Becoming postmedieval: The stakes of the global middle ages
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Becoming postmedieval: The stakes of the global middle ages
Sierra Lomuto Department of English, Rowan University, Glassboro, NJ, USA.
Abstract The concept of the ‘medieval’ emerged as a node of colonialist ideology that placed Africa, Asia, and the Americas into a backward and uncivilized – premodern – 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. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2020)11 , 503–512. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-020-00198-1
As scholars who study the medieval past have become increasingly aware of medievalism’s purchase among white hate groups, they have had to confront the field’s intimacy with white identity creation.1 A long-standing partnership between knowledge production and socio-political power structures has led to the institutional production of white heritage – an insidious racial project embedded in the very fabric of ‘medieval studies’ as a disciplinary construct.2 As an academic field dedicated to the study of Europe between the decline of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance, medieval studies presents itself as a de 2020 Springer Nature Limited. 2040-5960
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1 This topic has been heavily discussed; for an overview, see Kim (2019); Lomuto (2016, 2019); Miyashiro (2019); Pettit (2019); and Rambaran-Olm (2019).
Vol. 11, 4, 503–512
Lomuto
2 The connection between academic institutions and racial formations is well-studied; see, for example, Freire (1972); hooks (1994); and Ferguson (2012). For a theory of racial projects, see Omi and Winant ([1986] 2015). 3 For example, see Biddick (1998); Cohen (2000); Holsinger (2002); Lampert-Weissig (2010); Warren (2009). 4 This point is most thoroughly and persuasively made in Davis and Altschul (2009). 5 Sunderland (2019) outlines how medieval cosmopolitan studies has crafted a cosmopolitanism that is unmoored from the politics of colonial power. 6 For a study of the weaponization of the Middle Ages in modern media, political discourse, and acts of white terrorism, see Elliott (2017).
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politicized intellectual space that has little to do with histories of racism and colonialism. At the same time, it is also widely understood that the field was formed within and through a
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