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Reviewed by:
  • Medievalisms in the Post-colonial World: The Idea of “the Middle Ages” Outside Europe
  • Suzanne Conklin Akbari
Kathleen Davis and Nadia Altschul, eds. Medievalisms in the Post-colonial World: The Idea of “the Middle Ages” Outside Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. Pp. vi, 444. $70.00.

The first generation of publications on the intersection of medieval studies and postcolonial theory—from the seminal collection of essays edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, The Postcolonial Middle Ages 2000, to Lisa Lampert-Weissig's recent survey, Medieval Literature and Postcolonial Studies 2010—has come to a close. In Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World, Kathleen Davis and Nadia Altschul lay the foundations for the second generation of such studies, in which an informed self-awareness of the stakes of an investment in the medieval past is of crucial importance. The essays collected here address a broad span of topics with a diverse chronological and geographical range, and establish new parameters for evaluating the various uses of the medieval past: in this respect, Davis and Altschul's collection has its peers in Karla Mallette's European Modernity and the Arab Mediterranean: Toward a New Philology and a Counter-Orientalism 2010 and Michelle R. Warren's Creole Medievalism: Colonial France and Joseph Bédier's Middle Ages 2010. Like the studies of Mallette and Warren, the essays collected by Davis and Altschul have a common aim: that is, to analyze the strategic deployment of a “Middle [End Page 328] Ages” in the service of modern political agendas, from the nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries.

Perhaps the most striking feature of Davis and Altschul's collection is their organizing principle: each of the four sections of the volume is composed of a sequence of three essays, each of which presents a different perspective on the section's theme, followed by a “response” that points out areas of convergence and divergence among the preceding cluster of essays, leading to possible future research questions. This structure creates a greater sense of continuity and common purpose in the volume as a whole than one might have thought possible, given the widely disparate areas of research—in terms of field of study, methodological approach, and theoretical orientation—on the part of the volume's contributors. In two of the four sections, Davis and Altschul themselves have written the response essays; in the other two sections, responses are written by outstanding theorists in the field of postcolonial studies, Dipesh Chakrabarty and Simon Gikandi. In addition, greater cohesiveness across the volume is achieved by anchoring three of the four sections of the volume with an essay centered on the field of Latin American studies: this counterintuitive approach inverts the conventional scenario of medieval studies, situating Latinity in the New World setting rather than in the superannuated institutions of the European Middle Ages.

In their introduction, Davis and Altschul make explicit their aim to address “medievalism in spaces outside Europe, particularly colonies and former colonies that did not have their ‘own’ medieval period, and where the concept of a Middle Ages came as a function of European colonization” (1). This approach raises fascinating questions about the role of periodization, especially what it might mean to call a period “medieval,” and what kinds of power—and what kinds of inadequacies—are implied by such a designation. Davis and Altschul suggest that the medieval is at once a “spatiotemporal concept,” “part of a temporal grid” and “part of a spatial imaginary” (1). By investigating how “colonial medievalisms contribute both to medieval studies and to postcolonial theory,” Davis and Altschul hope to “bring medievalist and postcolonial scholars into conversation about the shared histories of their fields and the potential of their mutual endeavor” (3). In some ways, this trail has been blazed already by Lampert-Weissig and, earlier, by Bruce Holsinger in The Pre-modern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory 2005. Here, however, the movement toward dialogue is truly innovative, building [End Page 329] upon the preliminary effort in this direction found in Ananya Kabir and Deanne Williams's Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages 2005 but widening the temporal and geographical frame very substantially.

The first section, “Locations...

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