Thread by @punctum_books

THREAD.

1/ Given how the Int’l. Society of Anglo-Saxonists can’t get its act together to change its name, which is racist, & also has no problem sheltering predators & misogynists who are white men, we need to revisit our intellectual history. #RaceB4Race #MedievalTwitter #ASS

2/ Some scholars favor a name-change because they believe fascist-racist hate groups have misappropriated the subject matter of their field and thus we should distance ourselves from those folk. But others say: it’s not OUR fault that happens & we don’t want to erase our history.

3/ Scholars who believe the only thing wrong with “Anglo-Saxon” is that racist hate groups have appropriated it are terrible scholars, and worse historians. The first 2 attestations in English for “Anglo-Saxonist” are to John Mitchell Kemble (OED) & the 3rd time, in his obituary.

4/ That is a “meh” fact, except the practices of a certain highly-racialized (RACIST) and gendered (SEXIST) field of 19th-century English archaeology produced Kemble (who was also a philologist & the first English editor of “Beowulf”). Kemble & his cohort were explicitly RACIST.

5/ Howard Williams has written: “we can regard how [Kemble and Wylie’s] interpretation of Continental [archaeological] discoveries were permeated by racial theories aimed at making specific statements about the shared Teutonic affinities and origins of the English and Germans.”

6/ While looting grave-goods in Hanover in mid-19th century, Kemble imagined he was standing in Beowulf’s barrow while also German-izing him, erasing the real history of an “England” built by a wide variety of migrant communities as was shown by Dr. Rambaran-Olm at #RaceB4Race.

7/ Most important, Kemble’s work as our first Anglo-Saxon(ist) bequeathed to us a racialized/racist field of study that later scholars believed was a disembodied, objectivist “historicism.” As always, bodies get erased, as does the embodied situatedness of the scholarship.

8/ The supposed “Anglo-Saxon” body is a cultural one, an invention, a FICTION. In the process, real bodies — traditionally, black, brown (etc.), but also the minds+bodies of actual scholars whose work is NOT disinterested — get erased & KILLED. This is a form of racist violence.

9/ How do we know this? Because one of our directors @EileenAJoy works on the intellectual history of Old English studies & because we learned a lot from Donna Beth Ellard’s book, “Anglo-Saxon(ist) Pasts, postSaxon Futures,” which is forthcoming: punctumbooks.com/titles/anglo-s…

10/ Ellard’s book is an exorcism of the colonial-racial ghosts that lurk within the field. Part memoir (Ellard’s grandfather participated in lynchings in the South), part grief work & part intellectual history, this book puts PAID to the lie that “Anglo-Saxon” is a neutral term.

@ISASaxonists