Cord J. Whitaker
‘Elite human beings of the 14th century have a hue, and it is white’.1 So writes medieval literature scholar Geraldine Heng. Famed sociologist and activist W.E.B. Du Bois proclaimed at the beginning of the 1900s that the ‘problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line’.2 Heng might as well have been writing about more recent centuries, too, including the twenty-first. The persistence of white supremacist ideas in the twenty-first century could not have been made clearer than when, in August 2017, the Alt-Right with other white nationalist and neo-Nazi groups staged the ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. That white supremacy persists across historical periods was part of the demonstrators’ point. They claimed to take their cues from medieval and ancient traditions, and they asserted the depth of their historical roots by carrying Crusader flags, Viking flags and shields adorned with ancient symbols of Roman imperial power.3 The architecture of the Alt-Right’s rise to prominence in the United States can be traced, through conduits including former White House Chief Strategist Steven Bannon, to Russian political analyst and erstwhile professor Alexander Dugin.4 Dugin has written voluminously in support of ‘the global rehabilitation of Tradition, the sacred, the religious, the caste-related… the hierarchical, and not equality, justice, or freedom’ and ‘returning to the Middle Ages or turning to them to look for inspiration…’5 A tenet of Alt-Right ideology is to agitate for the transformation of the United States into a polity in which membership requires whiteness, or a white ethnostate. In order to give credence to their desire, they refer to medieval Europe as their precedent.6 This essay offers some theories about how and why the Middle Ages animates the Alt-Right white nationalist movement. That the fourteenth century saw the ascription of a white hue to ‘elite human beings’ and that Alt-Right adherents and apologisers imagine an idyllic and all-white medieval Europe are only parts of the story.
They are, to be sure, parts of a story that is erroneous. One need look no further than the patron saint of the Holy Roman Empire in order to know that medieval Europe recognised some very ‘elite’ human beings who were not depicted as white Europeans. St. Maurice is described as Egyptian in the version of his saint’s life offered in the medieval hagiographic compendium known as Legenda Aurea. From at least the thirteenth century in the German environs of the Empire’s seat, he was nearly always depicted as black, with clear African features.7 Depictions of him such as that at Magdeburg Cathedral remain extant. The presence of Africans and others who are now called people of colour in medieval Europe was not limited to such exalted figures as patron saints.
Recent studies in bioarchaeology have ‘shown that Medieval Europe was not exclusively populated by people with White European ancestry although this myth continues to be perpetuated in the public’s imagination’.8 Indeed, the enslavement of sub-Saharan African people, among others including Slavs, helped populate medieval Europe with people of colour. Though Portuguese Prince Henry the Navigator’s shipment of 235 enslaved African people into Lagos, Portugal in 1444 is often recognised as the largest importation of black people into medieval Europe, ‘by the beginning of the 11th century AD, people from the Sub-Sahara were being transported and sold into Europe’ regularly, if in smaller numbers at a time than Henry’s breakwater cargo.9 It is also important to keep in mind that Mediterranean and African people had a presence in Europe going back at least as far as Roman imperial governance. Take, for example, the tomb of ‘Victoris natione Maurum’ (Victor of the nation of the Moors), a black African Roman soldier, in South Shields, England.10 ‘Moor’ can refer variably to Islamic heritage, African origin, or both, and Victor likely had darker skin.11 Despite the presence of Mediterranean and African people with darker complexions in medieval Europe, the myth of a heterogeneously white medieval Europe persists.
The myth persists largely because of popular cultural discourses that have been extant and operating since at least the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’ ‘medieval revival’ literary and artistic movements. Treating the legacy of that century’s pre-Raphaelite artists as it informs aesthetic choices in HBO’s popular television drama Game of Thrones, medievalists Helen Young and Stephanie Downes summarise:
Popular culture narratives and the visual imagery through which they are told typically orient audiences towards hegemonic ideological positions. In this case, the aesthetics of white femininity that dominate western medievalist screen culture in the 21st century are part of a cross-temporal framing of the Middle Ages as white space and the originary source of white cultural and racial identity.12
The imagination of medieval Europe as the source of white cultural and racial identity has been a powerful driver of culture for a long time now. These have included stereotypes and prejudices, but, more to the point, they have animated ‘racialized emotions’ and ‘racialized reactions’.13 Among these emotions and reactions are sexual and possessive desire for the medieval white feminine ideal. Pride and a sense of empowerment attend racialised reactions as well, especially inasmuch as the medieval white feminine stereotype includes within itself reproductivity and the potential for the idealised medieval world’s perpetuation. It is now an old myth that medieval Europe represents a set of homogeneously white ethnostates; yet it remains quite active.
What the Alt-Right represents and agitates for was far from new in August 2017. Yet—rather like the claim of Game of Thrones’ showrunners that their show represents the ‘real’ Middle Ages and not the romanticism or idealism of the ‘Disney Middle Ages’—the Alt-Right is an ideology that trades on its supposed novelty. In this regard, Alt-Right ideology mirrors the fascism to which it clearly hearkened in November 2016, well before ‘Unite the Right’. During the National Policy Institute’s annual conference in Washington, DC, held shortly after the electoral college victory that made Donald Trump president-elect of the United States, attendees responded to exhortations such as ‘Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!’ with Nazi salutes. According to historian and political theorist Roger Griffin, the Nazi’s Third Reich is one of only two successful and fascist movements in history. The other was contemporaneous in Mussolini’s Italy.14 Both the Third Reich and the Third Rome were deeply involved in the business of revising history in order to promote national myths beneficial to their causes. The European Middle Ages were central to these histories, especially in the case of Italy’s fascists. Alt-Right ideology is at heart at least as old as fascism, and central elements are at least as old as the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’ medieval revival.
Alt-Right ideology, however, is not, to be clear, any direct outgrowth of the cultures and ideas of the actual Middle Ages. When the mostly young, white and male adherents of the Alt-Right showed up in Charlottesville, their accoutrements bespoke the role of modern medievalism in racist ideologies. The ostensible purpose of the rally was to defend a statue of confederate leader Robert E. Lee and in order to defend such monuments generally. The location was also likely chosen because of the town’s leftist reputation, Virginia’s closely watched governor’s race and Charlottesville’s rather high-profile consideration of what to do with its Confederate monuments.15 An additional factor may have been white nationalist and Alt-Right leader Richard Spencer’s relationship to the University of Virginia, of which he is an alumnus. He targeted Charlottesville for demonstrations before the now infamous rally, and he has targeted Charlottesville again since. Quite apart from the reasons Spencer chose Charlottesville for the rally, demonstrators chose the Middle Ages for their affinities towards it. The Alt-Right and associated demonstrators donned generally respectable attire, following the lead of the slick and public-relations-savvy Spencer. The temporal play fundamental to the movement was on display when they added flags, symbols and other adornments with medieval European provenances to their decidedly modern fashions. These included the Othala rune which is associated with ‘ancestral homeland’ or ‘inheritance’ in runic writing and was adopted by the Nazis to represent the same xenophobic sentiment that underwrites the slogan ‘blood and soil’, which was also chanted at Charlottesville; symbols on display also included the Deus Vult cross associated with the Crusades.16 Most importantly for this essay, Alt-Right demonstrators also carried medievalising shields adorned with, among other things, the Holy Roman Imperial black eagle. As the art historian and blogger known as medievalpoc promptly pointed out on social media, the black eagle was generally associated with none other than Saint Maurice, the black African patron saint of the Holy Roman Empire. The demonstrators’ symbols, whether on pennants or shields, indicate their ideology’s interest in an idea of the Middle Ages whose relation to the real historical period is rather confused.
Confusion is an element that adherents of the Alt-Right come by honestly, and they are indebted to their fascist forebears. Mussolini’s fascism was born of the effort to improve an Italy that he saw as having fallen precipitously from the powerful and glorious days of the Roman Empire. Mussolini started out with a nationalism that involved only an inward-facing racism that found expression in his aim to improve Italy and Italians. In 1921, Mussolini stated: ‘fascism must concern itself with the racial problem. Fascists must concern themselves with the health of the race by which history is made’. By 1928, Mussolini’s racism grew more outward in its perspective; he saw Europe as increasingly threatened by ‘blacks and yellows’, especially in that Africans and Asians boasted significantly higher birth rates than Europeans.17 What’s more, the rise of Nazism in Germany was accompanied by a rise in anti-Italian sentiment that spurred at first Mussolini’s derision of German Aryanism, yet eventually led Mussolini to take on an ‘“if you can’t beat them, join them” attitude’. Aaron Gillette concludes, ‘German propaganda against the non-Nordic peoples certainly wouldn’t sting if Mussolini decided that the Italians were themselves Nordic’.18 The manipulation of—and outright lies about—racial identity was central to Mussolini’s effort to ‘improve’ Italians. Its integral role in Italy’s alliance with German Nazism shows confusion to be a valuable political tool whose users are sometimes, as in Mussolini’s case, quite aware of their revisionist practices.
In addition to revisionism concerning racial identities and presences, the medievalist temporal play that was on display in Charlottesville is another element of Alt-Right confusion that has its forebears in fascism. Under the influence of Italian philosopher, medievalist and antiquarian Julius Evola, Benito Mussolini’s fascism was medievalist and antiquarian. It engaged in temporal play that foreshadowed the form undertaken by the Alt-Right in contemporary politics. Mussolini’s movement towards a fascism with outward-looking racism at its core was in part due to Evola’s influence. Mussolini read Evola’s Synthesis of the Doctrine of Race in the early 1940s and drew from it support for his movement’s racist position that eugenics would improve the Italian ‘race’ by restoring to it the ‘lost Roman virtues of courage, fortitude, discipline, and martial ardor’.19 The effort to restore such ‘lost’ virtues was presented in tandem with Mussolini’s objective ‘to elevate the average Italian and to enucleate in him a new man’.20 In order to achieve the goal of improving Italy’s and its people’s standings in the world, looking backwards was required—to Italy’s Roman imperial past, to be sure, but also to the supposed glories of medieval European Christendom that comprised the Church seated at Rome.
Evola’s approach to the Middle Ages helps to explain the provenance of the temporal play that has bizarre results such as young men self-seriously carrying shields with the Holy Roman Imperial eagle emblazoned on them in twenty-first-century Virginia. Evola espoused a form of ‘Traditional’ thought through which he
advanced a radical doctrine of anti-egalitarianism, anti-democracy, anti-liberalism and anti-Semitism. He scorned the modern world of popular rule and bourgeois values, democracy and socialism, seeing capitalism and communism as twin aspects of the benighted reign of materialism.21
Evola’s disdain for modernity is on display in his not-so-subtly titled Rivolta contro il mondo moderno, or Revolt Against the Modern World, and it offers insight into why Charlottesville’s demonstrators fashioned themselves modern-day knights. In Revolt, Evola makes the case that medieval knighthood is a spiritual identity, over and against—and even in place of—Christianity and the Church. Tracing the origins of knighthood to the ‘Indo-Aryan’ tradition (as he does throughout his work), he writes:
In the older versions of knightly ordination, a knight was ordained by another knight without the intervention of priests, almost as if in the warrior there was a force “similar to a fluid” that was capable of creating new knights by direct transmission; a witness to this practice is found in the Indo-Aryan tradition of ‘warriors ordaining other warriors’.22
He goes on to call the chivalric class a competitor with and replacement for the priestly class. Indeed, he writes, ‘chivalry, both in its spirit and in its ethics, is an organic part of the empire and not of the Church’.23 In a discussion of medieval popular literature’s portrayal of weapons as symbols of ‘spiritual or ethical virtues’ designed to ‘connect any chivalrous deed to an inner action’, Evola turns to the ‘mysticism’ of weapons found in other ‘traditional civilizations’ and discusses the crafting of swords in the Japanese ‘warrior aristocracy’. He demonstrates the priestliness of the militarist when he turns to ‘Indo-Aryan’ warriors ‘competing victoriously in wisdom with the brahmana (that is, with the representatives of the priestly caste…)’.24 For Evola, chivalry supersedes time and place such that the costumes of Charlottesville’s demonstrators only make sense. For Evola, chivalry is trans-historical, but its medieval European iteration is special because of its proximity to modernity. Evola decries the ‘decline of chivalry’ in which:
the European nobility also eventually lost the spiritual element as a reference point for its highest ‘faithfulness,’ and thus became part of merely political organisms as in the case of the aristocracies of the national states that emerged after the collapse of the civilization of the Middle Ages.25
In other words, modernity and the rise of the nation-state have destroyed chivalry and have obscured the spiritual power of the knight. The ‘spiritual element’ to which Evola refers inheres in the European medieval political theory that a sovereign rules by divine right. The nobility’s support of such a sovereign constitutes their ‘spiritual element’. The rise of the nation-state, and the attendant decline in a sovereign’s apparent divinity, in Evola’s reckoning, strips the nobility of its higher calling. The Middle Ages represents, for the West, the latest period in which this brand of spiritual knighthood is fully intact and afforded the respect due to it.
The importance of the Middle Ages in the Alt-Right’s narrative of spiritual knighthood is not lost on the modern movement’s rank and file adherent. Even if movement leaders such as Spencer do not very often mention the Middle Ages per se, their interlocutors do. In 2015, Spencer spoke at a meeting of American Renaissance, a conservative organisation dedicated to so called ‘race-realism’, or the belief that race is not a socially constructed concept but that, rather, it is based in material, biological and ineluctable differences that cannot and should not be overcome.26 During that speech, Spencer addresses ‘white guilt’, or the sense that it has become a bad thing to be white; he cites whites’ ‘capacity to become our own worst enemy…to disembody shame and eat it, and keep it inside ourselves’. He then blames the phenomenon largely on Jews, Judaism and their influence on the Christian tradition: ‘white guilt has its roots in Judaism and Christianity’, he asserts. An audience member responds to Spencer’s claims by asserting that ‘Christian civilization was very self-confident and accomplished very much for centuries, for instance in the Middle Ages’. The commenter continues: ‘white guilt’ is a nineteenth- and twentieth-century phenomenon.27 Spencer’s response is anything but a full-throated defence of Christianity. Registering Evola’s position that chivalric ‘Tradition’ supersedes and replaces Christianity, Spencer calls ‘white guilt’ a ‘post-Christian phenomenon’ and states, ‘I don’t doubt that there were tremendous glories of Christian civilization’. He says so while raising his eyebrows as if he does indeed doubt it. Finally, he attributes to Christianity ‘at least… a revolution of morality that made us interesting’. Spencer’s two-mouthed treatment of Christianity reflects an Evolan approach that takes the Middle Ages as, on one hand, the all-important last moment when Tradition reigned supreme and, on the other hand, the decisive moment when Christian hegemony and its morality facilitated Tradition’s momentous downfall into the maelstrom of modernity where power is political and earthly, not divine.
Like the fascists, Alt-Right leaders and adherents seek a return to a time when power was so unassailable that it appeared divinely authorised, and that power belonged to those with whom they identify. A significant—perhaps the most significant—element in Alt-Right and fascist claims to historical power is the deployment of history known as palingenesis. Historian Aaron Gillette defines the phenomenon as a myth of national resurgence and regeneration. As Mussolini’s fascism matured, it became increasingly bound with the palingenesis on display in his position that the ‘lost Roman virtues of courage, fortitude, discipline, and martial ardor’ could be ‘rekindled’ and ‘permanently bred’ into the Italian until he became a ‘new man’.28 Indeed, palingenesis has been identified as perhaps the central, defining component of true-to-form fascism.
The centrality of palingenesis, or that of its more specific form ‘palingenetic ultranationalism’, has been borne out in theorists’ attempts to define fascism. As US Secretary of State (1997–2001) Madeleine Albright puts it in her 2018 book on fascism’s global resurgence, ‘there are no fully agreed-upon or satisfactory definitions, though academic writers have spilled oceans of ink in the attempt’.29 Albright ultimately relies on her considerable experience as a diplomat to adopt a definition focused on a fascist leader’s actions:
a Fascist is someone who identifies strongly with and claims to speak for a whole nation or group, is unconcerned with the rights of others, and is willing to use whatever means are necessary—including violence—to achieve his or her goals.30
Similar observations as to the complexity of fascism’s elements and dynamics lead Griffin to recognise that palingenesis alone cannot indicate fascism: ‘‘Palingenetic’ refers to the myth of ‘rebirth’ or ‘regeneration’’ but versions of this myth are so common in the ‘religious, artistic, emotional, and social imagination’ that it is ‘inadequate to define a political ideology’. What’s more, a version of it may be the ‘affective driving force behind all revolutionary ideologies’.31 A particular combination of forces intensifies palingenesis until it rises to the level of successful fascism. Griffin elaborates:
what all permutations of fascism have in common (i.e., the ‘fascist minimum’) is that their ideology, policies, and any organisations formed to implement them, are informed by a distinctive permutation of the myth that the nation needs to be, or is about to be, resurrected Phoenix-like from the forces of decadence, which, without drastic intervention by the forces of healthy nationalism, threaten to extinguish it forever.32
When palingenesis is combined with ‘ultra-nationalism’, they achieve a ‘populist ultra-nationalism’. When the latter is combined with the ‘myth of a radical crusade against decadence and for renewal in every sphere of national life’, Griffin argues, the conditions for fascism are met.33 The combination facilitates the development of a totalising worldview that submits the value of all peoples, places and things to the discernment of those who are empowered or, as Mussolini puts it, ‘the race by which history is made’.
Though race may not be central to fascism at its core, the racism that attends the Alt-Right’s medievalising reiteration of fascism should come as no surprise. Racism is such an effective tool of power consolidation that it very quickly attaches itself to the fascist project. Though neither Albright’s nor Griffin’s definition explicitly mentions race, one need not look too hard to see racism’s constituent elements at work when Albright writes of a leader claiming to speak for a whole group at the expense of others, with whose rights he or she is unconcerned. It is not hard to see it lurking in the corners of ‘ultra-nationalism’. Current Alt-Right racial ideologies are a descendant of Mussolini’s, whose movement from an inward-facing pro-Italian racism towards a racism focused on the threat posed by out-groups demonstrates fascism’s tendency towards racism.
The Middle Ages’ proximity to modernity and its cooptation as the last bastion of chivalry and ‘Tradition’ have contributed to its role as a contested site at which palingenetic fascism and modernist liberal democracy compete. While fascists seek to revive a dead and dying world in order to usher in a brighter future, modernists view the present moment as one that has improved upon its past; they look forward to a future of continual improvement. A distinction lay in the moment of crisis: for the fascist, the crisis is always now, when the polity must be resurrected or, to put it in the Alt-Right parlance constructed by Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, it must be ‘made great again’.34 For the modernist, the point of crisis is always potentiated in any event, entity or movement that would arrest human progress towards the goal—or at least what became the goal in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—of increasingly equitable national and global communities. Fascist claims of civic death and a return to the past for inspiration each represent moments of crisis for modernists who prefer to look to the past in the context of a rarely broken line of progress that has continued apace. The European Middle Ages are convenient to both of these perspectives—in the case of the fascists, as the last moment before the liberal democratic institutions so prized by modernists were empowered, and in the case of modernists, as the era which gave birth to liberal democratic ideas in their Western European iterations.
The remainder of this essay will address the contestation of the Middle Ages through the lens of a modernist literary and artistic movement that is inextricably bound with race and progress and that nonetheless deploys the Middle Ages in significant ways too rarely recognised in scholarship.
Demonstrating the modernist liberal democrat’s deployment of the Middle Ages is the Harlem Renaissance, a literary and artistic moment that is certainly associated with race, was an effect of the twentieth century along with fascism, and is often associated with high modernism. The movement was early associated with literary modernism—the mode that rejected conventional generic forms in favour of experimental texts that responded to Ezra Pound’s much quoted directive to ‘make it new’. Jean Toomer’s Cane, published in 1923, was lauded in 1924 as the work of:
an artist; the very first artist in his Race who, with all an artist’s passion and sympathy for life, its hurts, its sympathies, its desires, its joys, its defeats, and strange yearnings, can write about the Negro without the surrender or compromise of the artist’s vision.35
William Stanley Braithwaite, a prominent black American writer contemporary with the Harlem Renaissance, continued in his remarks that ‘Cane is a book of ecstasy and bronze, of dusk and flame, of ecstasy and pain, and Jean Toomer is a bright morning star of a new day of the Race in literature’.36 Henry Louis Gates, Jr interprets these and other commentary as characterising ‘Cane as the first modernist text in the tradition’.37
That the Harlem Renaissance’s modernism stands in counterpoint to fascism such as Evola’s is demonstrated not so much by Cane as by more overtly political Harlem Renaissance writing. In the 1928 novel Dark Princess: A Romance, one of the movement’s leading lights, sociologist and founding figure in critical race scholarship W.E.B. Du Bois uses the Middle Ages in a way that is in near complete contradistinction to contemporary fascist deployments. The egalitarianism, liberalism and democracy that Evola so despised are on full display in Dark Princess, where a world coalition of darker peoples represents the world’s great civilisations and bands together in order to advance the cause of non-whites around the world. Anti-colonialist and globalist, the coalition functions internally in an egalitarian liberal democratic manner. When coalition members consider whether African Americans are up to the task of joining their anti-colonialist efforts, the scene takes the form of a civil discussion. The Japanese representative raises the possibility of the ‘ability, qualifications, and real possibilities of the black race in Africa or elsewhere’. What follows are carefully expressed opinions and rebuttals, in a parliamentary style, from the main character Matthew Towns, Princess Kautilya of Bwodpur on the Indian subcontinent, the Japanese representative, the Egyptian representative, another Indian representative and the Chinese representative.38 Later in the text, when Towns’ love interest Princess Kautilya disguises her royal identity, it is to do the subversive and democratic socialist work of running workers’ unions in the United States. Though Matthew is the descendant of American slaves, the text ends with the union of his humble family and the princess’s regal stature: he reunites with the princess on his mother’s farm in rural Virginia as she presents him his infant son. The hierarchy of regal and slave ‘blood’ is levelled, and the distinction between wealth and poverty is collapsed. Though there are similarities to certain fascist practices—social levelling, or at least lip service towards it, and the use of some violence (Matthew participates in the thwarted bombing of a train chartered by the Ku Klux Klan)—the text presents a fully modernist political ideology in which human society trends progressively without any palingenetic need for resurrection.
Du Bois’s work bolsters its political modernism by deploying medievalism. Du Bois’s Dark Princess, despite being authored by a writer closely associated with the Harlem Renaissance and appearing only a few years after Toomer’s avant-garde Cane, does not boast the experimental play with genre and form commonly associated with modernism. Instead, the text appears in the conventional form of a romance. Indeed, it closely tracks with the form of a medieval romance. Many medieval romances feature a protagonist whose regal identity is obscured at the beginning, and sometimes for much of a text. In the Arthurian tradition, the boy Arthur’s royal identity is not exposed until he pulls the sword from the stone. In Chretien de Troyes’s Lancelot, the title character’s name is obscured from the reader, and many other characters, through more than two-thirds of the text. Similarly, Towns in Dark Princess is denied the medical degree by a university administration who will not allow him to register for his rotation in obstetrics because he, a black man, would have to deliver white women’s babies.39 Then, in the scene where he first encounters the coalition, Towns thinks to protest the members’ doubt about African Americans by proclaiming that ‘there’s as much high-born blood among American Negroes as among any people’. What comes out of his mouth instead is that American blacks are ‘common people’ who ‘come out of the depths—the blood and mud of battle. And from just such depths…came most of the worthwhile things in this old world’. The Japanese coalition member responds, ‘It is perhaps both true and untrue… Certainly Mr. Towns has expressed a fine and human hope, although I fear that always blood must tell’. Towns’s response:
‘No, it mustn’t,’ cried Matthew, ‘unless it is allowed to talk. Its speech is accidental today. There is some weak, thin stuff called blood, which not even a crown can make speak intelligently; and at the same time some of the noblest blood God ever made is dumb with chains and poverty’.40
African Americans, Towns asserts, are, like Arthur, royalty in disguise. Hidden identity, a trope characteristic of medieval romance literature, is the means in Du Bois’s novel of asserting black worth.
Medievalism also influences the dynamics of the love relationship that drive Du Bois’s modern-day chivalric romance. Medieval narratives from Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale and his Merchant’s Tale, and from Chretien’s Erec et Enide to Floris and Blancheflour feature lovers and beloveds, sometimes husbands and wives, who are mismatched in one way or another: sometimes class (or, in medieval political theory, estate), sometimes age, sometimes level of commitment and sometimes all three. Dark Princess, in which Towns is more or less penniless and the princess boasts extreme wealth and power, even if her agency as a sovereign is ever more threatened by European imperialism, certainly follows the model. The trope of the Saracen princess, or sometimes the Saracen prince, in which Western European Christian figures love or are loved by eastern ‘Saracen’ (Muslims or pagans, often with darker skin) characters, features in medieval romances such as Floris and Blancheflour, which was one of the most popular romances in medieval Europe. The situation in Dark Princess is certainly similar, where Towns’s black American Christian background contrasts with the princess’s Indian subcontinental spiritual beliefs. In fact, the globalising unity that forms Dark Princess’s triumphant ending when Kautilya is united with Matthew’s family is only possible because the text deploys age-old romance tropes.
It is not the case that all black thinkers contemporary with Du Bois refer to the Middle Ages redemptively, but even derogatory deployments intimate the importance of the period to thought on African Americans’ place in modern America and its history. Howard University philosopher Alain Locke in his highly influential 1925 essay ‘The New Negro’ did much to set and register the intellectual agenda for the Harlem Renaissance. In it, he treats the Middle Ages in a way that departs from Du Bois’s approach: for Locke, modernity and the Middle Ages are discrete. He associates black life in the agricultural South with the Middle Ages when he identifies the ‘Great Migration’ of blacks from the American South to northern cities as ‘in the Negro’s case a deliberate flight not only from country side to city, but from medieval America to modern’.41 Locke does not refer to ‘medieval America’ unthinkingly or with only simple reference to agriculture as a non-industrial and therefore medieval mode of life. Rather, he plays on the notion that blacks, because linked to southern agricultural society, are not as advanced as whites. Further on in the essay, Locke calls the American black the ‘migrating peasant’ and claims that he ‘has been the peasant matrix’ of the South who has contributed to that region’s culture materially and ‘spiritually’.42 He asserts that with migration northward and ‘city-ward’ the Negro ‘hurdle[s] several generations of expectance at a leap’.43 In other words, in the Great Migration African Americans catch up to white Americans and become increasingly equal with them. The Middle Ages represent a primitive past, with which African Americans are no longer to be associated. While Du Bois presents a tale that induces the reader to understand modernity through the lens of medieval romance, Locke uses the Middle Ages to illumine modernity through stark contrast. Both approaches, as disparate as they are, offer an alternative that illumines the dynamics of fascist medievalism.
Black medievalism is a foil to fascist medievalism because the former resists palingenesis while the latter relies on and facilitates it. The erroneous notion that the Middle Ages in Europe represent a time and space that was homogeneously white underwrites Alt-Right exhortations for a ‘return’ to the model of a white ethnostate. This erroneous image of the white Middle Ages is exactly what Du Bois and Locke alike contradicted, though with different comportments towards the value of the Middle Ages for modernity and its racial politics. Du Bois places black characters in a modern-medieval romance and Locke positions blacks as emerging from a modern American medieval feudal society: while there is certainly a difference in approach, both present a version of the European Middle Ages where black people, as in historical reality, are present. Black deployment of the Middle Ages resists palingenesis precisely because it invalidates the racial and cultural purity on which fascist medievalist palingenesis trades. The demographics and cultures of the European Middle Ages are shown to be as diverse, complicated and subject to interpretation as are its modern descendants. When Charlottesville’s Alt-Right demonstrators wielded fasces, Crusaders’ crosses and the Holy Roman Imperial eagle, among other symbols, in order to assert that ‘elite human beings’ still have a hue, they engaged not so much in revisionist history as in historical fantasy—and in a fantasy that their fellow medievalists, black medievalists, long ago put to rest when they, too, used the Middle Ages to understand and improve modernity.
1 Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 16.
2 W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2003), 3.
3 ‘Flags and Other Symbols Used by Far-Right Groups in Charlottesville’, Hatewatch, 12 August 2017, https://web.archive.org/web/20190212104126/https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2017/08/12/flags-and-other-symbols-used-far-right-groups-charlottesville, archived 12 February 2019. ‘Viking symbols “stolen” by racists’, The Norwegian American, 31 October 2017, https://web.archive.org/web/20180823031948/https://www.norwegianamerican.com/featured/viking-symbols-stolen-racists/, archived 23 August 2018.
5 Paul Ratner, ‘Why Some Conservative Thinkers Seriously Want the Return of the Middle Ages’, Big Think, 5 March 2017, https://web.archive.org/web/20180917185348/https://bigthink.com/paul-ratner/time-to-get-medieval-why-some-conservative-thinkers-love-the-middle-ages, archived 28 September 2018. Ratner quotes Dugin’s interview in Katehon, ‘Dugin: The Alternative to Liberalism Is “Returning to the Middle Ages”’, The Fourth Revolutionary War, 18 February 2017, https://web.archive.org/web/20170311211646/https://4threvolutionarywar.wordpress.com/2017/02/18/dugin-the-alternative-to-liberalism-is-returning-to-the-middle-ages/, archived 11 March 2017.
6 Caitlin Dickson, ‘The Neo-Nazi Has No Clothes: In Search of Matt Heimbach’s Bogus “White Ethnostate”,’ Huffington Post, 2 February 2018, https://web.archive.org/web/20190208050303/https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/neo-nazi-matthew-heimbach-bogus-white-ethnostate_us_5a745c5fe4b01ce33eb1d720, archived 8 February 2019. Jason Wilson, ‘“Young white guys are hopping mad”: confidence grows at far-right gathering’, The Guardian, 31 July 2017, https://web.archive.org/web/20190213131837/https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jul/31/american-renaissance-conference-white-identity, archived 13 February 2019. Alan Feuer, ‘Far Right Plans Its Next Moves with a New Energy’, New York Times, 14 August 2017, https://web.archive.org/web/20181224104417/https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/14/us/white-supremacists-right-wing-extremists-richard-spencer.html, archived 24 December 2018.
7 According to the medieval compendium of the lives of the saints in the Latin Church known as the Legenda Aurea or Golden Legend, St. Maurice was an Egyptian born in Thebes AD 250, and he led the Theban legion of the Roman army. He was martyred for refusal to worship pagan deities and for refusing to attack fellow Christians. Emperor Maximian had the entire unit killed near what is now Saint-Maurice, Switzerland. Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan, vol. 2 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 188–92.
8 Rebecca C. Redfern and Joseph T. Hefner, ‘‘Officially Absent but Actually Present’: Bioarchaeological Evidence for Population Diversity in London during the Black Death, AD 1348–50’ in Bioarchaeology of Marginalized People, ed. Madeleine L. Mant and Alyson Jaagumägi Holland(London: Academic Press/Elsevier, 2019), 69–114, at 71, doi:10.1016/B978-0-12-815224-9.00005-1, citing I.H. Habib, Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500–1677: Imprints of the Invisible (Farnham: Ashgate,2008) and Miranda Kaufman, Black Tudors: The Untold Story (London: Oneworld, 2017).
9 Redfern and Hefner, ‘Officially absent’, 73.
10 Rebecca C. Redfern, et al., ‘‘Written in Bone’: New Discoveries about the Lives and Burials of Four Roman Londoners’, Brittania 48 (2017): 253–77, doi:10.1017/S0068113X17000216; ‘RIB 1064: Funerary Inscription for Victor’ in Roman Inscriptions of Britain, ed. R.G. Collingwood and R.P. Wright, vol. 1(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965, repr. 1995), https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://romaninscriptionsofbritain.org/inscriptions/1064, archived 20 August 2016. Paul H. D. Kaplan, The Rise of the Black Magus in Western Art (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1985), 54–7, treats Jacopo da Verona’s letters, written in the 1330s, that discuss African monks in residence at the Church of the Nativity.
11 As Redfern and Hefner, ‘Officially absent’, 72, put it, ‘“Saracen” and/or “Moor”’ were often used ‘for people from the Islamic world, many of whom had Black ancestry’.
12 Stephanie Downes and Helen Young, ‘The Maiden Fair: Nineteenth- Century Medievalist Art and the Gendered Aesthetics of Whiteness in HBO’s Game of Thrones’, postmedieval 10, no. 2 (June 2019): 219–35, at 221.
13 Downes and Young cite Joe Feagin’s concept of the ‘white racial frame’. See also Jason Eastman’s work on racial framing, ‘white innocence’, and its legal ramifications in ‘The Wild (White) Ones: Comparing Frames of White and Black Deviance’, Contemporary Justice Review: Issues in Criminal, Social, and Restorative Justice 18, no. 2 (2015): 231–47.
14 Roger Griffin, ‘Staging the Nation’s Rebirth: The Politics and Aesthetics of Performance in the Context of Fascist Studies’, in Fascism and Theatre: Comparative Studies on the Aesthetics and Politics of Performance in Europe, 1925–1945, ed. Günter Berghaus (Providence, RI: Berghahn Books, 1996), 18.
15 Sarah Rankin, ‘Why hate came to the progressive island of Charlottesville’, Chicago Tribune, 18 August 2017. Archived 6 January 2019. https://web.archive.org/web/20181210180103/https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-why-hate-came-to-charlottesville-20170818-story.html.
16 ‘Deconstructing the symbols and slogans spotted in Charlottesville’, Washington Post, 18 August 2017. Archived 12 March 2019.https://web.archive.org/web/20190312005051/https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/local/charlottesville-videos/?utm_term=.c71c7c436008.
17 Aaron Gillette, Racial Theories in Fascist Italy (London: Routledge, 2002), 40–3.
18 Ibid., 56.
19 Ibid., 40, 54.
20 Ibid.,40. Recent research by Nicole Lopez-Jantzen suggests that appeals to ‘lost’ Roman virtues of martial ardour should be considered in the light of critical race theoretical readings of Ostrogothic political ideology in sixth-century Rome. She argues that Goths “subverted…Roman racial formation and imperialist ideology…by asserting Gothic distinction, based on martial masculinity.” ‘Between empires: Race and ethnicity in the early Middle Ages,’ Literature Compass 16.9-10 (2019):e12542. https://doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12542, at 5.
21 Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 53, my emphasis.
22 Julius Evola, Revolt against the Modern World, trans. Guido Stucco (Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions International), 80. Also, Evola, 80, helps to explain the misogyny, or more to the point, the near total absence of women within the Alt-Right movement: ‘In a number of instances what has been said about the knight’s ‘woman’ also applies to the ‘woman’ celebrated by the Ghibelline ‘Love’s Lieges,’ which points to a uniform and precise traditional symbolism. The woman to whom a knight swears unconditional faithfulness and to whom even a crusader consecrates himself; the woman who leads to purification, whom the knight considers his reward and who will make him immortal if he ever dies for her—that woman, as it has been documented in the case of the ‘Worshipers of Love’ or ‘Love’s Lieges’, is essentially a representation of ‘Holy Wisdom’, or a perceived embodiment, in different degrees, of the ‘transcendent, divine woman’ who represents the power of a transfiguring spirituality and of a life unaffected by death’.
For Evola, women inhabit the realm of spirit and are attributed only a passive agency while all the action is attributed to the males who would be knights.
23 Ibid., 85.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid.
26 ‘Race-Realism’ is discussed as American Renaissance’s raison d’être at https://web.archive.org/web/20190116224515/https://www.amren.com/about/, archived 18 February 2019.
27 Richard Spencer, ‘Why Do They Hate Us?’, American Renaissance, 8 May 2015. Archived 12 March 2019. https://web.archive.org/web/20190312005600/https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2518&v=3Sg LSV9Mgfw, at 40:17, my emphasis. Dugin, Evola, and Spencer’s speech at the American Renaissance meeting are addressed in somewhat less depth in my Black Metaphors: How Modern Racism Emerged from Medieval Race-Thinking (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 188–90.
28 Gillette, Racial Theories, 40, 54.
29 Madeleine Albright, Fascism: A Warning (Harper: New York, 2018), 8.
30 Ibid., 11.
31 Griffin, ‘Staging the Nation’s Rebirth’, 13, emphasis original.
32 Ibid., 13.
33 Ibid.
34 Trump’s campaign slogan is ‘Make America Great Again!’ It has been panned as racist by a wide range of commentators, from cultural critics writing for online outlets such as Noah Berlatsky to former US presidents such as Bill Clinton. Noah Berlatsky, ‘Trump voters motivated by racism may be violating the Constitution. Can they be stopped?’ Think: Opinion, Analysis, Essays, 17 January 2020. www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/trump-voters-motivated-racism-may-be-violating-constitution-can-they-ncna1110356. ‘Bill Clinton Says “Make America Great Again” Is Just a Racist Dog Whistle,’ HuffPost, n.d. https://web.archive.org/web/20191012073903/https://www.huffpost.com/entry/bill-clinton-says-make-america-great-again-is-just-a-racist-dog-whistle_n_5b2a678ae4b0697eecbf66f3.
35 William Stanley Braithwaite, ‘The Negro in Literature’, Crisis 28 (September 1924): 207, quoted in Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the ‘Racial’ Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 198–9.
36 Ibid. Cane was inscribed in literary history as ‘modernist’ by 1969 when Robert Bone, preeminent mid-twentieth-century scholar and critic of black American literature, proclaimed the book’s style ‘modernist, and highly metaphorical’. Robert Bone, ‘Cane’, New York Times Book Review, 19 January 1969: 3, 34, quoted in Gates, Figures,221.
37 Gates, 221.
38 W.E.B. Du Bois, Dark Princess: A Romance (Jackson, MS: Banner Books/University Press of Mississippi, 1995), 21–3.
39 Ibid., 4.
40 Ibid., 22–3, emphasis mine.
41 Alain Locke, ‘The New Negro’ in The New Negro: Readings on Race, Representation, and African-American Culture, 1892–1938, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Gene Andrew Jarrett(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 113–4.
42 Ibid., 114–8.
43 Ibid., 113.
Albright, Madeleine K. Fascism: A Warning. New York: Harper, 2018.
American Renaissance. ‘About Us’. New Century Foundation. https://web.archive.org/web/20190116224515/https://www.amren.com/about/, archived 18 February 2019.
Berlatsky, Noah. ‘Trump voters motivated by racism may be violating the Constitution. Can they be stopped?’ Think: Opinion, Analysis, Essays, 17 January 2020. www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/trump-voters-motivated-racism-may-be-violating-constitution-can-they-ncna1110356.
‘Bill Clinton Says “Make America Great Again” Is Just a Racist Dog Whistle.’ HuffPost, n.d. https://web.archive.org/web/20191012073903/https://www.huffpost.com/entry/bill-clinton-says-make-america-great-again-is-just-a-racist-dog-whistle_n_5b2a678ae4b0697eecbf66f3.
Bone, Robert. ‘Cane’. New York Times Book Review. 19 January 1969: 3 and 34.
Braithwaite, William Stanley. ‘The Negro in Literature’. Crisis 28, no. 5 (September 1924), 204–10.
‘Deconstructing the Symbols and Slogans Spotted in Charlottesville’. Washington Post, 18 August 2017. Archived 12 March 2019. https://web.archive.org/web/20190312005051/https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/local/charlottesville-videos/?utm_term=.c71c7c436008.
Dickson, Caitlin. ‘The Neo-Nazi Has No Clothes: In Search of Matt Heimbach’s Bogus ‘White Ethnostate’’. Huffington Post, 2 February 2018. Archived 8 February 2019. https://web.archive.org/web/20190208050303/https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/neo-nazi-matthew-heimbach-bogus-white-ethnostate_us_5a745c5fe4b01ce33eb1d720.
Downes, Stephanie and Helen Young. ‘The Maiden Fair: Nineteenth-Century Medievalist Art and the Gendered Aesthetics of Whiteness in HBO’s Game of Thrones’. postmedieval 10, no. 2 (2019): 219–35.
Du Bois, W.E.B. Dark Princess: A Romance. Jackson, MS: Banner Books/ University Press of Mississippi, 1995.
———. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Barnes & Noble, 2003.
Eastman, Jason. ‘The Wild (White) Ones: Comparing Frames of White and Black Deviance’. Contemporary Justice Review: Issues in Criminal, Social, and Restorative Justice 18, no. 2 (2015): 231–47.
Evola, Julius. Revolt against the Modern World. Translated by Guido Stucco. Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions International, 1995.
Feuer, Alan. ‘Far Right Plans Its Next Moves with a New Energy’. New York Times, 14 August 2017. Archived 24 December 2018. https://web.archive.org/web/20181224104417/https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/14/us/white-supremacists-right-wing-extremists-richard-spencer.html.
‘Flags and Other Symbols Used by Far-Right Groups in Charlottesville’. Hatewatch, 12 August 2017. Archived 12 February 2019. https://web.archive.org/web/20190212104126/https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2017/08/12/flags-and-other-symbols-used-far-right-groups-charlottesville.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the ‘Racial’ Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.
Gillette, Aaron. Racial Theories in Fascist Italy. London: Routledge, 2002.
Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas. Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity. New York: New York University Press, 2003.
Griffin, Roger. ‘Staging the Nation’s Rebirth: The Politics and Aesthetics of Performance in the Context of Fascist Studies’. Chap. 1 in Fascism and Theatre: Comparative Studies on the Aesthetics and Politics of Performance in Europe, 1925–1945. Edited by Günter Berghaus. Providence, RI: Berghahn Books, 1996.
Habib, I.H. Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500–1677: Imprints of the Invisible. Farnham: Ashgate, 2008.
Heng, Geraldine. The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
Kaplan, Paul H. D. The Rise of the Black Magus in Western Art. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1985.
Katehon. ‘Dugin: The Alternative to Liberalism is ‘Returning to the Middle Ages’’. The Fourth Revolutionary War, 18 February 2017. Archived 11 March 2017. https://web.archive.org/web/20170311211646/https://4threvolutionarywar.wordpress.com/2017/02/18/dugin-the-alternative-to-liberalism-is-returning-to-the-middle-ages/.
Kaufman, Miranda. Black Tudors: The Untold Story. London: Oneworld, 2017.
Locke, Alain. ‘The New Negro’. In The New Negro: Readings on Race, Representation, and African-American Culture, 1892–1938. Edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Gene Andrew Jarrett. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.
Lopez-Jantzen, Nicole. ‘Between empires: Race and ethnicity in the early Middle Ages’. Literature Compass 16, no. 9–10 (2019): 1–12, e12542. https://doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12542.
Rankin, Sarah. ‘Why Hate Came to the Progressive Island of Charlottesville’. Chicago Tribune, 18 August 2017. Archived 6 January 2019. https://web.archive.org/web/20181210180103/https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-why-hate-came-to-charlottesville-20170818-story.html.
Ratner, Paul. ‘Why Some Conservative Thinkers Seriously Want the Return of the Middle Ages’. Big Think, 5 March 2017. Archived 28 September 2018. https://web.archive.org/web/20180917185348/https://bigthink.com/paul-ratner/time-to-get-medieval-why-some-conservative-thinkers-love-the-middle-ages.
Redfern, Rebecca C. and Joseph T. Hefner. ‘‘Officially Absent but Actually Present’: Bioarchaeological Evidence for Population Diversity in London during the Black Death, AD 1348–50’. Chap. 5 in Bioarchaeology of Marginalized People. Edited by Madeleine L. Mant and Alyson Jaagumägi Holland. London: Academic Press/Elsevier, 2019. doi:10.1016/B978-0-12-815224-9.00005-1.
Redfern, Rebecca C., et al. ‘‘Written in Bone’: New Discoveries about the Lives and Burials of Four Roman Londoners’. Brittania 48 (2017): 253–77. doi:10.1017/S0068113X17000216.
‘RIB 1064: Funerary Inscription for Victor’. In Roman Inscriptions of Britain. Edited by R.G. Collingwood and R.P. Wright. Vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965, repr. 1995. https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://romaninscriptionsofbritain.org/inscriptions/1064, archived 20 August 2016.
Spencer, Richard. ‘Why Do They Hate Us?’, American Renaissance, 8 May 2015. Archived 12 March 2019. https://web.archive.org/web/20190312005600/https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2518&v=3SgLSV9Mgfw.
‘Viking Symbols ‘Stolen’ by Racists’. The Norwegian American, 31 October 2017. Archived 23 August 2018. https://web.archive.org/web/20180823031948/https://www.norwegianamerican.com/featured/viking-symbols-stolen-racists/.
Voragine, Jacobus de. The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints. Translated by William Granger Ryan. Vol. 2. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993.
Whitaker, Cord. Black Metaphors: How Modern Racism Emerged from Medieval Race-Thinking. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019.
Wilson, Jason. ‘‘Young White Guys Are Hopping Mad’: Confidence Grows at Far-Right Gathering’. The Guardian, 31 July 2017. Archived 13 February 2019. https://web.archive.org/web/20190213131837/https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jul/31/american-renaissance-conference-white-identity.