Homeland insecurity: Biopolitics and sovereign violence in Beowulf
- PDF / 547,564 Bytes
- 12 Pages / 535.748 x 697.323 pts Page_size
- 15 Downloads / 194 Views
Homeland insecurity: Biopolitics and sovereign violence in Beowulf
Adam Miyashiro Literature Program, Stockton University, Galloway, NJ, USA.
Abstract This article argues that the figure of Grendel in the heroic poem Beowulf can be read through theories of biopolitics in order to understand the concept of sovereignty and ‘ancestral homelands’ as it has been presented in the poem. I argue that we must regard the poem as presenting a particular biopolitics of the homeland and sovereign power, specifically in how Grendel and his kin are represented as a kind of ‘proto’-Indigenous people that unsettle the Danes’ territorial and political stability. In this way, Grendel and his mother trouble the kingship of Hrothgar and the Danish territorial sovereignty, portrayed as violent and as both inside and outside of the political order. I conclude by examining the term eþel [‘ancestral homeland’] which crystallizes in a single linguistic and orthographic unit the relationship between kin/genealogy and territory/property. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2020)11 , 384–395. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-020-00188-3
Sovereign and beast seem to have in common their being-outside-the-law […] beast, criminal, and sovereign have a troubling resemblance […] a worrying mutual attraction, a worrying familiarity, an unheimlich, uncanny reciprocal haunting. – Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign Beowulf is a poem that forms the most widespread contact that English speakers today have with early English culture from the British Isles. Today, the term
2020 Springer Nature Limited. 2040-5960
postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies www.palgrave.com/journals
Vol. 11, 4, 384–395
Homeland insecurity
‘Anglo-Saxon’ is coded racially as an exceptional form of whiteness in much of the Anglophone world. It has made its way into the American foundational narrative upon specific settler-colonial hierarchies, based largely upon race, religion, and class. As a literary, historical, and philological document, Beowulf has been central to race-thinking in Anglo-settler-colonialism in the Americas and beyond, precisely because it closely binds the genealogies of Germanic tribes that tangentially related to ruling lineages on the continent. Beowulf reflects the racist attitudes at the core of the settler-colonial project, and the version of white supremacy that has become the legacy of this modernist project. The monsters that haunt the poem Beowulf resemble the kind of biopolitical figures we see in how Indigenous bodies are represented in settler colonial modernity, through how Grendel is racialized as a form of ‘bare life,’ which threatens the territorial, and political stability of the Danes, following the theories of biopolitics put forward by Giorgio Agamben. This territorial anxiety produced by the simultaneous inclusion and exclusion of the Grendelkin becomes visualized in the runic symbol (eþel), symbolizing ‘ancestral homelands,’ which are used in the manuscript to shore up dominant political id
Data Loading...
