Title: Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures ed. by Ananya Jahanara Kabir and Deanne Williams
Abstract: Reviews ANANYA JAHANARA KABiR and DEANNE wii.liams, eds. PostcolonialApproaches to the EuropeanMiddleAges: Translating Cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp.xii, 298. isbn: 978-0-521-8273-7. $80. The eleven essays collected in this volume cohere principally around an insight that might seem obvious in hindsight but which is no less profound for its obviousness: that postcolonial approaches to the European Middle Ages are not anachronistic, as some critics have complained, because the MiddleAgeswere, byvirtue ofthe fact that they were inaugurated by the fall ofthe Roman Empire, in fact, already postcolonial. They come after empire; indeed the very word 'colonial,' as Seth Lerer points out, derives from the Latin colonia, for the sorts of military settlements that dotted the Roman empire (79). This audacious move takes back theory for the Middle Ages, demonstrating that medievalists need not be content merely to apologize meekly for applying theory 'anachronisrically' ro their subject but, as Bruce Holsinger argues in a 2002 Speculum arricie, can confront the presenrist bias ofcontemporary theory, recognizing and building upon the literally groundbreaking work of medievalists who have always figuted (often invisibly) in the development of litetary theories, including postcolonialism. Suddenly everything old is new again; some very oldfashioned medieval scholarship begins to look quite novel. Contriburors to this volume, stripping away rhe stereotypes that have clung, like so many barnacles, to medieval studies, uncover in eveiything from the Très riches heures of the Duke de Berry, Anglo-Saxon poetry, maps, John Gower, Alexander romances, Romance philology, and Fernando de Roja readings rhar challenge 'western myths oforigins, history, identity, and temporality' (2). And yet, two questions must necessarily follow from this insight into medieval postcolonialism. The first concerns the ways in which this postcolonialism differs from that which followed the end ofEuropean empires after World War II. What balance ought we to strike between acknowledging their similarities and cataloguing their differences? Collectively, the essays tackle this question admirably, most explicitly in Ananya Jahanara Kabir's reading of British ofFicials' use ofmedieval England as an analogy for Imperial British India, a means of'translating' the colony's cultural strangeness, but it is a thread that appears in other essays as well. A second question asks how medievalists should go about uncovering the postcolonialism of the European Middle Ages and its continuing effects in modern Europe and its former colonies without appropriating and intellectualizing the language that postcolonial theory offers to make sense ofgenuine oppression. In this regard, Lerer's reading of ARTHURIANA l6.1 (2006) 105 1?6ARTHURIANA Beowulfthrough Seamus Heaney's experience of British rule in Ireland serves as a salutary reminder ofEurope's own inrernal colonizarion. Michelle Warren links the connections between Joseph Bédier's obsessions over philological origins to linguistic purity and anxieties about racial hybridity and métissage resulting from his experiences of 'republican colonialism' (218) on the island of Bourbon. Noting that, within postcolonial theory, translation often figures the asymmetrical power relations of colonization, the editors draw upon the medieval trope of transito imperii et studii as a means to connect the disparate essays in the volume. All are 'case studies of translation as the transfer of language, culture, and power' (7). Lerer's essay, for insrance, moves from an investigation of a narrow linguistic problem oftranslation—how to render in modern English the Anglo-Saxon phrase 'on fagne flor' in Beoivulf—to a meditation on what that poem's most recent translator, the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, might 'carry over' to the poem from his own postcolonial Northern Ireland. The volume is full ofsuch juxtapositions, leaps across geographical sites, temporal chasms, and disciplinary boundaries (although all but two ofthe contributors are affiliated with English departments): the translation of ancient Trojans into late medieval Turks in the visual arts (James G. Harper), for instance, or the Alexander romances' 'translation' of the static east-west binary into a more complex four part history mapped onro the four cardinal points ofthe earth (Suzanne Conklin Akbari). Material culture emerges as a significant carrier of cultural translarion in everyrhing from Anglo-Saxon spolia (materials plundered from Roman ruins and incorporated into medieval buildings), medieval maps, Roman mosaics, and French tapestries. In at least one essay...
Publication Year: 2006
Publication Date: 2006-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 2
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