Becoming postmedieval: The stakes of the global middle ages

Abstract

The concept of the 'medieval' emerged as a node of colonialist ideology that placed Africa, Asia, and the Americas into a backward and uncivilizedpremodern -time. Even as it demarcates Western Europe as its purview, the 'Middle Ages' has also implicated the rest of the world as an invisible 'other.' This article argues that as Medieval Studies develops a 'Global Middle Ages,' it must necessarily account for this racial colonial project. Drawing from Sara Ahmed's theories of institutional diversity work, my analysis contextualizes the global turn as a public relations campaign that repairs and protects the field's reputation after white supremacists displayed their love for the Middle Ages in Charlottesville in 2017. I caution against a 'Global Middle Ages' that makes a platform of diversity its focal point, and I call for a coupling of the 'global' and the 'medieval' that confronts the field's deeply entrenched Eurocentrism and breaks the 'Middle Ages' apart from within.

Philology and racist appropriations of the medieval

“…Early philologists laid the groundwork for them to do that through their own high‐brow appropriations of the Middle Ages. However, scholars are interrogating the problematic relationship between academic constructions of the medieval and ethnonationalism (Ellard, 2019; Karkov, 2020; Lomuto, 2020; Utz, 2016). Through this work, the nationalist foundations of early English philology may continue to erode.…”

“…That constructions of the medieval have remained so popular with ethnonationalists speaks to the role of appropriation in the work of early medievalists, like nineteenth century English philologists. Sierra Lomuto contends that “to confront racist appropriations of the past is to necessarily confront the way our institutions have produced knowledge about that past” (Lomuto, 2020, p. 504). Early philologists, for example, would refer to words as belonging to the race of English, presented language as transmitted through race, described Old English as “pure and unmixed,” and wrote of the “consanguinity” of related languages (Benzie, 1983, p. 84; Reynolds, 1985, p. 403; Jefferson, 1904, p. 365‐66; Klipstein, 1849, p. 41).…”

QShaman’s Ragnarök: An Iconography of Extremism

“…[26] "Toxic medievalism" is linked inextricably to how the "medieval" is formulated and taught within the University as an institution, and its origins, as Sierra Lomuto has written, in the colonial project. [27] Adam Miyashiro has discussed the ways that fantasies of the "medieval" and the pernicious notion of the "Anglo-Saxon" have participated in white colonization of the American landscape since the beginning: "The racialization in medievalist discourses about the Americas, and how medievalizing the Americas formed a central part of the settler colonial narrative of whiteness, need to be understood as a process of indigenous erasure, elimination, and ultimately the long history of genocide." [28] Regarding "Viking" as a racial identity rather than a job description dangerously obscures and then reconstitutes medieval Scandinavian history as a narrative of racial purity and white global dominance.…”