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Ed Webb

Post 'Anglo-Saxon' Melancholia - Catherine Karkov - Medium - 0 views

medium.com/...saxon-melancholia-ca73955717d3

academia medieval history culture nationalism white supremacy UK Britain US USA

shared by Ed Webb on 02 Feb 20 - Cached
  • ‘Anglo-Saxon’ Studies developed in the context of and alongside the rise of the British Empire in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Its methodologies, classifications, and way of thinking about the English, the English language, the island of Britain, and the pre-1066 past, developed side by side with the idea and image of the empire. In fact, as numerous scholars have shown, it was used to provide historic justifications for that empire and its racism. It provided the fiction of a ‘pure’ English past and its often equally fictitious institutions (trial by jury, the navy, a proto-parliamentary system of government) alongside the idea that the English were in some way a chosen people.
  • historians such as Sharon Turner, whose History of the Anglo-Saxons, appeared between 1799 and 1805, claimed direct links between the moral and intellectual qualities of the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ and those of the modern English. This scholarly rediscovery of Bede and translation of other early medieval texts allowed the English, as well as the colonial Americans who saw themselves as their direct descendants, to carry these ideas with them into the modern world and into their colonies.
  • how inextricably tied to racism and racial hierarchies the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ is in English history and culture, and to reemphasize that this is not just an American issue.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • On both sides of the Atlantic Beowulfwas translated and adapted for children as a text that could instil in the young imperialist values, nationalist pride, racism, and a myth of heroic masculinity.
  • In Joseph Bernard Davis and John Truman’s Crania Britannicaof 1865, the size and shape of skulls and other skeletal features were used to liken the medieval Britons (especially the Welsh) to contemporary African and ‘Oriental’ peoples, all of whom were lacking in social and technological sophistication. The implication was that the historic colonisation of the Welsh provided just cause for the colonisation of other lands and peoples in the modern world
  • Given this history, it is impossible to claim, as do some, that the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ is free of racist meaning in the UK
  • The term cannot be separated from its racist past and the violence it helped to justify, nor from its racist implications today, nor from the violence committed by those who in their academic defence of the term incite attacks on their colleagues. The petition signed by a group of (largely) UK academics arguing for retention of an (arguably) historically precise and critically aware use of the term is now circulating amongst white supremacists as an academic endorsement of their views.
  • another proof, as if we needed one, of the toxicity of so much of contemporary academic culture especiallyin the UK
  • I find hope in the convivial and subversive interventions of those students and scholars who are fighting for a more just, inclusive, and egalitarian medieval studies
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