Selective Memory
By demonstrating the ways in which famous historical figures such as Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington used medieval histories as part of their techniques of self-fashioning before and after Emancipation, defining for themselves and for others what it “means” to be black and free, or at least to operate on the other side of the institution slavery in America, Vernon’s chapter, “Medieval Self-Fashioning: The Middle Ages in African-American Scholarship and Curricula,” reveals the complex and shifting historical reality that lies underneath the sediment of (the idea of) race that has accumulated over the years to create an alternate reality/illusion. The sediment of race since Emancipation covers up complex history in favor of the simplified, rigid “truth” that practitioners of medieval scholarship are, typically and necessarily, White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs), mostly of the older male variety, and, further, that this is who “should” be invested in medieval studies because it is who has been invested in medieval studies throughout time. When “scholars” and the populace work in conjunction to repeatedly select histories they want and ignore histories they don’t, as Kolodny’s “Anglo-America’s Viking Heritage: A Nineteenth-century Romance” demonstrates, dominating cultures such as the Anglo-American can concoct “good” and “bad,” “light” and “dark” pasts to claim one over the other. This process necessarily involves contrast, because to define one’s self as “good” one makes the other “bad.” After reading a chapter such as Vernon’s on African-American scholarship and curricula alongside Kolodny’s on Anglo-America’s selective history, it becomes clear that it is possible to take the same history and reflect on it, publicly and through writing, to create the future one wants, and the future one wants is contingent upon one’s positionality within the structure of domination.
Douglass’s selection of the fourteenth-century Scottish chieftain, the historical figure of “the black Douglass,” builds off the “romantic image of the Middle Ages” as he seeks a “change in identity” (Vernon 47). In naming himself after a Scottish chieftain, Douglass constructs his identity atop the sedimented “reality” that has accreted and been romanticized by the dominant culture over hundreds of years to position himself favorably within it. According to Vernon, “the mythology of the Middle Ages provided the discursive means for African-American intellectuals to fashion their identity in the decades after the civil war” (49). In this way, Douglass “read American history in parallel with medieval British history … to reinterpret and reshape the past based on fictional ties,” appealing to “the history of Anglo-Saxon and Norman conflict to subvert dominant narratives” (Vernon 54-58). Like the collective identity accretes over time, so too can the individual’s identity add onto that collective accretion to rise above, or cut through, the sedimented reality. Put another way, self-fashioning in the muck created by the historical notion of race requires working with/in that muck to survive.
When in a survival, and fear-based, us-v.-them mentality, competition sets in, which was the case when Anglo-America sought to construct as white a heritage as it could, distancing themselves from the “darker,” more Roman, more Catholic, further-south cultural histories of the Spanish, French, and Italians. After all, whose skin is paler than the Norse? “Bolstering the national self-image in the face of Europe’s greater power and ancient cultures, even historians found the romantic resonances of the Vinland story too compelling to ignore,” Kolodny writes (119). What American historians, writers, and makers of culture did ignore, were the “anonymous ‘Indian hunting-bands’” that “wandered through” the land of “abundance” that was America/“Vinland,” and the Spanish, Italian and French explorers who laid claim to large swaths of it. The difficult figure to reckon with was Columbus–the romantic notion of him built up over time meant he could not be ignored in full–which was done by politely paying homage to him as an individual but overlooking the Spanish, pre-Inquisition monarchs who sent/funded him. In this way, complex realities taking into account the overarching institutions and dominant structure are ignored in favor of simple, bite-sized, rugged individuals like Lief Erikson and Columbus and their simplified adventure narratives. This is how it is possible for a situation to perpetuate such as that articulated by Heng in “Racial Worlds, Medieval Worlds,” in which young women from Singapore are made to wash British women’s sweaters in ways not practical for the climate, the reality in which they lived: overlooking the present because “that’s how it’s always been done.” Similarly to how race has obscured complex histories, the Newtonian notion of time as linear has remained dominant despite Einstein’s unveiling of time as relative. Discourses such as Ahmed’s and Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, which she cites in “Race as sedimented history,” can queer time, queer history, and help us make sense of the uncertainty of living in a decentered complex and multicategorical “reality” that is not as simple or easily reduced as the “discovery narrative” discourse would have us believe.
Works Cited
Ahmed, Sara. “Response Essay: Race as sedimented history.” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, 2015, pp. 94-97.
Freeman, M. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Duke UP, 2010.
Heng, Geraldine. “Beginnings: Racial Worlds, Medieval Worlds: Why This Book, and How to Read a Book on Medieval Race.” The Invention of Race in the Middle Ages, Cambridge UP, 2018, pp. 1-14.
