Medievalists and the Global Refugee Crisis

by JONATHAN HSY

[UPDATED September 8 with more links! Scroll to the end of this post.]

This entry falls somewhere between a compilation of links/resources and a proper essay. In this blog posting, I wanted to reflect a bit on the global refugee crisis that's currently in the news and consider how (or if) medievalists might respond to what's happening in Europe and elsewhere.

Part I: Medievalists on Twitter

[Images from my twitter feed yesterday (September 6), including premodern iconography of the biblical Flight into Egypt.]

The image above is a screenshot from my mobile device yesterday morning—and it happens to provide a sample of different ways medievalists (premodern academics) are engaging with media coverage of the plight of refugees in Europe and other places around the globe:

• The Refugee Tales Walk is a collective effort by activists and storytellers to showcase the stories of refugees indefinitely detained in the UK; taking its cue from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the project tells stories of lives in transit. Note this brief blurb on the Global Chaucers blog; you can also follow "Refugee Tales" on Facebook or on twitter.

• The Chaucer tweeter (@LeVostreGC) urges his followers to support the UN Refugee Agency.

• Kees Teszelszky, historian of early modern Dutch-Ottoman-Hungarian relations, chimed in on the plight of refugees by tweeting depictions of the biblical Flight into Egypt (Mary, Joseph, and infant Jesus on horseback) from 16th-century sculpture and stained glass; another tweet suggests the recursive history of refugees in transit through Hungary in particular. [Medievalists.net also linked to an article about medieval refugees fleeing Hungary during Mongol invasions.]

Popular media (especially social media) has deployed the adjective “medieval” to varied ends: sometimes the term targets refugees themselves, but other times refers to the perceived mentalities of governments (European as well as Middle Eastern) in response to this crisis [I won't link to particular examples here, but a quick search for "medieval" and "refugee crisis" certainly brings up examples].

In mainstream news media, people of varied religious backgrounds are discussing the ethics of refugee welcome, including

• Jewish traditions of welcome for strangers (from The Guardian, September 5).

• Coverage of the Pope's very recent call for Europe's Catholics to welcome refugees (The Washington Post, September 6).

• Forceful critiques of nativism and Islamophobia in responses to the refugee crisis in Europe and online (The Conversation, June 24).

Historical context: In an earlier conversation on twitter (after the mass murders in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, SC, and subsequent news coverage of an online racist screed attributed to the shooter), Karl Steel stated that we as medievalists must be prepared to disrupt racists’ idea of "Europe." As indicated in the article about nativism and xenophobia linked above, the refugee situation has laid bare political anxieties over a "Muslim takeover" of Europe, and related fantasies of a white, Christian nation can become the implicit or overt basis for excluding refugees from over land or sea—and not only in Europe but also across the so-called “Global North” of industrialized countries (e.g., Australia, Canada, New Zealand, United States).

Part II: Discomforts of Analogy

[Top half of image: The opening to The Man of Law's Tale (illus. Edward Burne-Jones) in The Kelmscott Chaucer (William Morris, 1896) depicts Constance set adrift on a rudderless ship. 

Bottom half of image: In the opening scene of the 2003 BBC adaptation of The Man of Law's Tale (written by Olivia Hetreed, directed by Julian Jarrold), Constance is a Nigerian refugee.]

In addition to addressing a broader historical view of "Europe" and its meanings over time, how might medievalists think more carefully about analogies made between the lives of medieval people and refugees today?

• The Refugee Tales Walk (mentioned in Part I) provocatively invites people to contemplate similarities between the plight of present-day refugees and experiences of medieval travelers, with a clear ethical and political objective: building compassion and solidarity with displaced peoples and using art and storytelling to combat prejudice.

• In a blog post from over a year ago, Steve Mentz reflected on Caroline Bergvall's book Drift (2014), a work that juxtaposes the Anglo-Saxon elegy "The Seafarer" with the story of a boat of Algerian refugees that was seen—but not rescued—by NATO vessels in March 2011.

• Chaucer's The Man of Law's Tale tells the story of Constance, a tempest-tossed and much-imperiled protagonist. Her story begins in Rome, but her subsequent transit to (Muslim) Syria and (pagan but Christianizing) Britain—with many travails and dangers in between—have invited comparisons between this story and refugee experiences in the present. In a 2003 adaptation of The Canterbury Tales for the BBC, six tales were set in modern multiethnic Britain. The Man of Law's Tale (written by Olivia Hetreed and directed by Julian Jarrold) casts Constance as Nigerian refugee who mysteriously washes ashore in northern Britain—and the story goes on to consider modern-day complications of race, trauma, religious community, and cultural assimilation. This adaptation is complete with a scheming mother-in-law figure and courtroom drama scene (all present in Chaucer's original), and I've found this attentive adaptation useful when teaching my medieval literature classes. [For more about this production, see Susan Yager's 2007 article; I also address some linguistic aspects of this adaptation in a 2014 essay collection.]

I'll end this post by referring, in a roundabout way, to my own discussion of medieval Constance narratives (Chaucer's rendition as well as analogues by Boccaccio, Gower, and Trivet) in my book Trading Tongues (2013). The focus of my analysis on that book was on perpetual disorientation of the protagonist and she moves across space and language. Earlier this year, Pamela Troyer reviewed my book in the Rocky Mountain Review, and I was intrigued by her account of how she brought my chapter into her classroom. I quote these paragraphs here not because of what Troyer says about my book itself but what rather for her attentive reflections on the varied perspectives and life experiences of students from recent immigrant backgrounds:

After reading Trading Tongues, I experimented with Hsy's ideas in a required course I teach that includes readings from Canterbury Tales. The class had students majoring in literary studies, secondary or elementary education, and creative writing. Three of them were bilingual and most of them from area public schools, which are now multilingual communities; the Denver Public Schools posts its "top languages spoken" as Spanish, Vietnamese, Arabic, Somali, Amharic, Nepali, and Russian. Since we only spend six weeks on Chaucer's works, I have never assigned the Man of Law's Tale, but after reading Hsy's treatment of the Custance story [...] I wondered if the students might identify with her traumatic experience of geographical and linguistic displacement. [...]

I fully expected the class to be perplexed and stymied by the strange elements of the story and by Custance's impossible travel trajectory—the story is so medieval!—but a surprising number of the students related to her vulnerability and powerlessness. They saw her as a recognizable victim of racial violence, religious persecution, and sexual harassment, bartered by "pimps" or "slave traders." A student whose parents immigrated from Guatemala wrote with unexpected clarity that Custance "is just like many women in the world today, a social outcast with no access to justice except the fantasy of God's grace." My students found Custance's peripatetic suffering plausible and accessible. What they found "medieval" and unrealistic was the conclusion of the story: Custance survives her travails (the French root of travel) without having been raped or beaten and without losing her healthy child to kidnappers or death. Unrealistically she is reunited with her people in material comfort in her homeland. One first-generation American summarized it as "typical immigrant wishful thinking." (Troyer 98)

Troyer's discussion tantalizingly ends there, and there's much more about this classroom experience that could be explored. How does an affective response to a seemingly alien medieval world change how one thinks about (im)migraiton, desire, hope, nostalgia, life trajectories? I'll just end this posting by asking few questions. What are the ethical investments of medievalists in this current humanitarian crisis (or any crisis, for that matter)? How (or should) we address urgent present-day concerns in our scholarship, in our classrooms, online, or in the streets?

UPDATES [September 8]:

• Steve Mentz: "Notes toward a Migrancy Syllabus" (September 8)
• Cynthia Haven: "'Mountainish inhumanity': Thomas More, Shakespeare, and the refugee crisis" (September 7)

TODAY: Whan That Aprille Day 2015 #WhanThatAprilleDay15

by JONATHAN HSY

Image search results for #WhanThatAprilleDay15 on twitter (11:20am EST). 

For current images, go here.

Hey ITM readers! TODAY is Whan That Aprille Day!

Last year, we responded to a call from the Chaucer blogger (@LeVostreGC on twitter) to launch a new holiday to celebrate old, dead, and/or zombie languages (check out the 2015 iteration of this open call; and here's the recording we posted last year featuring some of the ITM bloggers reading texts in Latin, Middle English, and Old English). The Global Chaucers blog celebrated the first holiday (somewhat mischievously) by posting the opening lines of the the General Prologue in twelve modern languages.

Whan That Aprille Day 2015 has already featured some notable participants. The TEAMS Middle English Texts Series (METS) staged a social media countdown throughout the month of March leading up to today (view the entire archive of tweets here); this effort was spearheaded by Jenny Boyar (@JennyBoyar on twitter). And check out this surprise video of METS staff reading from The Floure and the Leafe!

To join in on the fun, check out the #WhanThatAprilleDay15 hashtag on twitter and marvel at people all over the world tweeting in old languages. And, if you're so inclined, contribute something of your own!

Medievalism + Trans-Medievalisms

by JONATHAN HSY

[There has been much bloggery at ITM about BABEL in Santa Barbara: see here, here, and here. I'd like to touch on a few BABEL-related matters here through a post with two keywords: Medievalism and Trans-Medievalisms.]

MEDIEVALISM

Medievalism: Key Critical Terms, eds. Emery & Utz (Brewer, 2014).

Medievalism: Key Critical Terms, edited by Elizabeth Emery and Richard Utz (Boydell & Brewer, 2014) has just been released! My chapter on "Co-disciplinarity" reworks my earlier ITM posting after the BABEL conference in Boston in 2012. The editors kindly asked me to contribute a chapter after reading that blog post, and in the expanded/adapted chapter in this volume I turn to queer theory to think about the fluid and nonlinear approaches to temporality that discussions of medievalism invite. I also suggest how approaches to medievalism can create experimental spaces that unbind academic disciplines and domain-specific approaches to knowledge. The chapter (like my original ITM blog post) ends with a utopian call for us to work together across our respective bailiwicks and to open ourselves up to the risky, unanticipated possibilities that emerge in the process.

What makes me so very excited about Medievalism: Key Critical Terms is precisely networked quality of its chapters. Here's the blurb from the publisher's website (and click through to see the names of the contributors full table of contents):

The discipline of medievalism has produced a great deal of scholarship acknowledging the "makers" of the Middle Ages: those who re-discovered the period from 500 to 1500 by engaging with its cultural works, seeking inspiration from them, or fantasizing about them. Yet such approaches - organized by time period, geography, or theme - often lack an overarching critical framework. This volume aims to provide such a framework, by calling into question the problematic yet commonly accepted vocabulary used in Medievalism Studies. The contributions, by leading scholars in the field, define and exemplify in a lively and accessible style the essential terms used when speaking of the later reception of medieval culture. 

The terms: Archive, Authenticity, Authority, Christianity, Co-disciplinarity, Continuity, Feast, Genealogy, Gesture, Gothic, Heresy, Humor, Lingua, Love, Memory, Middle, Modernity, Monument, Myth, Play, Presentism, Primitive, Purity, Reenactment, Resonance, Simulacrum, Spectacle, Transfer, Trauma, Troubadour.

This volume in a certain way stands in for an entire networked community. The book has a lively Facebook page and many contributors in this volume have been actively involved in the "Medievalism" series at University of Rochester Press, Studies in Medievalism, and the medievalism studies community more broadly. Recent onferences such as The Middle Ages in the Modern World (MAMO) in St. Andrews in June 2013 (see my posting on ITM and Candace Barrington's posting on the Global Chaucers blog) and much more recently Medievalisms on the Move at Georgia Tech (October 2014) are just two examples of how medievalism studies is increasingly bringing many different kinds of people together in a shared space of exploration. *

Left: Karl Fugelso's "Continuity" features Dante in visual medieval and modern art.
Right: Carol Robinson's "Gesture" discusses medieval practices and contemporary ASL scholarship.

I'm learning so much from the other contributions in this volume, and I appreciate the surprising reconfigurations of knowledge and perception that emerge when we no longer "segregate" different kinds of media or artistic traditions into separate chapters. For instance, Karl Fugelso's chapter CONTINUITY showcases how medieval and modern visual traditions interlace over time through Dante. Carol Robinson's chapter GESTURE bridges medieval practices and contemporary scholarship on American Sign Language (ASL), concluding with a discussion of a nonspoken adaptation of "Gawain and Dame Ragnelle" by acclaimed Deaf storyteller Peter Cook.

TRANS-MEDIEVALISMS

My view from the moderator's chair. "Trans-Medievalisms." BABEL conference at UCSB, October 2014.

This question of how medieval material moves across media brings me to the BABEL conference in Santa Barbara. Candace Barrington and I organized a session on "Trans-Medievalisms," and we set out to consider what happens when "the Middle Ages" (whatever we mean by that term!) traverses cultures, languages, material forms, and media. Our call for proposals and/or manifesto was as follows:

What happens to the Western Middle Ages when it crosses into diverse, concurrent times, languages, and cultures? How does “medievalism” take shape in multiple spaces across the planet—including cultural habitats where the Western Middle Ages are no longer the “‘zero point’ of orientation” (to reroute a phrase from Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology)? What cultural work do “the Middle Ages” perform as they infuse modern-day modes of global media and cultural production—textual, visual, musical, performative, cinematic? Our session is inspirited by our work on the Global Chaucers project, a utopian scholarly endeavor that seeks to gather, back-translate, and analyze all non-English translations and adaptations of Chaucer’s work. Our scheming with scholars around the world has so far revealed Chaucerian adaptations in places as far-flung and interconnected as Latin America (Argentina, Bolivia), East Asia (China, Japan, Korea), Europe (Denmark, Flanders, Spain, Hungary), the Middle East (Israel, Iran), and Africa (Nigeria, South Africa), as well as works in re/invented languages (Esperanto, Neo-Latin).

For this session we aim to gather participants working on Chaucerian adaptation in non-English contexts or any aspect of medieval appropriation in “global” contemporary culture (however conceived). How might plurilingual, transoceanic, and intercultural orientations provoke new modes of engaging with the past? How can we create a dynamic, multi-site community of cross-temporal scholars and enthusiasts, a fluid collective that thrives across disciplines and borders? We welcome non-medievalists, amateurs, and enthusiasts, including creative work by poets, playwrights, musicians, and/or interpretive dancers. We highly encourage collaborative submissions.

The session resulted in four strikingly divergent yet enticingly intertwining presentations.

• Raúl Ariza-Barile: Chaucer’s Spanish Accent: Impossible Poetry? Raúl's paper offered a brief background of Chaucerian translation into Spanish, suggesting (among other things) how a careful consideration of Latin American contexts might shift our conversations about the aims and practices of modern translators; the presentation ended with a debut performance of his own translation of the opening lines of Chaucer's General Prologue into rhymed Spanish verse.

• Shyama Rajendran: The Impossibility of Locating The Ramayana. Shyama's presentation traced the movement of the ancient epic Ramayana across many cultural traditions and performance contexts beyond South Asia, attending to a plurality of reception histories across time and space; she ended with a careful consideration of the political implications of the Ramayana's narrow appropriation for the purposes of Hindu nationalism in contemporary India.

• Carol Robinson: Expressing Loathly Ladies—Explicitly Noncompliant. In this presentation, Carol featured the work of two of her former students who created a collaborative video adaptation of the Wife of Bath. Each student had recorded a dramatic monologue: one performance used ASL to engage with Deaf culture, relating the episode when the Wife is rendered deaf; a "political dramatization" by a queer student (in drag) incorporated contemporary debates about polygamy and marriage.

• Elaine Treharne: TEXT Technological Transformations: the Inexactitude of a Medieval Unreality. Elaine's talk suggested the possibility of cross-cultural comparative analysis across seemingly disparate contexts including medieval Western and East Asian (Chinese) texts. Her reflections not only considered the rich materiality of textual production but also suggested its importance as artistic performance.

These presentations richly showcased the heterogeneity of cultural/artistic/linguistic materials that we might call "medieval" (thinking expansively beyond the contours of Latin-speaking Europe). At the same time, these perspectives collectively invited us to think more creatively about what new modes of medieval appropriation and comparative analysis actually might enact and enable.

Medievalism studies has certainly "arrived" in the academy and it is also clearly breaking down the boundaries between what lies within and outside of institutional and traditional academic structures. The ITM blog is one such community among many, including other digital spaces like Medievally Speaking, Global Chaucers and the Medieval Electronic Multimedia Organization (MEMO). We're in a very exciting time for medievalism studies now and I hope that these networked communities will continue to thrive, grow, interconnect, and adapt.

[EDITED November 22, 2014] The next MAMO conference will be held in Lincoln, UK, from June 29-July 2, 2015. Deadline for the call for proposals is December 12 (see this site for the details)!

* NOTE: In our MAMO 2013 presentation, Candace and I drew upon our experience working with many collaborators on the Global Chaucers project. A roundtable and polyglot performance at the New Chaucer Society Congress in Reykjavík, Iceland, brought together scholars, translators, and poets (and scholar-translators and poet-translators!), and a chapter drawing from our various collaborations will appear in our "Global Chaucers" chapter in Gail Ashton's Medieval Afterlives in Contemporary Culture (Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2015); more here.

Provocative New Media Post ...

by J J Cohen

... by Matthew Gabriele over at Modern Medieval. He starts with an observation I've been making as a department chair for a while: students no longer use email as their primary mode of communication, even if the professoriate still does. To reach them we need not to fear new modes of communication. The hybrid approach Matthew argues for makes a great deal of sense.

And I quibble (yes I quibble) with his assertion that Eileen can't Tweet. For all her tedious verbosity, she is also the suzerain of the ravishing and succinct phrase. Have you read her Tiny Shriner haikus, sir?