medievalpoc reblogged
Simply perfection.
so just imagine how much these factors shape our interpretations of historical evidence. ;)
The scene takes no more than five minutes of the movie, and the tension between colonial history and race only escalates from that point on. However, we as museum professionals need to talk about the inclusion of this scene, especially regarding its function in a film that was cut from nearly four hours long in its first iteration to a solid two, a film that so many young people will see and one that is poised to become a cultural touchstone. The museum is presented as an illegal mechanism of colonialism, and along with that, a space which does not even welcome those whose culture it displays.
And is there anything incorrect about that?
It is worth considering the aspects of the scene that are realities in the modern museum. African artifacts such as those shown in the film’s museum are likely taken from a home country under suspicious circumstances, such as notable artifacts in real-life Britain like the Benin bronzes which now reside at the British Museum. It is often the case that individuals will know their own culture as well as or better than a curator, but are not considered valuable contributors because they lack a degree. People of color are less represented in museum spaces, and often experience undue discrimination while entering gallery spaces. Finally, museums are experiencing an influx of white women filling staff roles, leading to homogenized viewpoints, and lack senior staff with diverse backgrounds. With these truths represented in such a short but poignant scene, the tension between audiences and institutions is played out to the extreme.
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Accept and acknowledge that medieval studies has a racism problem and that it’s not just a ‘few bad apples’ or whatever. Our whole inter-discipline was built to bolster whiteness and justify colonialism and imperialism. Literally, European cultures got interested in the Middle Ages right at the time biological concepts of race went mainstream. If we can’t even acknowledge that how can we be sure we’re not still doing the same things, standing on the shoulders of racist giants?"
thedancingwalrus-blog reblogged your photo and added:
@medievalpoc I knew about both these people, I didn’t know they met much less fenced.
I think I love you.
AND!! This is why I’m always trying to show people, as much as I can, how marginalized histories aren’t separate histories!!
The way we slice and dice it up into “periods” and then chop it up some more into “topics” and “military history” or “art history” or “disability history” or “LGBT history”; the PROBLEM is when we start thinking that means they don’t overlap, and aren’t part of the same thing!!
I know many of you have seen posts like, “Can you believe that [historical event 1] and [person of historical “importance”] happened/were born in the SAME YEAR??
It’s a weird kind of cognitive dissonance that spawns false anachronisms left and right. It makes too many people label so much that absolutely DID happen as “unrealistic”, or believe it’s just too much of a coincidence.
And that’s how you end up with so many truncated imaginations, such a dearth of empathy, and the setup for such a hostile attitude towards anything doesn’t fit into a falsified concept of “Historical Accuracy.”
To try and force a connection between two things that might seem disparate is one of those little things I always get accused of, but I’ve seen wayyyyy too many amazing, mind-blowing, flabbergasting, and downright transcendent historical narratives to EVER dismiss a possibility because some people think it seems too unlikely or “out there”.
The painting I posted? Only became available online quite recently. The additional portrait of Chevalier d'Éon?? Was only identified and acquired by the National Portrait Gallery FIVE YEARS AGO!
That’s the best part about history; it isn’t “over” in that sense. It keeps happening, and we keep writing it, and learning it, and revising it, and there’s always something new to learn. I’ve been doing this for almost four years now, and it’s still like, the COOLEST thing to me.
History, as properly understood, is our attempt to reconstruct and understand the events, lives, and experiences of those who came before us — the good, the bad, and the ugly.
History follows rules of evidence and interpretation. Most important, it is debated and revised constantly as new evidence and new ways of interpreting the evidence come to light.
jzeise replied to your post: “Could you please change texts from "slave" to "enslaved person"? I...”:
Your problem is what those of us in museum must grapple with all the time.
Every inch of text is valuable real estate in an exhibition.
That said, I use enslaved person or other term.
Well, yes, of course. But I think that the way these discussions go in closed groups versus open discussions can have a very different effect and result.
I’m trying to bring these topics out in the open where people who might be hearing about it for the first time, people who never even thought about it, people who are old hands at this and might be entrenched in The Way We Do Things, and people who are directly affected by these discussions, can add diversity and pragmatism to the **practical application** of these concepts.
Ethical problems in curation, both physical and digital, should never really stop being a current discussion, because they’re always a current topic. History and art are always changing because people and society are always changing.
medievalpoc reblogged
To be a queer teenager is to exist in a vacuum. We are cautioned of a darker time just a decade or so ago when, by the popular telling of it, openly queer Americans seemingly didn’t exist. We are so often reminded of how quickly the world changed, and how lucky we are to live in the present, that it often feels like we are a new phenomenon.
Of course this isn’t true; the freedoms that LGBTQ+ Americans enjoy today were made possible only because of queer activists who spent decades fashioning a disparate social identity into a vocal, proud community. But how many of us can name them?
When we don’t grow up learning this history, our only point of reference for what it means to be queer in the U.S. becomes the ever-complicated present. There is something deeply isolating in that. History is a mirror. Every person looks to the past to find those exceptional people who have altered their way of life, who validate both their distinct identities and their ability to change the world. Discovering your heroes, no matter who you are, is an act of hope.
| Michael Waters for The Establishment
medievalpoc reblogged
Our 1st place contest winner requested a Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep comic as their prize.
I took a class about Ancient Egypt last semester and we had a whole lecture dedicated to talking about how gay Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep were. Their tomb walls were decorated with scenes of them ignoring their wives in favor of embracing each other. In one scene, the couple is seated at a banquet table that is usually reserved for a husband and wife. There’s an entire motif of Khnumhotep holding lotus flowers which in ancient Egyptian tradition symbolizes femininity. Khnumhotep offers the lotus flower to Niankhkhnum, something that only wives were ever depicted as doing for their husbands. In fact, Khnumhotep is repeatedly depicted as uniquely feminine, being shown smaller and shorter than his partner Niankhkhnum and being placed in the role of a woman. Size is a big deal in Egyptian art, husbands are almost always shown as being larger and taller than their wives. So for two men of equal status to be shown in once again, a marital fashion, is pretty telling. Not to mention they were literally buried together which is the strongest bond two people could share in ancient Egypt, as it would mean sharing the journey to the afterlife together. And yet 90% of the academic text about these two talks about these clues in vague terms and analyze the great “brotherhood” they shared, and the enigma of Khnumhotep being depicted as feminine. Apparently it’s too hard for archaeologists to accept homosexuality in the ancient world, as well as the possibility of trans individuals.
On the last note, I was walking around the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago and there is a mummy on exhibit. It caught my attention because the panel that was describing it was talking about how it was a woman’s body in a male coffin and wow, the Egyptian working that day really screwed that up. My summary, not actual words, sorry I can’t remember verbatim but it basically said that someone screwed up.
They claimed that the Egyptians screwed up a burial.
The Egyptians. Screwed up. A burial.
Now I’m not an expert in Ancient Egypt but from what I know, and what the exhibit was telling me, burials and the afterlife and all that jazz DEFINED the Egyptian religion and culture. They don’t just ‘screw up’. So instead of thinking outside the box for two seconds and wonder why else a genetically female body was in a male coffin, the ‘researchers’ blatantly disregard the rest of their research and decided to call it a screw up. Instead of, you know, admitting that maybe this mummy presented as male during his life and was therefore honorably buried as he was identified. But it would be too much of a stretch to admit that a transgender person could have existed back then.
(Sorry I can’t find any sources online and it’s been like 2 years but it stuck in my mind)
There’s a lot of bigoted historian dragging on my dash these days and it makes me happy.
Once again, more proof that we queers have ALWAYS been here, and it’s a CHOSEN narrative to erase them.
gastly-ghoul-rain
I am reblogging this for the lols as well as a very accessible and engaging reminder that every historical narrative is created by human beings interpreting existing evidence and will necessarily reflect their biases, experiences, cultural norms and taboos.
Human objectivity is a myth, and until we have diversity present and speaking out in and across all disciplines, the truth will remain obscured.
King John's Delegation to the Almohad Court (1212), IIan Shoval Medieval Interreligious Interactions and Modern Historiography
Is Matthew Paris’s story of an English diplomatic delegation, sent by King John to the caliph of Morocco in the summer of 1212, nothing more than fiction, or does it report actual historical events? Did King John really offer to subjugate his kingdom to the Muslim caliph and did he consider converting to Islam? Was one of John’s diplomats genuinely a converted Jew with whom the Muslim ruler conversed about theological issues?
And how may a new reading of this medieval chronicle in its appropriate historical context contribute to our understanding of the professionalization of diplomatic practice, the emergence of European bureaucratic kingship, Christian–Muslim political interaction, interreligious polemic, and conversion?
In this book, these questions are explored as part of the first full-scale study of Matthew Paris’s report. The volume proposes an entirely new interpretation of the text and portrays a multifaceted and inherently complex picture of the interactions between Christians, Muslims, and Jews around 1200 that draws on law, politics, statecraft, history, culture, and religion. This study also prompts a re-evaluation of the delegation story as a ‘test case’ for John’s measures during his reign. Matthew’s text is examined in its historical context of Christian–Muslim encounters on the frontier in order to advance our understanding of a crucial era of political and diplomatic transformation.
my history classes usually teach us that the birth of the atlantic slave trade had nothing to do with racism and that racism was born from it, not the other way around. i've always been kind of leery of that. i was wondering what your thoughts on the subject were?
Since this ask is specifically about anti-Black racism and its association with chattel slavery, my “thoughts on it” are pretty irrelevant. But what I can do is basically show you where to look for diverse voices and educated writings on this matter:
Discussion here: http://medievalpoc.tumblr.com/post/81808959018
Discussion here: http://medievalpoc.tumblr.com/post/81390891942
Syllabus with Reading List: http://faculty.smcm.edu/ljhall/pamethn.html
On The Enlightenment as the template for Modern anti-Black (and other) Racism (quotes from Kant; Hume; Goethe): http://medievalpoc.tumblr.com/post/132938218093
On Conflicting Sources: http://medievalpoc.tumblr.com/post/77699653807
On Inaccessible and/or problematic Sources: http://medievalpoc.tumblr.com/post/81781216735
The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity by Benjamin Isaac (sample at link)
Barbarian Invasions and the Racialization of Art History. Eric Michaud. OCTOBER 139, Winter; 2012, pp. 59–76. Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
‘Race’, ‘Nation’, ‘People’: Ethnic Identity Construction in 1 Peter 2.9 David G. Horrell. New Testament Studies / Volume 58 / Issue 01 / January 2012, pp 123 143.
Answering the Multicultural Imperative: A Course on Race and Ethnicity in Antiquity Author(s): Denise Eileen McCoskey. Source: The Classical World, Vol. 92, No. 6 (Jul. - Aug., 1999), pp. 553-561. Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
medievalpoc reblogged
The goal of writing history is to be as unbiased as possible. Most history about the Middle Ages is wrongly centered around the "white" population but your bitterness towards the exclusion of POC will distort your historical vantage point. Take care.
I had a funny feeling you were an undergrad History Major.
I’ll do for you what I’ve done for other undergrad students I’ve counseled, and hopefully soften your future disillusionment if you stick with that discipline.
There is no such thing an an unbiased historian.
The more an author seems to be trying to convince you that there is only one answer to your question, or that they are the only reliable source for the information you’re trying to find, the more you should question what you’re reading.
It’s interesting that you seem to think that my sincere enthusiasm for the topic of my research can somehow be construed as “bitterness”; but then again, I’ve noticed that a lot of white people tend to project their ideas about people of color being angry, “offended”, or resentful onto me. A lot.
The “take care” was a nice touch. As if you’re worried about my virtuous “objectivity” being besmirched by the foul corruption of critical thinking, instead of keeping myself a properly passive receptacle for “facts” passed down untouched and unexamined from the colonial era.
Do you believe that the contents of your textbooks are somehow unaffected by political and capitalist agendas, unlike literally everything else that surround us?
We’re all biased. I’ve been asked to reassure people previously that I am somehow NOT biased; my answer has always been that I will always be biased because I am a human being. We don’t somehow transcend our own humanity, points of view, and lived experiences as soon as we start writing about history! In addition:
Objectivity is a myth. We don’t suddenly stop being human when we start thinking about something! The problem is that there is a lack of openness, a lack of discussion, and a massive amount of bias that only goes one way. There is only one narrative, and no counternarrative. That’s not how academia is supposed to work, that’s not how history is supposed to work. It’s definitely not how art is supposed to work, but that’s probably the most rigid and inflexible of them all!
One thing I’ve mentioned over and over on this blog is how there is a dominant narrative of “History” that pervades the U.S. education system. This dominant narrative is often shaped more by forces other than historical accuracy; it’s decided by politicians and corporations rather than historians or educators. I have also said that the myth of objectivity in history, in education, in art, and even science, is a very damaging concept. We are all biased, because we are all human. We all have different experiences and perspectives.
The answer to bias is not “objectivity”. The answer, in my humble opinion, is diversity of bias.
The way we read and write history is always changing because we as a society are always changing. Medieval history doesn’t come to us untouched by the intervening centuries, nor is the way we write about it now uninfluenced by the lived reality of our present. There are myriad perspectives from which you can engage with history; by restricting yourself to only one you’re depriving yourself of an entire world of active and interesting engagement with the past and the present.
If history was actually just the recitation of cut-and-dried factoids unchanged by our interactions with it, it there would be no point to it. It is because of the ways in which human beings today add to, rediscover, and analyze historical events, objects, and figures that we are able to engage with and be enriched by it.
If your mentors and professors aren’t teaching you that, then I’m really sorry you are receiving an education so lacking in passion and engagement.
Yo!!! You got a mention in PBS's Idea Channel about history and junk!!!
Oh, wow, so I did. Actually, it’s a video about historiography and he goes into a lot of stuff I’m always talking about on here, about the “Narrative” that we arrange history into, and uses a textbook versus Downtown Abbey to illustrate some differences in the way history and truth is presented (and represented):
I especially enjoyed the parts about how history is by necessity affected by our modern perspective; that there is no actual “objective” way to tell history.
Was there a specific period where a conscious decision was made to erase POC from western (European/North American) history, or was this ongoing?
Well, the problem with your question is that “period” and “ongoing” aren’t mutually exclusive things. Take the Enlightenment, for example. French historians place it from 1715 and 1789, but others say it began in the 1650s. Some say it began with the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and ended with the Napoleonic wars.
What gets glossed over in all this argument about periodization and the memorization of factoids, names, and dates, is that the Enlightenment was also the beginnings of scientific racism as an attempt to justify colonialism, genocide, and chattel enslavement of people kidnapped from the African continent.
You’ll learn all about Immanuel Kant in your history of Modern Philosophy class, but here’s a quote you probably won’t see there:
The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the trifling. Mr. [David] Hume challenges anyone to cite a single example in which a Negro has shown talents, and asserts that among the hundreds of thousands of blacks who are transported elsewhere from their countries, although many of them have even been set free, still not a single one was ever found who presented anything great in art or science or any other praiseworthy quality, even though among the whites some continually rise aloft from the lowest rabble and through superior gifts earn respect in the world. So fundamental is the difference between these two races of man.
(The Oxford Handbook of Culture and Psychology edited by Jaan Valsiner; page 562)
Oh, and here’s Kant on the natures of Native Americans of all nations:
That their temperament has not become entirely adequate to any climate can also be inferred from the fact that it is hard to find any other reason why this race, which is too weak for hard labour and too indifferent for industrious work, and which is incapable of any culture even though there are enough examples and encouragement in the vicinity [namely, the example set by the European colonial settlers], stands far below even the Negro, who occupies the lowest of all other levels which we have mentioned as racial differences .
You ask me, WAS it ongoing. I say that it is STILL ongoing. Because these people were responsible for horrific atrocities, they found the need to justify, and even feel righteous about, committing them. If the people who suffered and died for their benefit were somehow less than human, having, according to Kant, no worth, creativity, accomplishments, or human value after the rigors of philosophy have been applied, then their exploitation for the benefits of white Europeans was warranted, according to the morality they were actively creating. The moralities and aesthetics created by these “Enlightenment Thinkers” that we continue to venerate are also the source of the racism and oppressive structures we suffer under today.
The atrocities that are still being perpetrated today against people of color are still built on the philosophical foundation that it is being done to people who’ve been misrepresented as having no value, no culture, no history of their own, no achievements and little to offer besides what they can be exploited for. The ties into the way people of color are not represented or are misrepresented in various forms of media, especially books, movies, tv shows, and even cartoons that purport to show historical content. This kind of thinking is also built into the way we are educated; consider your own history education, and how “American History” seems to always begin in Europe, or how “Art History” could much more accurately be called “European Art History”.
This devaluation and assessment of relative moral value is what causes a sort of schism or cognitive dissonance on the part of those who see some of these works at MPoC for the first time. We’re culturally conditioned to value the art style and the mediums used (oil paintings, reliquaries, marble sculpture, et cet), but we are at the same time culturally conditioned to devalue people of color aesthetically, morally, and intellectually.
The fact that European art has not always devalued depictions of people of color this was is also something that went through the philosophical justification grinder both during and after the Enlightenment. Depictions of Biblical figures with dark skin or other indicators that they did not meet the criteria of the construction of whiteness that was forming were seen as a mistake that needed to be fixed. And yes, there’s plenty of evidence that this was an active process:
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe also expressed a sense of aesthetic disappointment in black madonnas in a comment from 1816: “How the most unhappy of all appearances could have crept in-that, probably for Egyptian or Abessinian reasons, the Mother of God is portrayed as brown, and the face of Our Savior printed on Veronica’s veil was also given a moorish color-may be clarified when that part of art history is more closely examined.“
(From Majesty to Mystery: Change in the Meanings of Black Madonnas from the Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries by Monique Scheer )
Although the most obviously objectionable attitudes about race have been snipped and sanitized from our educations about this era, the content and gist of these ideas remain intact as they are taught to us. Information about aesthetics, value, science, and history from this context is presented to us as if it is neutral in its judgements, and exists properly and justly in the realm of “objectivity”.
The “conscious decision” of whether or not to value works of art that depict or are created by people of color is ongoing right now, and that decision is still being made be each and every person reading this right now. There are tons of people who think all of this is somehow “made up” that these works “don’t count” (whatever that means), don’t matter, are just “exceptions” (to what?), and generally shouldn’t be talked about, researched, explored, or made a fuss over.
I’m trying to put these works back at the forefront of our cultural and popular consciousness, and trying to extricate them from the centuries of racist baggage they’ve been subjected to. In some ways, perhaps I’m an idealist, because I like to think each person is capable of seeing art and perhaps even humanity, in a new and totally unexpected way. But I know that they need to be seen, they need to be talked about, and they need to influence the way we see history.
So, maybe your question opened a bigger can of worms than you anticipated, but that’s the answer I have to give you.
#thefunktastic#medievalpoc#philosophy#history#art#aesthetics#racism#scientific racism#the Englightenment#Immanuel Kant#David Hume#Johann Wolfgang van Goethe#historiography#art history#education#popular culture#chattel slavery#genocide#colonialism#exploitation#morality#justification#moral judgements#victim blaming
...There is now a manifest discrepancy between the large number of students who request that we address their love of Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, and medieval-themed video and computer games on the one hand, and the decreasing number of medievalists hired to replace retiring colleagues on the other. We are no longer protected by our involvement in preserving European heritages, an involvement often joined up with primordialist, jingoist, and colonialist mentalities discredited in the Western world by the 1970s. And we are as endangered as the rest of our humanities colleagues by the advent of new areas of scholarship, the intimidating popularity of the STEM disciplines, and politically motivated cuts to the liberal arts.
What can we do?
Perhaps we should begin by admitting that in enjoying the splendid isolation that allowed us to learn a lot about medieval culture, we have failed to share that knowledge with the public. As a result, a single 178-minute movie, Braveheart, could wipe out what 150 years of scholarship had established about the Right of the Lord’s First Night (a feudal lord’s rumored right to take the virginity of his serfs’ newlywed daughters). Meticulous source study since the Enlightenment about the horrific crimes committed during the medieval crusades hasn’t stopped schools from naming their teams Crusaders. And tens of thousands of learned books and articles about medieval knighthood have had no influence on white supremacists’ appropriation of allegedly chivalric virtues. It is clearly time to lower the drawbridge from the ivory tower and reconnect with the public.
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Digital technologies and social media only partially account for the willingness of museums to explore, at least tentatively, relaxing their control over historical authority. The current trend is in part a legacy of the New Social History of the 1960s and its interest in telling history “from the bottom up.”
Having worked for a generation to tell stories that de-center elites, museums are now de-centering elite storytellers, too. The anti-authoritarian bent may be as well a legacy of the so-called culture wars of the 1990s. The fierce backlash against revisionist historical interpretations in the Smithsonian’s The West As America and in the planned Enola Gay exhibition may have made museum administrators more than happy to hand off interpretive authority to outsiders.
Finally, we must consider the impact of changes in realms much broader than the museum world. The country’s growing ethnic diversity and its economic crises have pushed museum leaders to recognize that the field’s traditional business models need to be revamped. Instead of taking public support for granted, museums are desperate to prove their worth to their communities, a stance that makes them more receptive to outside partners, voices, and interpretations.
In September 2011, The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage published Letting Go? Sharing Historical Authority in a User-Generated World, an anthology edited by Bill Adair, Director of Exhibitions & Public Interpretation; Benjamin Filene, Associate Professor and Director of Public History at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro; and Laura Koloski, Senior Specialist in Exhibitions & Public Interpretation.
Letting Go? investigates path-breaking public history practices at a time when the traditional expertise of museums and historical institutions is constantly challenged by evolving trends in technology, community-based programming, oral histories, and contemporary art.
The anthology features 26 newly commissioned thought pieces, case studies, conversations, and artworks by 19 leading cultural practitioners, including Nina Simon, Michael Frisch, Kathleen McLean, Fred Wilson, and more. These contributors address questions of ownership in the world of Web 2.0 and social media—can everyone be a storyteller or curator?—and explore the implications of 21st-century audiences that create, rather than just receive, historical interpretation. Drawing on examples from history, art, and science museums, Letting Go? offers concrete examples of “shared” authority between institutions and audiences, as well as models for innovative integration of public curation and participation.
Distributed by Left Coast Press To order your copy, visit the Left Coast Press website or Amazon.
Read an excerpt from the Introduction here
If one understands Europe’s modernity—a long process of five centuries—as the unfolding of new possibilities derived from its centrality in world history and the corollary constitution of all other cultures as its periphery, it becomes clear that, even though all cultures are ethnocentric, modern European ethnocentrism is the only one that might pretend to claim universality for itself.
Modernity’s Eurocentrism lies in the confusion between abstract universality and the concrete world hegemony derived from Europe’s position as center.
Europe, Modernity, and Eurocentrism by Enrique Dussel