Read on Twitter
1/ I too watched #TheDig last nite. While I loved the superb acting (C.Mulligan wrecks me time & again), beautiful cinematography, & tender humanization of the archeological dig, I felt uneasy w/ its glorification of a benevolent “Anglo-Saxon” world that “was not the dark ages.”
2/ One of the refrains of the movie, reprised at key moments, is that the past is never the past, that it is not what is left behind, that it continues through us. In the end, historical representations are not neutral, contained subjects, [...]
3/ [...] but ones channelled through the fantasies, anxieties, of the present moment. Ours is riven w/ white supremacist a & neo-nazi appropriations of a fantasy of an “Anglo-Saxon” world as a white utopia that my medievalist colleagues of color continue to debunk.
4/ The term "Anglo-Saxon" is enunciated with gusto at least ten times. See, for example, what ADAM MIYASHIRO has written about the subject: https://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2017/07/decolonizing-anglo-saxon-studies.html; Also the important work of @ISASaxonists
5/ At one point in the movie, Beowulf is evoked. Let’s remember what my colleague Dorothy Kim wrote about the racialization at the heart of this white, male hero epic: https://daily.jstor.org/the-question-of-race-in-beowulf/?utm_campaign=generalmarketing&utm_content=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&fbclid=IwAR3rC1x_GgnjulKZ-b8pcnEkBBnPhKJqnpwFXGEpFValhvNvN36Pz-rBgG8
6/ All the actors in the movie, the heroes of the Sutton Hoo excavation, are white people doing right by history while the world prepares for war. There is a southern Asian character in the British Museum delegation but has no speaking lines.
7/ tl;dr My point is that we know that the history & iconography of the Middle Ages have been weaponized for insidious political ends, & films presenting a romanticized desire to know this past cannot be apolitical when medieval shields appear in Charlottesville & on the Capitol
