It’s been my experience that viewing art that empowers, versus art that dehumanizes you/representations of "you", is a difference that can be felt immediately & viscerally.

Part of why I post European art is because most Americans have been physiologically trained to value that art style or origin (through education, media exposure, and cultural contexts given), but to devalue representations of people of color.

It’s been my observation that this either resolves or creates a conflict in the viewer, and which of those it does depends on who the viewer is.

[art info]

Seeing a positive and (in this context) valuable representation of a person who is not white creates a conflict in a white viewer only if they’ve built their entire sense of self and identity in the idea that ONLY white people can have value, history, dignity, and other traits they associate with these artworks. This is an identity and value system based entirely in exclusion, and who is NOT allowed to “claim” what they view as “cultural accomplishment.”

[art info]

However, for someone who is living the conflict of wanting to value your identity as a person of color, BUT is surrounded by white supremacist values and representation, seeing an artwork like this:

[art info]

might help to resolve an existing conflict between valuing the self, and living in a culture that only values a particular art style and a specific manner of presenting it.

Certainly this conflict doesn’t exist for everyone, but I know that it did for me. Also, this work is certainly Eurocentric, and it truly gladdens me that more and more people are looking outside the sphere of European and Eurocentric art and creating art archives like East Is Everywhere, which centers Asia and the Middle East, other ways of viewing early modern and classical antiquity global cultures or intercultural interactions in the work of Dr Caitlin R Green, and focus on interdisciplinary diversity and individual perspectives at the margins of the field at The Medieval Middle.

Art has always affected my life, the way I feel about myself, and the society I live in. Researching and looking for artworks that might fall outside the narrative my culture has pushed onto me has been incredibly freeing and inspiring to me personally, and it’s my hope this information can find its way into the hands of anyone who might be able to benefit from it.

#medievalpoc #art appreciation #aesthetics and racism #race and representation #art history #cultural criticism #values #history #counternarratives

medievalpoc

Submission: Context-Free Notions of Purity in a Post-Colonial Society

travelwedo submitted to medievalpoc:

Hey! I saw that salt cellar from Benin you posted. It’s a theme that’s been on my mind a lot since starting to follow your blog. From time to time you post a thing like this, or those “porn” pictures of an English diplomat in Japan, or the recent Japanese helmet imitating some Portuguese elements (and “nanban” even apparently means “barbarians”), etc. So there is fetishism, and borrowing, and decorative use of foreign elements in non-European art too. It’s that Europeans ended up being the ones who went and colonised everyone else, which fed into these manifestations of European art making it so political (even though non-Europeans are well known for colonising and enslaving each other, e.g. the Japanese in China, the Mongols in Asia, the Inca, Maya and Aztecs in South America, various African tribes against each other, etc.) So when I look at it from this point of view, it is possible to distinguish art from everything else and still like the art for the sake of it. But my impression is that whenever you tag something with “Orientalism” or similar, you imply that you dislike that art? It seems natural to be drawn to beautiful artistic traditions and want to incorporate them into your own work if you’re an artist. I remember you were even discussing Degas once in a fairly negative tone, because he used some Japanese-style effects.

This is turning out long and rambling, which I hate, but it’s like that point I was trying to make about colour (in art) a while ago. In a purely artistic context, you see everyone doing the same thing, but I feel like you present European art as less valuable when it incorporates foreign elements, when you don’t do the same to non-European art.

As a communication exercise, I'll paraphrase what you're asking me so I can see if we're on the same page. Here's what I've got:

Why do you present your posts as if the power dynamics of a post-colonial world are relevant to the way we view, learn, and write about these artworks today?

And to literally quote you:

I feel like you present European art as less valuable when it incorporates foreign elements, when you don’t do the same to non-European art.

*sigh*

Okay, let's rehash the facts of the current situation I'm speaking into, a.k.a., CONTEXT. As in, the context of this blog. As in, "why does Medievalpoc exist?"

1. European art is often viewed as the "only" art that exists. If you take "Art History", you ACTUALLY taking "European Art History". That isn't a neutral situation. European art is elevated to an undeserved position that borders of reverence, BECAUSE of colonialism, because of whiteness and white supremacy, and because whiteness and Eurocentrism is overvalued in our culture. People of Color who have created or been the subjects of European art through history have been erased, downplayed, skipped over, and devalued.

2. NON-EUROPEAN ART IS CONSIDERED A NICHE OR SPECIALTY subject, much the same way non-Western and/or non-Eurocentric History is. It is systematically devalued because of racism, stereotypes, and white supremacy. It's often written about and presented as if it's inferior. Artworks that feature people of color are sold off to Ethnography Museums for not being European enough. NATIVE AMERICAN ART IS PUT INTO NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUMS. Because apparently our ART is as whimsical, earthy, and naturally occurring as a fossilized dinosaur turd? From the article:

strong> When Native American, Pacific, and African art and artifact is lumped in with natural history exhibits, it sends a message that these groups are a part of the "natural" world. That the art they produce is somehow less cultured and developed than the western art canon. It also sends the message that they are historical, an element of the romantic past, when in reality these peoples are alive and well, with many traditions intact and new traditions happening all the time.

3. The reason Orientalism SUCKS is because it's a European fantasy about what the Middle East and Asia were like, and that is believed MORE THAN THE TRUTH IS, more than the actual narratives, stories, and histories of those people. I mean, did you read the link I appended to many of those posts? The paintings and literature that fall under the umbrella of Orientalism are a beautiful LIE that continues to affect our society today:

"Orientalism” is a way of seeing that imagines, emphasizes, exaggerates and distorts differences of Arab peoples and cultures as compared to that of Europe and the U.S. It often involves seeing Arab culture as exotic, backward, uncivilized, and at times dangerous. Edward W. Said, in his groundbreaking book, Orientalism, defined it as the acceptance in the West of “the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate theories, epics, novels, social descriptions, and political accounts concerning the Orient, its people, customs, ‘mind,’ destiny and so on.”

^ That's not about "liking" or "not liking" or "but it's pretty". It's about purpose and function. Once again, if you're going to accuse me of having a double standard of some kind, maybe you should take a second to look at the world around you and how information is presented and organized according to the dominant narrative.

This blog exists within the context of an already-dominant narrative. Stop trying to place it in some kind of vacuum outside history or society, in some kind of bubble where the only bias that exists is mine. MedievalPOC is a project dedicated to creating a counternarrative, and pretending the dominant narrative is irrelevant to what I post here frames it as some kind of objective truth, when it isn't.

One more time:

In a purely artistic context, you see everyone doing the same thing, but I feel like you present European art as less valuable when it incorporates foreign elements, when you don’t do the same to non-European art.

"In a purely artistic context" and "you see everyone doing the same thing" completely erases the entire context of literally EVERYTHING I post.

Pretending everything's all equal and happy and that my presentation is somehow biased is a thing a lot of people like to do. Because you've just obliterated reality. There is no "purely artistic context". That's a complete myth.

Your art history book? A human being wrote that. It wasn't found underground with the dinosaur turds. It isn't naturally occurring. The person who wrote it has a race, and a gender, and a culture, and a society, and biases, and preferences, and life experiences.

Me too! And YOU! Art is created by humans. Humans exist in society, and so does what we make.

#art history #context #counternarratives #Postcolonial Studies #Orientalism #African Art #Native American Art #European Art #humanity #society #submission #travelwedo #essays

medievalpoc

a-book-of-days-deactivated20150 asked:

Just wanted to tell you that your responses to debunkers, deniers, and haters are almost as informative and epic as your regular on-theme posts. The only thing preventing me from enjoying them thoroughly is knowing that they come at the expense of personal aggravation to you. I sincerely think you're one of the best Tumblrs going and I have recommended you to at least 20 people now, including some of my professors. Anyway, you're great, your blog is great, and keep fighting the good fight.

Thank you. Honestly, I don’t do it for the frustrating people, I do it for the frustrated people who know these assumptions about history are crap, but can’t articulate why, or don’t have access to the bits and bobs we call “sources”, or just aren’t very good at research, which is fine.

You go right ahead and enjoy them, share them, get inspired and get creative. I personally feel like these stories are interesting and that’s why they’re so polarizing-they challenge our ingrained assumptions and the narratives we’ve been taught or informed by culture.

After all, every character is some kind of “exception”, even the tiresome trope of the Blacksmith who becomes a King is by nature an exception to a cultural norm. That’s what captures our imaginations. Why not expand that idea in ways we might not have known it were possible?

Be as Historically Accurate as you wanna be. :)

#History #medievalpoc #creativity #historical accuracy #counternarratives #a-book-of-days

medievalpoc

admiralofthehip replied to your post: “How do paintings of legendary figures from the past in distant lands prove anything about Bohemia's demographics? That's like saying Jesus was in Milan in the 15th century (or in any other place anywhere) because everybody was painting pictures of him.”:

Apparently, white people in medieval art is evidence that they were there, but POC in art isn't good enough?

I've often thought about changing the title of this blog to "Let's pretend you have a point".

Because it's never really been about facts, or logic. As much as people have "complimented" (*eyeroll*) this blog on using both those things, the situations I'm addressing via this blog aren't truly based on either of those things.

The "burden of proof" such as it is, will always remain solely on those who are historically disenfranchised. Notice the lack of calls for "proof" that people in Medieval Europe were all white.

Our vision of the past has been and continues to be written by the present. In the post linked above, I speak about the ubiquitously disappointing limits of our imaginations, which have been truncated by the endless amounts of money and resources thrown at producing the same stories, over and over again.

Those who control our present control our view of the past. I live in a nation where it is perfectly legal to intentionally falsify "The News", while simultaneously presenting yourself as a reputable arbiter of the truth. If these are our standards for journalism, then even marginally creative endeavors owe absolutely nothing to reality or truth.

It just goes to show that aligning with popular misconceptions and cultural narratives never requires proof. It's only those who disagree, and those who are harmed by these narratives, who must prove the same thing over and over again, who are perceived as requiring approval, permission, or the showing of deference to the systems that created the misconceptions in the first place.

It's a glaring and painfully obvious double standard, but hey...let's pretend they have a point.

It's still wrong.

#admiralofthehip #systematic inequality #status quo #stories #narratives #counternarratives

medievalpoc

mademoiselle-red asked:

It seems to me from (high school history class) that medieval European society was intolerant of differences. Any difference from the majority were frowned upon. How did nonPOCs in medieval Europe view POCs, who were in the minority in terms of skin color being different from the majority of their neighbors? Did they 1) perceive that there was a difference? 2) did they believe pigmentation made someone "other", or was it insignificant, as inconsequential as having a different hair color?

medievalpoc answered:

Uh. I’m not even sure how to answer a question framed this way. I choose 3) Medieval European society spans about a thousand years and an entire continent (albeit a smallish one, you know, for a continent) so any answer given to this would be both right and wrong simultaneously. The wording is really confusing, and I don’t really understand why “did they perceive a difference?” would be an option.

I will definitely differ from the idea that “any difference was frowned upon”. That’s not true at all. Medieval Europeans often thought someone who was very different was exciting and cool, like, as long as they didn’t constitute some kind of obvious threat or belong to a group considered at odds with or a threat to the dominant culture of that particular place or time. Really intense antipathy was mostly reserved for familiar-difference type stuff, like oppression and persecution of Jewish people, Roma/Romany, et cet. Also, The Crusades were a thing.

I express my condolences for your high school history class. And like, of course they perceived human difference, but…the way it was perceived and the differences that were seen as significant varied a lot. To generalize, the really important differences would have been religion, gender, and social class/financial status, with some variance for ability/disability status. Ethnicity would have variously been an important difference or grouping which intersects with religion, and eventually a sort of proto-nationality type thing.

The bottom line is, we can never really know, because if someone wasn’t perceived as “Other” they weren’t depicted that way in art, or described that way in literature or records. I mean, we are talking about an era during which representational art of non-religious human figures just kind of disappeared and reappeared with cultural and social fluctuations in the area(s).

Additionally, there were places during this era that just didn’t make images of people at all, for the most part. Hence people asking me for images of people of color in Viking art, and I’m just like….uh….

Source

A lot of the research going on in that direction is more like, “this is probably a human face”.

Now, there are those who take this kind of representation as evidence of racial homogeneity and isolation (a.k.a. Vikings never saw people of color), which I think is ridiculous, because Vikings. And then there are those like me who think that this is because Vikings (an extremely general term, really) didn’t place much importance on human features we would consider “racial” nowadays, or maybe they did and just didn’t care about drawing realistic looking people.

Anyhow, I just picked something at random to try and ground the conversation, but really I could just wave my arms around and yell “history!” and feel like I was answering that question, too.

I think it is fairly non-controversial to say that the Vikings were quite familiar with people of, what today might be considered, different racial categories. Obviously, the “Nordic” Vikings were in frequent contact with the Sámi — the Sámi are often “othered” in Norse literature. But the true Vikings who took to the sea encountered many cultures and people who looked “different.”

As you mentioned, they hit North America, and they also traded/fought with the Abbasid Caliphate and with the “Saracens” along the Med. Even if we don’t count the Rus as purely Scandinavian Vikings, Norwegians were happy to chill with them and meet/kill people like the Pechenegs of the Central Asian steppes. Harald harðráði, according to his saga (the general points of which are not really disputed), might as well have been an early Globetrekker TV host — if that show involved more killing, robbing and blinding. He even visited Jerusalem and later made it to the Euphrates. And Harald probably wasn’t that unusual as far as Viking travelers went — their two main trade routes were to the West around the British Isles and East down the Dnieper to cosmopolitan Constantinople.

All this information made its way back to Scandinavia and Norse settlements and was written down, particularly in iceland, a few hundred years later — so people still understood that there was a larger world out there even as they became more isolated after the Viking Age expansion.

"At home," apart from mixing with the Sámi, things seem to have been kinda vanilla-looking. DNA studies for places like Iceland that found themselves less connected to the rest of the world (though they still frequently met Basque whalers) after the Viking Age, show a mix of genetic material from Scandinavia and the British Isles. So, as Iceland is often seen as being a bit of a "snapshot" of the Viking Age because of its isolation, we can assume that other Viking settlements weren’t too different (Shetland and Orkney for example). HOWEVER, Norway’s connection with the Rus, and Denmark’s European connection make it likely that they would have been less homogenous.

A recent DNA study looking for the extent of a Viking genetic legacy in Northwest England (which was probably a sizable Norse settlement) also turned up at least one sub-Saharan African bloodline, though it may have appeared in England as early as the Roman occupation or as late as the start of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. So, outside their hometowns, the places where Vikings set up shop were probably more diverse then Hollywood might imagine. People tend to forget that the Vikings were some of the most well-traveled people of their time. They encountered tons of cultures and people and tapped into trade routes that went even farther afield. If anyone was going to be familiar with diversity, it would be a Viking.

Viking Age art that has preserved in wood and metalwork doesn’t really use color — well, not in a photo-realistic way, anyhow. Embroidery and clothwork might show something but it doesn’t preserve as well. Much of the casual art created by Vikings and their descendants has been lost . Norse literature, though, gives some insight into how they saw people in their own society.

The Rígsþula, which is probably Icelandic in origin, probably written in the 13th century and probably based on Viking Age oral traditions, divides people up into three classes starting with scabby-faced, big-footed, swarthy slaves on the bottom and moves up to ruddy and clear-skinned freemen and then the elites with their blonde hair and piercing eyes. The “swarthy” slaves may refer to “darker” folks like the Irish, who the sagas say (and DNA studies have confirmed) were carried off as slaves to places like Iceland. Even so, blondes had more fun.

So, the Vikings were a group very familiar with diversity but who were themselves mostly descendants of Scandinavians and the people of the British Isles with some intermarriage with the Sámi (except for the Rus who were likely Scandinavian-Slavic). The diversity the Vikings saw is not easily readable in their extant visual art but much of it is refelcted in the writing of their descendants.

medievalpoc

It will never cease to baffle me why reblogs or replies like the post above frame their posts like a disagreement, when...like...literally it's just completely in line with what I've been saying, from my point of view.

Not liking me is totally fine, which you've made clear that you don't, and no one's forcing you to. But I think a lot of people keep moving the goalposts of what they claim I'm trying to say. As in, moving it from the premise "there were people of color in Medieval/Early Modern Europe" to assuming or misrepresenting my claim as "There was a POC majority in Medieval Europe", which seems like it's reaching pretty hard. The flippant "blondes had more fun" is sort of creepy though.

As for the influence Eddic poetry had on the likes of Tolkien and Borges and whatnot, I've critiqued the translations habits of 19th and 20th century historians before, and I'm certainly not the only one. That's just one of the many ways in which relatively modern negative attitudes toward people of color gets projected onto the past.

That's one of the #1 ways that we end up with ideas like "Medieval European women had no power or autonomy" as well as "Medieval European were racist/had no idea what people of color looked like/were racially homogenous or isolated".

Another confusing part of the framing for me is that this is "non-controversial", because actually it's pretty obnoxiously controversial, and it shouldn't be. Until you get into the higher levels of education, this kind of information remains suppressed by standardized curricula, and then "suddenly" it's just facts but somehow no one cares to do anything about it. Mostly because by that point there are only five people on earth who know what you're talking about anymore, and you're very invested in jostling for rank among those five people.

My point is also that almost always, interesting stories from history are exceptions, not the crap everyone knows about, or basically those that adhere to the narratives we've had hammered into our heads from not only education, but popular film, literature, and other media.

The way these narratives function in our society is a very important tool for social influence and control, otherwise there wouldn't be so much frigging political hoopla over it. Once again, the way these narratives, often fictionalized, function in our society is a very important tool for influence, which is why some people will very easily be tipped to the point of violence in order to defend children's animated films near-ubiquitous whiteness.

Which I believe, sheds a little more light on why my statement of "there were people of color in Medieval Europe" is misrepresented as "everyone was people of color in Medieval Europe".

Kind of like the study mentioned in this NPR article/interview on how when men see 17% women onscreen, they *perceive* it to be 50/50, and when 33% of the characters onscreen are women, they *perceive* there to be MORE women than men.

This kind of projected hypervisibility leads to people taking blurry screenshots of films like Disney's Frozen and hollering LOOK! REPRESENTATION of POC"!!!!! I mean, if that's what counts as representation, then it follows that actually having a main character be a person of color is somehow "overdoing it" or "too politically correct". It's a false framing. It's a polarization skewed on the axis of hypervisibility versus "default" or "neutral". And this false framing is used to exclude, misrepresent, persecute, and generally to do harm.

The hostility towards any sort of representation of people of color in fiction and fantasy media feeds on itself, and you end up with posts like this one, in which someone feels as though "Historical Accuracy" specifically in regard to race is a mandate that goes either way, based on some kind of ephemeral burden of proof that's just never really going to exist, not in the way people expect it to, I think.

I mean, "Historical Accuracy" in regard to whether or not a particular character was cultivating barley or wheat comes nowhere NEAR the level of popular discourse and controversy that human difference and representation thereof is, and with good reason. It's because one directly affects people living and consuming media as we speak, and the other really doesn't.

Once again, I will state that a lot of the disconnect here is because I'm looking at the past from where we are now, rather than looking at the past in and of itself.

And in summation, I invite people to look over the rather valuable information contained in the post above this one, and consider what I've always said: there is evidence, and there are interpretations. The same evidence can be interpreted in very different ways. I'd say the evidence above just goes to show how much diversity and worldliness was happening with the whole Viking thing, and someone else uses it as a premise for "things were looking pretty vanilla."

The bottom line, what is and isn't common knowledge will absolutely be affected by popular media, educational structures, and existing narratives that we have constantly reinforced by the culture around us. I'm providing a counternarrative. Similar evidence, sometimes even the same evidence. Different interpretation, with a great deal of precedent.

#Vikings #Viking art #diversity #narratives #counternarratives #terminalpleasure