tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post8721410374347079031..comments2024-03-10T20:46:19.274-04:00Comments on In the Middle: The Ultimate Rear-Avant-Garde, Leading from Behind: A Radicant-Altermodern Medieval StudiesCord J. Whitakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06224143153295429986noreply@blogger.comBlogger7125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-49357112837368230572013-01-10T13:51:10.294-05:002013-01-10T13:51:10.294-05:00And now in the shameless plug department, I'd ...And now in the shameless plug department, I'd also like to mention, in relation to this post, that Laurie Finke, Kathleen Kelly, and Marty Shichtman have put together a fab issue of postmedieval on "The Mobile Middle Ages," which will be forthcoming later this year [early summer], and also featuring an essay by my co-blogger Jonathan Hsy [!]:<br /><br />THE MOBILE MIDDLE AGES<br /><br />This special issue of postmedieval will feature collaborative work that tracks the flows of ideas, words, people, goods, money, books, art objects, and artifacts across national boundaries. The essays in this volume follow trails, routes, and trajectories into conceptual territories usually mapped by geographical “middles” - spaces in between places. Our aim is to explore movement across and between medieval cultures generally understood as distinct and internally homogeneous in order to reveal the hybridity and fluidity produced by cultural interaction through commercial traffic, migration, nomadism, intermarriage, imperialism, and diaspora. Two border crossings are central to this issue. First, we want to shift the focus within medieval studies from the uniqueness or distinctiveness of the national cultures that have defined medieval studies, thus encouraging scholarship that elucidates the mobility of cultures and the exchanges between them, ultimately decentering Europe as the locus of the “middle ages.” The volume connects Europe to other areas of the world; essays explore far-flung geographies from Bergthorsknoll in Iceland to Cairo to Caffa, and move throughout the Mediterranean and along trade routes that linked Europe to the east. Second, these essays traffic between disciplines, fields, and areas of expertise in medieval studies. Essays explore literatures in English, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Arabic, and Hebrew, as well as art history, archaeology, and epidemiology. Through the dialogues begun in this issue, we want to establish a place “in the middle” where scholars with different expertise can come together and create a common space and language for thinking more globally about routes that connect rather than borders that separate and define—and in so doing, perhaps rethink their own expertise.<br /><br />Essays<br /><br />“Flea and ANT: Mapping the Mobility of the Plague, 1330s-1350s,” Kathleen Coyne Kelly (Northeastern University)<br /><br />“Speaking in Tongues: Medieval Xenoglossia and Mobile Linguistic Networks,” Jonathan Hsy (George Washington University)<br /><br />“Have Dante Will Travel: On the Limitations of Personal Mobility,” Daniel Hartnett (Kenyon College)<br /><br />“Der guote Gêrhart: the Power of Mobility in the Medieval Mediterranean,” William Crooke (East Tennessee State University)<br /><br />“Virtual Mobility: Dreamscape and Landscape in a Late Medieval Allegory,” Anne Harris (DePauw University)<br /><br />“Ruins in Motion: The Genizah Romance Harağāt,” Heather Bamford (Texas State University-San Marcos)<br /><br />“Places and Mobilities in the Viking Age North Atlantic,” Douglas J. Bolender (Field Museum of Natural History) and Oscar Aldred (Newcastle University)<br /><br />John Urry [Univ. of Lancaster], who founded the field of Mobile Sociology is writing the Response Essay, and Kathleen Biddick the Book Review Essay. Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-28876082645734399772013-01-10T11:10:42.420-05:002013-01-10T11:10:42.420-05:00"Make that a pack of "persons," hum..."Make that a pack of "persons," human and nonhuman, "residing" together while also open to the world, and I'm with you."<br />It's a deal! Thanks much, EJ.medievalkarlhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12440542200843836794noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-21028780592238696132013-01-10T09:22:53.646-05:002013-01-10T09:22:53.646-05:00Karl: wait ... are you telling me you *don't* ...Karl: wait ... are you telling me you *don't* want to live in Portlandia with the rest of us? All kidding aside, I think other-worldists and alter-modernists are essentially on the same page in certain respects [esp. with regard to opposing, rejecting, and moving away from neoliberal capital]; Bourriaud's work, for example, is very much in step with that set of movements, and by "moving in the same direction," he doesn't mean "now, we all live in Portlandia" [just to use that as an example], he means, everyone simply moving outward, away from "home." Another way of putting this would be to say that the moving in the same direction does not really mean we are all heading to the same place; rather, it means a sort of mass exit from systems and places over-determined by neoliberal capitalism, by nationalism, by cultural assimilation, and the like. In other words, "same direction" = "out of here." For me, the more troubling question has to do with who can actually do this; many people are suffering within so-called non-self-directed "mobility" while others are suffering in their "stuck-ness." Bourriaud's book is mainly looking at artists and artistic movements, not at, say, global, diasporic labor conditions [a better author for the negative view of mobility would be Zygmunt Bauman, or Ulrich Beck].<br /><br />I like that image of two lovers looking out at the world together, both rooted [to each other?] and also open to what is "out there," although I'd like to get rid of the distinctions "in here" and "out there" altogether, and I'm done with couples and coupling, unless we're willing to multiply those in a way that isn't always "serial." Make that a pack of "persons," human and nonhuman, "residing" together while also open to the world, and I'm with you. Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-63689945802725613322013-01-09T20:07:04.035-05:002013-01-09T20:07:04.035-05:00praise first! Eileen, when are you assembling all ...praise first! Eileen, when are you assembling all your manifestos into a shouty 100-page book? You have enough now, and you should. <br /><br />second, better than altermodernity, I like <a href="http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altermondialisme" rel="nofollow">autremondialisme</a>, but heard in a more posthuman register, because autremondialisme fights back on the broader front that would preserve our work as university educators as something more than just the replicators of privilege, <i>and</i> because frankly " What I term altermodern is precisely the emergence, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, of an analogous process: a new cultural precipitate, the formation of a mobile population of artists and thinkers choosing to go in the same direction" sounds to me like a utopic Portlandia in the worst possible sense or even the fantasy of libertarian, Randian shrugging. Maybe I'd like something like a less-than-half remembered idea from Marguerite Duras, maybe, about two lovers looking not at each other, but out at the world together (where is that from? Believe I heard it from...Dan Kline). Here we have a mixture of rootedness <i>and</i> openness <i>and</i> resistance that appeals to me and, in my better moments, should draw me to action.<br /><br />Finally, to, well, look out at the world together, <a href="https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/2022/9492/10.10.06.html?sequence=1" rel="nofollow">here's me</a> gesturing towards my review from a couple years back of the <i>Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: The Middle Ages</i>, where I complain about this fine volume's use of national rather than thematic categories. Ah well!medievalkarlhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12440542200843836794noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-50991145781496852792013-01-09T16:25:59.432-05:002013-01-09T16:25:59.432-05:00All good ideas are utopian, Eileen. The hard part ...All good ideas are utopian, Eileen. The hard part is to render them part of the everywhere.<br /><br />Or maybe better, to enable people to perceive that they are already a part of the everywhere, and their invitation needs to be accepted.Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-19256000408240286542013-01-09T16:23:29.998-05:002013-01-09T16:23:29.998-05:00Jeffrey: I agree with your point over places where...Jeffrey: I agree with your point over places where we need to hesitate and also how some of the problems we face [both within the more narrow field of medieval studies and within the more broad humanities and then even the larger University-writ-large] feel quite difficult to address [or *do* something about at present]. And I also realize that medieval studies are often seen [by others, in various so-called intellectual vanguards] as irrelevant to present issues, crises, etc. I guess I naively believe at the same time that maybe medieval studies [so called] can form its own intellectual rear-vanguard, that then can make things [intellectual-cultural life] "flow" in certain directions. It is admittedly a utopian idea.Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-22633550784755884762013-01-09T16:04:33.280-05:002013-01-09T16:04:33.280-05:00So much to respond to here, Eileen. Thank you for ...So much to respond to here, Eileen. Thank you for a post so rich with insights, urgings and provocations.<br /><br />As you know from the FB and Twitter discussions I've been precipitating lately on the subject, I've been thinking a great deal about the future of humanities disciplines -- esp English, since that is my own base. Though really what I've been wondering is how soon English will look like some language departments and smaller fields like philosophy, linguistics, and so on, gutted of their full time faculty members, adjunctified, repurposed for efficient service or closed down.<br /><br />On the one hand I love Readings idea of short term confederations of scholars addressing problems in limited lifespan communities, and I like the foward looking ethos of the altermodern. But both those movements can easily leave medievalists -- and honestly, most humanists -- behind. The same process that leads to the exclusion of the Anglo-Saxonist or the expert in medieval Iberia when a group articulates a Middle Ages and ends up speaking a suffocating majority vision just by the numbers game (more people work on ME than the other fields) can play out with those who study the "distant" past getting excluded in favor of more contemporary focused scholars, and so on.<br /><br />Problems all the way down. Not insurmountable, but necessary to hesitate over.<br /><br />As your own work has made evident Eileen, in the end the issue is not a failure to articulate what medieval studies offers to the contemporary humanities (the arguments have been made repeatedly and seem to me cogent), nor a necessity to defend the humanities better (as your post makes clear, that has been done eloquently again and again and again). We don't need more persuasive things to say but we do need better methods of being heard, and that is very difficult indeed.Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.com