Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewAnglo-Saxon(ist) Pasts, PostSaxon Futures. Donna Beth Ellard. Earth [New York]: Punctum Books, 2019. Pp. 420.Erik WadeErik WadeSUNY Oswego Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreDonna Beth Ellard’s book combines critical analysis of both medieval and modern texts with autoethnography and creative writing to argue that the field of early medieval studies is haunted by racist figures. Instead of grieving and releasing these figures, Ellard suggests, the field has incorporated them into itself. By refusing to recognize our psychic investment in such figures, she argues, we are unable to mourn them and let them go—instead, we make them a hidden part of ourselves, buried at our professional and personal core. This racial melancholia prevents the field from moving forward. It is difficult to imagine a book as innovative and daring as this coming out from an academic press other than Punctum.There is much to like here. Ellard connects theoretical texts rarely applied by early medieval English scholars with a sharp, incisive analysis of the problems of the field’s own colonial and racist histories. One of her most important insights is that previous (white) analysis of the field’s problems has tended to stop at World War II, representing the contemporary period as free of racist and colonialist scholarship. Yet despite this promise, the book is held back by its failure to engage with the many scholars of color who have already done much work on the current field’s whiteness, racism, and colonial legacies. It also curiously does not engage with the fifty or more years of work on race and psychoanalysis starting with Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1967). It is strange to read a book focused on using mourning and melancholia to think about race that does not cite any of the preexisting work on race and melancholia (such as Paul Gilroy or David Eng’s pathbreaking work).Ellard uses psychoanalysis to diagnose the field’s histories of disciplinary racism and its practitioners’ psychic investment in the “fathers” of the field like John Mitchell Kemble and King Alfred. White investment in the psychic structures of racism and colonialism allows scholars to disavow the racist work of nineteenth-century scholars, while still refusing to fully let go of their racist investments in a white “Anglo-Saxon” period. It is unclear how Ellard’s theory of medievalists’ psychic investment in racism would apply to the psychic life of scholars of color in the field. The book thus focuses on white people “letting go” of the field’s implication in genocide, human trafficking, and imperialism, a focus that the book never quite acknowledges (42).Her chapter on Beowulf is perhaps the best moment in the book; she considers Beowulf as a poem marked by graves and grave entry. Beowulf’s dive into the Grendelkin’s mere resembles breaking into a barrow, which Beowulf does twice at the poem’s close, first into the dragon-haunted barrow and then, in death, into his own barrow. Ellard argues that the narrative structure of Beowulf resembles a barrow and our entry into the poem parallels Beowulf’s burglarizing of barrows and the repeated penetration of Victorian archaeologists into barrows in search of the Anglo-Saxon, an act that Ellard connects to scientific racism and craniology.In her two-chapter analysis of King Alfred and Anglo-Saxonism, Ellard investigates the racist baggage that the idea of the Anglo-Saxon race has carried. Like Allen Frantzen and John Niles, Ellard reads Anglo-Saxonism as a racial ideology that began in the pre-Conquest period, rather than as a modern invention (unlike most scholars of racial Anglo-Saxonism).1 Ellard traces the origins of the philosophy to the court of King Alfred the Great and tracks it through Alfred’s reception in subsequent generations. Ellard argues that narratives around Alfred have sought to turn him from a corpse into a corpus, from body into text, allowing him to become a symbol flexible enough for the field’s colonial uses. Scholars’ investment in a symbolic Alfred, she argues, can be seen in their obvious discomfort with the famous tale of Alfred’s illnesses in Asser’s Vita. Here Ellard, in one of the book’s most poetic sections, uses creative nonfiction to return Alfred to being a biological human again by imagining Alfred’s long illness. She parallels Alfred’s struggles with Crohn’s disease and hemorrhoids to her southern family’s investment in its racist “fathers,” who engaged in lynching, genocide against Indigenous people, and the human trafficking of enslaved Black people. Ellard admits her own investment in these relatives and in the Confederacy, an admission that she argues enables her to let them go, just as her fictional narrative of Alfred struggling with illness enables him to be mourned and released from his central position in the field.From here, Ellard turns to American investments in the Olde English brand of malt beer. She considers how the brand’s “medieval” marketing includes targeted ads aimed at Black men that reproduce racist narratives about their excessive sexuality, hypermasculinization, and alcohol consumption. She then examines rap music’s investment in Olde English malt liquor and the resulting importation of Anglo-Saxonism into rap music, where she argues it both enacts violence and is repurposed by rappers for critique. (This argument requires us to assume that “Olde English” is popularly understood to be the same as “Old English” from the pre-Conquest period, rather than a reference to early modern spelling of the “ye olde” variety, which the iconography suggests.) I am least qualified to evaluate this chapter, but the footnotes are sparser and far shorter than in any other part of the book, suggesting that Ellard has not fully engaged with the extensive scholarly field of hip-hop studies. Nor does this chapter engage with work by medievalists of color like Matthew Vernon or Cord Whitaker on medievalisms in Black communities, though it cites a great many white medievalists who have analyzed hip-hop. She does engage with scholars of color in hip-hop studies, but seems to pass over those in her own field. This chapter also uses scare quotes to a much greater extent than any other chapter, mostly around Black cultural references, something that Ellard does not do with the terminology of white cultural forms in the rest of the book. Sentences like the following grammatically and rhetorically hold the language of hip-hop at arm’s length, contrasted with the high-theory language Ellard employs: “Eazy-E drinks his ‘40,’ then spits a rhyme of empowering rage and political energy, exposing Olde English not simply as a prop for the ‘gangsta’ but more importantly as an object of conspicuous consumption that draws its power from the brand’s long-standing reference to the Old English language and the Anglo-Saxonist meta-discursive regime of masculinity, virility, and strength that surrounds it” (315).Finally, Ellard concludes with an analysis of the ongoing state of the field and the place of the personal in it. She speculates that her own approach to autoethnography, and her release of the terms “Anglo-Saxon,” “Anglo-Saxonist,” and “Old English,” have left her “homeless” and without a field (280). She suggests that her newfound homelessness allows her to listen to other fields and make connections with African American studies that could breathe new life into early medieval English studies.Yet, while Ellard engages with some scholars of color outside the field, her work often centers white male senior scholars invested in maintaining the field’s traditional approaches. These voices appear at the expense of scholars of color in the field, who are largely relegated to footnotes.The book’s lack of engagement with the work of medievalists of color causes it to repeat conversations and claims made earlier by scholars of color. Margo Hendricks, one of the founders of Premodern Critical Race Studies (PCRS) in the 1990s, wrote a relevant reflection on the difference between PCRS and what she calls Premodern Race Studies (PRS), PCRS’s “‘white’ cousin.”2 Hendricks argues that PRS’s central characteristic is an erasure of previous race scholarship by scholars of color: “What is troubling is the representation of this body of work as innovative or groundbreaking when, in fact, it is derivative. PRS assumes no foundational work on the study of race exists before it comes into play. If these scholars recognize the preexistence of a cohort of Black, Brown, and Indigenous scholars working on the subject since the 1980s, this preexistence is often relegated to a footnote surrounded by whiteness. Or worse, this body of scholarship is entirely ignored.”3 Hendricks draws crucial attention to the importance of citational genealogy in PCRS, to the need to acknowledge the giants who paved the way and who have been pushing back at whiteness, racism, and ideas of a preracial premodern period for decades. Hendricks’s point that white scholars tend to erase previous work by scholars of color—or confine it to footnotes—describes much of Ellard’s book. I could find only a single instance where Ellard engaged directly with the arguments of a medievalist of color outside of the footnotes, when she briefly quotes the work of Dorothy Kim on one page (53). Ellard’s citational politics further demonstrate this centering of white medievalists, citing Simon Keynes, for instance, forty-nine times, Howard Williams twenty-three times, and Niles twenty-six times, while Mary Rambaran-Olm is cited five times, Dorothy Kim six times, and Cord Whitaker thrice. The book rarely engages with the work of scholars of color other than through citations or just by naming them without citing them. This happens with Ananya Jahanara Kabir, for instance, who is named repeatedly but never cited (27, 36).4 White medievalists—by contrast—are engaged and returned to repeatedly in the text, Howard and Keynes in particular.Ellard gives the impression that she is unaware of the decades of premodern work on race done by scholars like Hendricks, Kim Hall, Jacqueline de Weever, or Geraldine Heng. She thanks Postmedieval for publishing her work in 2013 and 2019, “many years before issues of colonialism and race were topics of immediate concern in medieval studies” (12), an astonishing claim given the flurry of work on race and colonialism over the last thirty years, including scholarship by Hendricks herself from the early 1990s onward. Hendricks describes the tendency of white scholars to represent their work as “innovative or groundbreaking[,]” a tendency that Ellard reproduces here. While Ellard argues that her approach enables her to listen to other fields, it has seemingly not enabled her to listen to scholars of color in her own field.This is part of a larger problem in white medieval scholarship, where white scholars often seem willing to engage scholars of color from outside their field, while sidelining the work of their medievalist colleagues of color. When medievalists of color do appear, it is rarely as fellow scholars but instead as symbols, usually presented as activists who give “critiques” whose content is never discussed. While criticizing citations might seem fussy, those of us who are white need to consider how our discussions of the work of our colleagues of color differs from how we discuss our white colleagues. Hendricks reminds us that white scholars usually confine scholars of color to footnotes (if they cite scholars of color at all), and analysis by scholars of color is rarely seen as “productive.” Indeed, white discussions of Ellard’s book and work—both before and after it came out—described Ellard as “building” new spaces in the field and producing new possibilities, while characterizing the work of scholars of color on exactly the same issues of the field’s racial and colonial politics as “critiques.”5 As Rambaran-Olm noted at the time, such framing suggests “only white people ‘push the field forward’ thru their ‘radical’ approaches but [people of color] are only good [for] critique.”6 Ellard’s reproduction of the field’s centering of whiteness undermines her book’s worthy goals. It also results in actively marginalizing language: she describes her family as “owning slaves” (238, 280, 311 n. 58), a term that Black scholars argue should be replaced with a phrase like “enslaved people,” terminology that recognizes the agency and identity of enslaved Black people outside of a reductionist identity like “slave.”Many of the white scholars she cites as authorities on decolonization and racist narratives in the field have been resistant to precisely the issues that she raises. Ellard quotes Williams extensively as an authority on decolonizing the field, and she states that chapters 2 and 3 “expand upon” Williams’s work (176). Williams and Niles both signed an open letter (a letter Ellard herself criticizes [353 n. 34]) that advocates for the retention of the term “Anglo-Saxon” in the field and condemns “criticisms and accusations levelled at the heritage of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ studies.”7 The letter argues, “It is neither justified nor constructive to impose collective guilt upon colleagues who are not directly responsible for wrongs committed in quite different contexts.”8 Ellard describes the letters’ signatories as an “ideological old guard that we continue to struggle against and which many scholars within the field are still unable to part with or condemn” (353), but this “ideological old guard” includes the same white scholars whose work she has centralized, a fact that seems profoundly contradictory to her project. She herself seems unwilling to “part with or condemn” them.Part of the issue is that Ellard’s book appears unwilling to name whiteness, other than when discussing people of color. In light of the book’s own centralization of white scholars, this apparent unwillingness implies that whiteness remains the unspoken structuring force of the work, to such an extent that people of color are repeatedly called “non-white” (238, 280, 311 n. 58). This unspoken privileging of whiteness limits the book’s power to banish the field’s racist ghosts.As a white scholar, I cannot speak to how scholars of color may encounter Ellard’s book or how they may feel about its opening request to scholars of color to “forgive” the field (16). Nor can I speak to how they may feel about Ellard’s admission that she has “possessed a repugnant love—and [has] embraced the terrible violence—of American colonialism, slavery, and racism” and that she has “not known how to stop loving” the Confederate flag (258). It will be up to scholars of color to decide whether they find such admissions reassuring or not.I can, however, speak as a queer, disabled person who found themselves troubled by the book’s fictional account of Alfred as an ill man humiliated by “grossly intimate” medical examinations that involve doctors frequently fingering Alfred’s anus (262). Ellard seeks to strip Alfred’s sovereignty within the field by writing a fictional account of Alfred as a vulnerable human struggling with illness. This fiction—while beautifully written—uses disability, illness, and unwanted male-male “intimacy” to take away Alfred’s sovereignty. I am further troubled by the section’s repeated motif of Alfred’s humiliation and degradation when his anus is fingered by male doctors who “wouldn’t keep their hands off Alfred,” and whose “roving hands” Ellard describes as “feeling him up” (263). Ellard claims Alfred’s ongoing illness—and the unwanted homoerotic “intimacy” from his doctors—unmans and unkings him: “Although Alfred’s body was that of a king, by the time [the doctor] had finished with him, its royal patina had worn off, and Alfred was just another chronically sick man, who couldn’t stop shitting himself. Intimacy can do that to you” (262). I am concerned by the suggestion that Alfred’s status in the field can be undone by imagining him as an ill, disabled man being anally penetrated by other men.9 Such reinscription of normative masculinity limits the book’s ability to tear down the field’s temples to its white fathers.I detail these limits here because I genuinely want this book to succeed, and I want to see more books like this that engage with the field’s ongoing investment in racism and colonialism. In many ways, this work is miles ahead of most of the more limited scholarship done to date by white medievalists like Frantzen, Niles, and T. A. Shippey. However, the book’s investment in that previous work goes hand in hand with a general failure to engage with the pioneering work done by premodernists of color, and with a failure to name and wrestle with whiteness itself. Certainly, some of the works cited—such as books by Cord Whitaker and Matthew Vernon—came out only a few months before this book, so it is possible they would have been engaged with more fully if this book had been released a year later. However, the book fails to acknowledge the earlier extensive decades of work by premodernists of color, suggesting that the problem was not one of timing. As such, while this is an important and challenging book, we must be clear about how it at times reifies the hierarchies that it seeks to topple.Notes1. Allen J. Frantzen and John D. Niles, eds., Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997).2. Margo Hendricks, “Coloring the Past, Considerations on Our Future: RaceB4Race,” New Literary History 52, nos. 3/4 (Summer/Autumn 2021): 368.3. Ibid., 369.4. Curiously, Kabir’s scholarship appears in the bibliography but not elsewhere.5. See Mary Rambaran-Olm (@ ISASaxonists), “THREAD: POC are constantly being used by white people,” November 9, 2019, https://twitter.com/ISASaxonists/status/1193268205667725315; Daniel C. Remein and Erica Weaver, “Getting Intimate,” in Dating Beowulf: Studies in Intimacy, ed. Daniel C. Remein and Erica Weaver (Manchester University Press, 2020), xii.6. Rambaran-Olm, “THREAD: POC are constantly being used.”7. John Hines, “The Responsible Use of the Term Anglo-Saxon” (PDF), 3, A Forum for Multidisciplinary Anglo-Saxon Studies, http://www.fmass.eu.8. Ibid., 5.9. Elsewhere, Ellard suggests the “homoerotic overtones” of a white brewing company that “fucks over” its Black customers, a troubling conflation of white sexual assault of Black men with homoeroticism (304 n. 39). Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 120, Number 3February 2023 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/722836 Views: 169Total views on this site HistoryPublished online November 16, 2022 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.