imperialist
white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy, so too does the “medieval” carry this
valence of power. It comes as no surprise, then, that for white supremacists, the
“medieval” furnishes a heritage site for whiteness. Within their
ideology, medieval imagery such as the Othala Rune,
Tyr Rune, and
Celtic Crosses serve as symbols that aim to transform
that whiteness from an oppressive power structure into a cultural and
ethnic heritage. They then assert this whiteness as
a vulnerable identity under attack, one that needs protection from what
they see as the genocidal threat of multiculturalism. For example, at the deadly
Unite the Right rally in August 2017, where white supremacists converged in the
name of protecting “white heritage” (specifically, to keep the Robert E. Lee
statue from being taken down), the Othala Rune appeared prominently on many banners.
This pan-Germanic runic letter means heritage and inheritance, particularly in
relation to homeland. It has been appropriated as a white supremacist symbol
since the 1930s, and it became the official
symbol of the Prinz Eugen wing of the Nazi party in Croatia. Today, it is
featured heavily within white supremacist circles. Not only did we see it at Charlottesville, but it is also a common
tattoo and has even been commercialized.
One
company sells numerous products branded with various white supremacist symbols,
including medieval ones, such as shirts and buttons with the Othala rune, a
Thor hammer with runes on it, and a shirt with a Celtic cross overlaid on the
Confederate flag. The company’s tagline, “It’s not illegal to be white…yet,” reflects
the myth of white genocide. At the same time, the accompanying logo is a white
hand holding a noose, explicitly referencing the socially sanctioned extrajudicial
killings of black people. We can see clearly how they present white violence as
a justified necessity. These same ideologies motivated the Christchurch terrorist
attack and informed the Australian senator’s tirade that seemed to endorse it.
This
connection between the medieval and white supremacy is not new, and
in fact the Christchurch terrorist cites inspiration from another white terrorist with racist medievalist fantasies. The events in Charlottesville,
however, struck the loudest wake-up call
for most academic medievalists. After Charlottesville, in what felt like
an overnight turn, a field that had previously shunned discussions of race and
racism became hungry for them. Over the last year and a half, we have seen
an immense proliferation of conference sessions, symposia, think pieces,
new dissertations, and new courses on both the whiteness of Medieval Studies
and the racist appropriation of the “medieval” beyond academia. In a powerful essay
about Anglo-Saxon Studies, in particular, Mary Rambaran-Olm describes the
racism that has pushed many scholars of color out of the field, and academia in
general.
There has also emerged a particular
form of public medievalist discourse that focuses primarily on correcting
racist misconceptions about the Middle Ages. While certainly useful, as it
provides the public with an important education and demonstrates why studying
the distant past still matters in the present, this work has largely been
missing the rigor of anti-racist critique. Unfortunately, in one of the only
published critiques of this work I’ve seen, a bravado of white masculinity
prevented any chance of raising this issue for a productive public
conversation. In fact, in the social media debate that followed Sam Fallon’s
harsh
Chronicle of Higher Ed article,
it was difficult to see past all the mansplaining whiteness on both sides until
Jenny Tan cut right through it in a brilliant
twitter thread
that named the problem for what it is: “white progressive self-importance that
is really more about self-promotion than social or political principle.” Tan
trenchantly elaborates on this point in
another thread,
where she describes precisely the kind of white ally-ship dominating public
medievalist discourse.
The most popular example of this
kind of work is The Public Medievalist’s series “Race, Racism, and the Middle
Ages.” The series seems to approach the racist appropriation of the medieval as
an external problem out there that
threatens an innocent love for the medieval past. In other words, the series
aims to reclaim the medieval past from white supremacists—placing it back in the
hands of academic medievalists and cosplayers who hold a non-racist love for the medieval. There’s nothing particularly
wrong with this aim, and it is certainly understandable, as no decent person
wants to be associated with the same things as white supremacists. But this
approach can inadvertently lead to a protection of white innocence rather than
an anti-racist intervention. Of course, not all of the essays in the series
reflect this type of scaffolding: for example, essays by Helen Young, Matthew
Vernon, and Eric Weiskott (and certainly others) clearly frame their analyses
of racist medievalisms through a framework informed by critical race studies.
On the whole, however, the series is too invested in the innocence of good
white people to see its own limitations for productive anti-racist critique.
In one particular essay about how
we can hold onto medieval symbols that have been misappropriated, the author (likely
unwittingly) defends racism—at least, the accidental kind. He suggests that
these symbols can be saved by both signaling their non-racist meaning and
learning to identify when they are wielded with racist intent or not; or, in
cases where you can’t tell, to offer the benefit of the doubt to the bearer of
the symbol. This argument necessarily centers white viewers who have the luxury—the
privilege—of caring about intent when it comes to racism. In a series
explicitly about opposing racism, it seems astounding that we would find an
essay so irresponsibly protecting accidental racists. But it becomes less
surprising when we glimpse the contributor list and see that it is nearly all
white, or when we view the poster that captures the overall tenor of the series.
The poster is clearly not informed by critical race studies, and it even praises
“melting pot” societies—a problematic concept that is not about inclusion, but
rather the assimilation of non-white cultures into white dominance. I called
out the problem with this language on Facebook, and they subsequently revised
it to “multicultural societies” for the version they now sell on their website
(without signaling the rationale for the change, and thus profiting off the
constructive feedback of people of color without acknowledging our labor), and
I do wonder about their critical awareness of
multiculturalism
as well. The “melting pot” is about erasure; so in a twisted sense, the poster
captures precisely how this series can erase people of color—both our bodies
and our intellectual output—from its discourse on race and racism, while congratulating
itself for doing good anti-racist work.
Even though the series editors are
not race scholars or activists, or even scholars of color with experiential
knowledge about racism, many medievalists turn to them as expert sources on how
to teach race in their classrooms. Why does Medieval Studies accept non-experts
as its leaders in this work? As race and racism have become trendy topics among
medievalists, white (and predominantly male) medievalists have jumped on the
bandwagon, claiming expertise they have not earned, and too many in the field
sanction them—but why? It seems too simplistic to point to the patriarchal
whiteness of Medieval Studies itself for an answer, but that is where we can
find it: white men have always held the most authority in our field; and so, it
seems, the field turns to them for leadership even in conversations about race
and racism. How different would this series have been if its editors recognized
their own lack of expertise on the
topic they sought to promote? Perhaps they would have built a platform where
black feminist theories, queer of color critiques, and other methodologies
generally absent in Medieval Studies could begin to inform our analyses of
racist uses of the Middle Ages. Instead, The Public Medievalist and our field gives us more whiteness,
more white feelings, and more white supremacy even as we are told these are the
things they are fighting against.
Institutional Change
Racism is about the structural ways
in which people of color, and particularly black and indigenous peoples, have
been disenfranchised by various forms of violence and oppression. Anti-racist
strategies for correcting racist appropriations must necessarily address
structural change within the institutions that have facilitated not only racist
appropriations, but also the conditions that produce white terrorism in the first
place. Andrew Elliott
has argued
that “as medievalists we ought to refocus our attention away from the direct
referent of a given medievalism, and onto the context in which it is used as
well as the mechanism by which that medievalism is disseminated” (3). The
historical accuracy of the referent isn’t what matters: what matters are the
conditions and contexts surrounding the referent in our own time. Disrupting
the narrative of a white Middle Ages protects Medieval Studies from accusations
of racism, but it does little to address racism itself. In other words, as we assert
that medievalists don’t only study
and promote the histories of white people, we also overlook how we do promote whiteness through the
disciplinary construct of the “medieval.”
Seeta Chaganti’s essays for Public
Books about both the
Trump
administration and the
Confederate
monuments, Jonathan Hsy’s essay about
antiracist
medievalism and the Chinese Exclusion Act, as well as Peter Baker’s
reflections
post-Charlottesville on the Medievalists of Color blog, give us excellent
examples of public medievalist scholarship that
does serve anti-racism. These pieces not only center people of
color in their discussions (a bare minimum expectation), but also recognize the
complexity of our experiences with race and racism, as well as accurately identify
white supremacy as a power structure that doesn’t merely reside within the
hearts and minds of individuals, but within oppressive institutions that thrive
on everyday, insidious racial violence.
Significant
strides have been made toward institutional equity over the past few years,
notably in the Medieval Academy of America, which instituted a Diversity &
Inclusivity Committee last year. Their recent annual conference took the
theme “The Global Turn,” deliberately breaking away from its more traditional
program, which has been known for its emphasis on Western European and
Christian history. Yet, strikingly absent from their line-up of keynote
speakers, new fellow inductions, and prestigious award winners were scholars of
color. A name most glaringly absent from these lists was Geraldine Heng, an
early founder of Global Medieval Studies whose voice in the field has also
provided necessary critiques regarding its political implications. But of
course progress takes time and we can’t expect overnight change. The field has
shown a genuine concern about its link to white nationalist movements, and even
a central institution like the MAA is mobilizing toward solutions.
Medieval
Studies is investing energy and resources into inclusivity initiatives, and it
is certainly about time. But we must not confuse the institutionalization of diversity
work with anti-racist or decolonizing work. The former protects the
institution—in this case, Medieval Studies—whereas the latter would tear it
down.
The overwhelming whiteness of
the field and the public appropriation of the medieval by white supremacists
are undoubtedly related to how the field has been formulated. Sometimes too much focus is put on distinguishing ourselves from them out there so that we can allow white supremacy to be seen as
something existing outside of ourselves, as if white supremacy were not
something we uphold in the institutions we serve. Describing this dynamic,
Sara Ahmed has written,
“The reduction of racism to the figure of ‘the racist’ allows structural
or institutional forms of racism to recede from view, by projecting racism onto
a figure that is easily discarded (not only as someone who is ‘not me’ but also
as someone who is ‘not us,’ who does not represent a cultural or institutional
norm)” (150).
It may be that a field like
Medieval Studies as such needs to be dismantled and something else in its stead
built up from the ground. Geraldine Heng, as a founder of the concept and
someone who has thought about the “global medieval” for decades, has suggested
we move toward “early globalities” as an alternative, thereby shedding a
restrictive Eurocentric term when studying an interconnected past. And, as Adam Miyashiro has
explained—it really is about time that scholars stop using the blatantly white supremacist settler colonial terms "Anglo-Saxon" and "Anglo-Saxonist" to describe themselves and their work.
If we want to be anti-racist, we
need to start thinking more radically about how we can reformulate our field in
our teaching, graduate training, and public outreach. These priorities will necessarily
require institutional change, and may even mean leaving behind this thing we
currently call Medieval Studies.
Thanks to Leila K. Norako, the other editors and co-bloggers of In the Middle, Mary Rambaran-Olm, and
Adam Miyashiro for their excellent feedback on this essay.
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| Sierra Lomuto is an Assistant Professor of English at Macalester College, where she also currently holds a Consortium for Faculty Diversity Postdoctoral Fellowship. She earned her PhD in 2018 from the University of Pennsylvania. |
