Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World: The Idea of 'the Middle Ages' Outside Europe (review)
Rent from DeepDyve- Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World: The Idea of 'the Middle Ages' Outside Europe
The University of Queensland
Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World: The Idea of 'the Middle Ages' Outside Europe is a wide-ranging investigation of intersections and mutually-challenging encounters between medievalism and postcolonialism. Part of the Rethinking Theory series, edited by Stephen G. Nichols and Victor E. Taylor, it brings together a group of scholars working in diverse research areas whose joint endeavours move away from a Eurocentric focus in thinking about medievalism. The essays take as their starting point the common evocation of medievalism in the service of European nationalism and then present various challenges and thought-provoking ways of conceiving medievalism and postcolonial histories.
A great strength of the book is its structure. It is divided into four parts with the themes of 'Locations of History and Theory', 'Repositioning Orientalism', 'Nation and Foundations' and 'Geography and Temporality'. Each part consists of three chapters and a response by a fourth scholar, either a medievalist or a postcolonial theorist. The effect of this is to create an engaged and interactive dialogue between the contributors to the volume, an attribute which is often missing from other essay collections addressing a theme. The respondents perform the role of well-informed and insightful chairpersons for a panel at a conference, reflecting on the essays, drawing out connections between them and sometimes challenging arguments made by the essays. [End Page 214]
The editors raise a range of relevant questions. What medievalisms arise in the cultural spaces outside Europe, particularly for colonies and former colonies which did not have their own 'Middle Ages' and where the idea of 'medieval' was received as part of European colononization? What happens to the idea of the medieval and what work does it do when considered from perspectives outside Europe? The cultural contexts in which the essay collection asks these questions is extensive in its range, including: Latin America, India, West Africa, Australia, Japan, South Africa, the United States and the Caribbean.
Whereas medievalism has been often thought of as 'a spatiotemporal baseline for many dominant narratives' (p. 1), many of the essays present material and ideas that alter simplistic ideas of the service to which medievalism has been put. Louise D'Arcens, for example, explores how Australian historian and pacifist George Arnold Wood (1865-1928), in his public lectures on St Francis of Assisi, engaged aspects of the European Middle Ages for the purposes of anti-military and anti-imperial protest. As D'Arcens observes, it is widely accepted that modern conceptions of medieval chivalry were central to the ethics, ideology and iconography of British imperial military engagement and that 'in the performative and literary culture of colonial Australia, a martial vision of the medieval period was frequently evoked in the service of apologias not just for wars fought in the service of empire but more generally for everyday colonial dirty work: trade, occupation of land and indigenous dispossession, and the pedagogic dissemination of British ideology' (p. 80). Her research, however, presents a lesser-known counter-history to this narrative; Wood's objection to the Boer War (1899-1902) was framed through his interpretation of St Francis.
Another theme which emerges from the various essays is the elasticity of the concept of medievalism, the diverse angles from which it has been approached and its multiple temporal layers. Haruko Momma's essay examines medievalism in the work of Natsume Soseki (1867-1916), one of Japan's most critically acclaimed novelists. Soseki's early publications include several short stories set in medieval Britain, an intriguing site of intersection between medievalism, colonialism and Orientalism. Soseki mixed medieval and postmedieval Arthurian sources, drawing from both Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur and Tennyson's Lancelot and Elaine and Lady of Shalott. Momma points out that Soseki did not simply present his medieval world...
