Hold My Mead Bro

September 14, 2017 6:46 PM

Hold My Mead: A Bibliography For Historians Hitting Back At White Supremacy A collection of academic articles examining the questions of ethnic and cultural diversity across the ancient Roman and Medieval European worlds.
posted by supermedusa (22 comments total)

This is wonderful! So many resources to rebut stupidity! Thank you for posting this!
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 6:54 PM on September 14, 2017 [2 favorites]

This is good. Thank you for sharing.
posted by Fizz at 6:55 PM on September 14, 2017 [1 favorite]

Eidolon, which you'll see cited a bunch, has changed their mission to be explicitly and unapologetically feminist, progressive, and inclusive. It's a real breath of fresh air. (If you like Sarah Bond's blog, her Twitter is really great too!)
posted by Mouse Army at 7:13 PM on September 14, 2017 [8 favorites]

omg I'm so nervous/excited. after 9 years this is my first FPP. I'm still working my way through the articles but I'm so glad others are excited about them!
posted by supermedusa at 7:16 PM on September 14, 2017 [32 favorites]

This is great content. Congrats on your first post.
posted by KGMoney at 7:24 PM on September 14, 2017 [7 favorites]

Glad somebody already linked Eidolon. I keep forgetting to, like, go there and read their articles, but their recent stuff has been amazing when I remember. They've had quite a few articles explicitly pushing back against white nationalist usage of the classics.
posted by tobascodagama at 8:33 PM on September 14, 2017 [2 favorites]

**historical overgeneralization alert**
even though slavery, tribal hatreds, and brutal conflict obviously go back to the beginnings of history, it seems that explicit race hate really got a turbo boost in the 18th and 19th centuries and hasn't really let up since.
posted by wibari at 8:54 PM on September 14, 2017 [6 favorites]

Wibari, i think whiteness wasn,t really reified before that point. The latter days of colonialism gave birth to this otherizing of everyone else and we are still swilling the dregs thereof.
posted by supermedusa at 9:00 PM on September 14, 2017 [9 favorites]

This is so totally something I need in my life. Thanks!
posted by asperity at 9:16 PM on September 14, 2017

The editor of Eidolon is one Dr. Donna Zuckerberg, sister of Mark. Huh.
posted by Autumnheart at 9:28 PM on September 14, 2017 [2 favorites]

sister of Mark

Mildly interesting, but not particularly relevant. That doesn't stop her alt-right detractors from seizing on the relationship as a cudgel, just as they'll use her religion and heritage, her gender, her appearance, her husband's appearance, all as spectacularly horrific excuses for dismissing her arguments out of hand. Reading the comments on "How to Be a Good Classicist Under a Bad Emperor" was eye-opening for me, though not perhaps in the way the commenters, those evil fucks, intended.
posted by Iridic at 12:00 AM on September 15, 2017 [3 favorites]

Forwarded to my wife who is a medieval historian, thanks
posted by crocomancer at 12:52 AM on September 15, 2017 [1 favorite]

The Victorian Re-Invention of Race is a good systematic study of the 19th century origins of different strains of white supremacist thinking. It shows how much white supremacy, as an ideology, owes a lot to modernity. The white supremacist's fantasy account of the medieval or classical past is like an enlightenment liberal's account of the state of nature: a thought experiment that expresses an ideology in the form of a just-so story or fable. Nothing to do with actual history.
posted by Aravis76 at 3:41 AM on September 15, 2017 [8 favorites]

What I never understood about the white supremacists who worship the Roman Empire as Glorious White History and proof of the superiority of the "white race" is that they glorify Rome because Rome conquered and dominated such a wide swathe of peoples and places. How can they then get angry when someone points out that a giant empire that spans from the Rine to the Sahara and from the Atlantic to the Euphrates contained an enormous mix of a whole lot of different ethnicities and cultures?
posted by Sangermaine at 6:35 AM on September 15, 2017 [1 favorite]

As a big fan of ancient rome and ancient philosophy, I am disgusted by the tought of someone studying either and coming away with the idea that "powerful men are good", "Ancient romans / grecians were white", or "I am a continuation of an ancient tradition."

It's as foolish as using "The Art of War" as a business guide. You can take any random jumble of words and filter them through your own preconceptions and beliefs. But to truly understand the past and the people who live there requires pushing outside of your preconceptions.
posted by rebent at 8:01 AM on September 15, 2017 [6 favorites]

I too am a medievalist. I am also 100% white Irish decent person and I hate that my heritage and interests have been usurped by hate. I have had a celtic cross & dragon tattoo on my upper back for 18 years and it NEVER occurred to me that someone might construe it as a "white pride" symbol until this last year. ugh...

we are supposed to learn from history so we DON'T make the same mistakes again, not as a handbook for how to continue being horrible!
posted by supermedusa at 8:21 AM on September 15, 2017 [4 favorites]

I went on a Roman history reading thing a few years back, and I was horrified. They were psychotic and greedy destroyers, even in the republican period when they were supposedly living out the destiny of a free society. The notion that this cruel, militaristic State is some ideal of civilization is mind-boggling to me now.

And the conventional story of Greece they give you, as a semi-educated person, is completely centered on Athens, and completely invested in the idea of their culture being a long great progression to democracy, seen as an idealized archetype for our political system. There is, to say the least, a lot left out of this picture.

But to truly understand the past and the people who live there requires pushing outside of your preconceptions.

And this is very difficult! I remember when I figured out that it was a false path to try to think of the ancient philosophers as sort of defective natural scientists, which is an anachronistic view that you find pretty commonly. It governs modern people's conceptions, even if it's not a thing they would explicitly agree with, I think. I guess that was a lot of Kuhn's argument, with respect to Aristotle. You have to start by at least considering the possibility that their thought was guided by norms and goals that simply don't exist in modern technological/rationalistic culture. Of course it's also wrong to go full Heidegger and begin by postulating that they were mysterious sages, possessed of a special form of wisdom.
posted by thelonius at 8:41 AM on September 15, 2017 [3 favorites]

I went on a Roman history reading thing a few years back, and I was horrified.

Wait till you get to the Renaissance....
posted by BWA at 8:58 AM on September 15, 2017 [2 favorites]

Hey, this is fantastic. I am looking forward to reading lots of the links but especially enjoyed the link to the People of Color in European Art History collection at Tumblr.

Thanks for posting this, supermedusa!
posted by kristi at 1:07 PM on September 15, 2017 [2 favorites]

The bibliography is interesting, fresh and digital. Thanks. I recommend some old school print, too: Martin Bernal, Black Athena, The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilation, vol. I-III (a lot of heads exploded when vol. I came out in 1987); Frank M. Snowden, Blacks in Antiquity; and G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World. These books change my conception of world history forever.
posted by marycatherine at 7:14 PM on September 15, 2017 [1 favorite]

How can they then get angry when someone points out that a giant empire that spans from the Rine to the Sahara and from the Atlantic to the Euphrates contained an enormous mix of a whole lot of different ethnicities and cultures?

Because they want to believe that Romans were proto-Nazis, who systematically exterminated every non-white civilisation in their path as they conquered, as opposed to being only occasionally brutal and genocidal and occasionally tolerant and pragmatic. But I don't know how they deal with the paradox that, if the Roman definition of barbarism had been coupled with a Nazi-level commitment to extermination, the whole civilisation would have destroyed itself trying to kill all Germans.
posted by Aravis76 at 1:49 AM on September 16, 2017 [3 favorites]

I have an English professor friend who re-posted this note on FB on Thursday of this week that was written by a fellow tenured acquaintance of hers:

"Friends and colleagues: this week, a brilliant medievalist, Dorothy Kim [link to a representative blog post], has been personally attacked on a blog written by Rachel Fulton Brown [link to a blog summarizing the situation], a tenured professor at the University of Chicago. Dorothy has spent the last few years forcing medieval scholars to reflect on our own role in, at best, staying silent as parts of our field have been hijacked by white supremacists. She has shown us the ways that some of us have failed to include scholarship that addresses the racial complexities of the both the Middle Ages themselves and the scholarly traditions we’ve inherited when we teach and mentor younger scholars or confront representations of the Middle Ages in popular culture.

As a result of her work, and that of other medievalists of color, many of us have rewritten syllabi and reframed our work much to the benefit, I think, of the field as a whole. One does not have to agree with all of Dorothy’s statements to acknowledge how important this self-examination has been. To respond to it with a vicious personal attack and then to encourage that attack to be picked up by the execrable Milo Yiannopoulis and his millions of followers is not scholarly dispute or intellectual engagement: it’s harassment. I’m a tenured, full professor, and I stand with Dorothy."

I was shocked. So I looked it up. These issues are definitely being discussed beyond academia now.
posted by droplet at 7:30 AM on September 16, 2017 [1 favorite]