Author: mlee16

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Medievalism blog

The Modern University as a Site of Medievalist Nostalgia 

Donna Trembinski, St. Francis Xavier University 

Western-style universities were founded in the Middle Ages.  One doesn’t need to look very far to see evidence of this today. The pageantry of university gowns and ceremony, fraternities, common meals in refectories all stem from medieval antecedents. For the most part, such medieval-inspired nostalgia on today’s university are the generally frivolous trappings of an institution steeped in history, or, more accurately for Canada, an institution that wants to project the image it is permeated with history and custom. Not all medievalisms in university settings are so harmless, however. For instance, most universities in Canada police their own communities. They have codes of conduct that are expected to be followed and infractions of the codes are policed by internal security forces and internal justice systems. That modern universities in Canada have become essentially a law until themselves is somewhat surprising, until we remember that this too has its roots in the structure and operations of medieval universities. 

The oldest university in Europe is probably at Bologna, founded in the mid-eleventh century. Soon after, other centres of higher learning were founded; Oxford and Paris by the end of the twelfth century and many others in the decades after that. Before the advent of these centres of higher learning, monasteries, cathedrals and mosques were the centres of higher learning, and indeed, medieval universities retained many of the characteristics of learning that had developed in these religious institutions. Just as institutions of higher learning grew enormously in Islamicate lands in the period from the 10th-14th c, so too did medieval universities.  By 1400, there were  more than 40 universities in Europe. Almost all these universities still exist in some form or another today. 

Figure 1: A sixteenth century image of masters in robes at the University of Paris    

Source: Wikimedia Commons 

Medievalism in modern university settings has not yet merited a great deal of attention, but evidence of the medieval origins of the institution and nostalgia for that medieval past can be found all over university campuses. The black gowns and colourful “caps”  students wear for ceremonies? Those have their origins in the clerical robes most students wore in the Middle Ages (See Figure 1). Oral examinations or defenses? These too, have their origins in the disputationes of medieval universities, in which students and masters debated the important intellectual questions of the day.  Fraternities and houses? Those too, are explicitly medieval. Called nationes each house had its own distinct character. 

A less clear, but nonetheless apparent medieval lineage can be found for university codes of conduct and disciplinary tribunals; a university’s own “court” system tasked to mete out justice and penance when infractions occur. Students at medieval universities were clerics. This meant that they were maintained by church funds and were regarded as members of the church. As such, university students had the right to be tried in ecclesiastical courts rather than town courts when they committed crimes. Functionally this meant that many universities had their own courts with jurisdiction over students and other members of the university community.  

Figure 2: A medieval illumination showing students drinking and being sick.  

Source: The Times Higher Education 

This became a bone of contention between university students and towns people, especially as medieval university students had a reputation for participating in the more unsavory aspects of university life, drinking, carousing, fighting. Students frequently clashed with local landlords, pub owners, merchants and town officials. But when they were called to face the penalties of their crimes, town officials had no recourse but the university courts which were more favourable and lenient to students. Punishments in these courts generally consisted of doing penance and small fines, rather than the corporeal punishment that might have been meted out in town courts. Understandably, medieval townsfolk sometimes resented the privilege students had to be tried in university courts.  

Though some of the powers of university courts were stripped in the early modern and modern periods, to a large extent, universities still police themselves as they did in the Middle Ages. Most universities have codes of conduct by which students are expected to abide. These codes of conduct regulate all manner of infractions from sexual assault, to academic misconduct like plagiarism and cheating, to prohibited drug use on campus. Though many infractions regulated by student codes of conduct are criminal and, as such, governed by federal, provincial or local laws, policing, investigation, judging and sentencing still often occurs only within university processes and amongst university personnel, far removed from other legal bodies. This extensive power of protection is directly rooted in medieval models of university life and privilege and has, in some cases, at least appeared to allow universities to gloss over or ignore problematic behaviors by both professors and students.  

At first glace, university code of conducts and attendant processes may not appear to be medievalism as it is generally understood, a nostalgia for a sanitized and fundamentally false version of the Middle Ages. However, modern universities have fought to retain and even enhance their rights to police their own communities, believing the institutions to be a community of their own, both a part of, but also separate from, the usually urban community in which they exist. This comes, at least in part, from a modern agreement with the quite medieval notion that members of the university community are different and so deserve special and favoured treatment. This is nostalgia, even if it has not yet been interrogated as such. 

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Medievalism blog

The Pseudo-Recognition of Women Warriors in Imperial China and Contemporary Media 

Shoufu Yin, University of British Columbia 

If one goes to the cinema, watches TV dramas, or plays video games, there is one thing that one will not miss: the salience of Chinese women warriors. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) has notably popularized the swordswomen of traditional China. The Disney films of Mulan (1998, 2020) are based on the well-known “Ballad of Mulan,” which attests to the Sino-Steppe geopolitics of roughly the sixth century CE, when Mulan joined the army in her father’s stead. While the award-winning film The Assassin (2015) takes inspiration from Tang (618–907) legends devoted to women knights-errant, the monster film The Great Wall (2015) invented a woman commander Lin Mae who was presented as living in the mid-eleventh century. Interestingly, although Turning Red (2022) is mainly about a 13-year-old Chinese-Canadian girl in Toronto named Mei, it actually stresses that a maternal ancestor of Mei acquired supernatural fighting power from her pact with red pandas during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). 

Figure 1. Mulan, A Well-Known Chinese Woman Warrior 

Source: Wikimedia Commons  

These are not isolated examples. In recent decades, popular culture representations of women warriors of imperial China, whether historical or fictional, have gained increasing popularity in global media. My general take is that these films and games provide new opportunities for teaching and writing histories. They invite and encourage us to ask new and interesting questions. The release of Total War: Three Kingdoms (2019), which includes the character of Zheng Jiang, a bandit queen from the second century CE, sparked a wave of curiosity among players and fans who began to question whether Zheng Jiang was a real historical figure. This online discussion served as a catalyst for further historical inquiries: What kind of error did the developers of Total War: Three Kingdoms (2019) make when reading the primary sources? Were there actually bandit queens in second-century China or early China (1800 BCE – 200 CE) in general? (Short answer: yes!)  

In some cases, popular culture representations even point to understudied areas in history. To give only one example, the series Pirates of the Caribbean (2003–2017) has effectively popularized the story of Zheng Yi Sao (1775–1844), a historical leader of pirates who remains relatively understudied in the field of Chinese and maritime history. During the spring semester of 2023, while teaching an introductory course on Chinese history (one from the lens of and with a particular focus on women), I found that my students were surprised to discover that Zheng Yi Sao was not a fictional character. In fact, they were particularly passionate about delving into the “real” history of this legendary female pirate.  

Now, it seems that the time is ripe to at least think about teaching the history of imperial China by focusing on women, including but not confined to those who had once challenged their ascribed gender roles and/or those who have been featured in the global film/game industry. Before that, however, we need a conceptual and analytic framework that will enable us to critically engage different representations of women warriors in China and beyond—ranging from the earliest records in history to the most recent films or video games. How do producers and consumers (whether in East Asia or North America) Orientalize and fetishizing the imperial past, women in war, and the related narratives? 

My purpose here is to test an idea that I call “the pseudo-recognition of women warriors.” As a first approximation, it refers to the problematic appropriation, imagination, or representation of women who played critical roles in warfare and other violent settings. In doing so, I want to draw a distinction from what Axel Honneth calls “misrecognition,” the situation where individuals fail to receive the respect crucial to subject formation, which leads others to fail to see that individual’s value in intersubjective, social, and political relationships.1 When a regime, either imperial Chinese or global capitalistic, orchestrates “pseudo-recognition” of women, it gestures toward recognizing their achievements—epitomized in acts of promoting their ranks or featuring their valor. However, in doing so, the regime cunningly redescribes their achievements in ways that reproduce the ideological order, whether patriarchal, orientalist, or both. 

Elsewhere, I have identified multiple rhetorical strategies of pseudo-recognition that were particularly important in imperial China.2 The most established one eulogizes female commanders by reducing them to obedient daughters or faithful wives, who temporarily transgress the gender boundary only to better fulfill more important responsibilities that the patriarchal order prescribes for them. Why did Mulan join the battlefield instead of staying in the inner quarters serving her husband (as the normative texts prescribe)? Well, because she needed to save her father from throwing his life away on the battlefield. The second very influential strategy is simply to say that female leaders in war were exceptional individuals who transcend the gender order prescribed to commoners. While this approach plays an important role in actual documents of imperial China, it characterizes the logic behind some of the recent movies as well. Mulan has a unique destiny, according to Disney. And Mei’s maternal ancestor was uniquely chosen by the Red Panda Goddess as the guardian of her village, and this explains why such a woman rose as military and political leader. Another form of pseudorecognition that characterizes both imperial Chinese and contemporary global cultural production is certainly the fetishization of the female body when representing fighting women. In the sixteenth century, commercial prints started to visualize female commanders in the Chinese tradition, and Saito Tamaki thoroughly examined the “beautiful fighting girl” as a complex sexual fantasy with a focus on Japanese anime and manga.3 

In brief, as other contributors to this forum have wonderfully demonstrated, the way we look at the past—whether it be a nostalgic quest for one’s origins or an Orientalist imagination of the Other—shapes our visions of the future. Given the paramount importance of critically examining our perspectives on the past, together its influence on the present and future, my discussion boils down to a proposal: From the lens of pseudo-recognition, it will be possible to compare how women warriors were represented in imperial China and global media. The imperial Chinese court repeatedly produced frameworks to make sense of women’s success in military leadership without giving up patriarchal ideology, which prescribes that women are not suitable for war. It seems to me that some of these discursive or representational strategies are still visible in cinematic representations of Chinese women today. In addition, it is worth stressing that the global popular cultural industry has notably introduced new techniques of representing and producing pseudorecognition of Chinese and Asian women and culture in general. This phenomenon warrants further research and analysis, as it has significant implications for how these cultures are perceived and understood on a global scale.  

Footnotes:

[1]: See in particular Axel Honneth, “The Point of Recognition: A Rejoinder to the Rejoinder,” in N. Fraser/A. Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange (New York: Verso, 2003), 237-67; see also Nancy Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis (London: Verso, 2013), 29, 167.

[2]: Shoufu Yin, “Rewarding Female Commanders in Medieval China: Official Documents, Rhetorical Strategies, and Gender Order,” Journal of Chinese History 6.1 (2022): 23–42.

[3]: Saito Tamaki, Beautiful Fighting Girl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

Further Reading 

Nancy Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis (London: Verso, 2013). 

Axel Honneth, “The Point of Recognition: A Rejoinder to the Rejoinder,” in N. Fraser/A. Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange (New York: Verso, 2003), 237-67. 

Saito Tamaki, Beautiful Fighting Girl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). 

Shoufu Yin, “Rewarding Female Commanders in Medieval China: Official Documents, Rhetorical Strategies, and Gender Order,” Journal of Chinese History 6.1 (2022): 23–42. 

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Medievalism blog

Medievalism in Latin America 

Julie Gibbings, University of Edinburgh 

The concept of medievalism has shaped, with varying iterations, political debates across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Latin America. According to the central narratives that marked these debates, the Iberians who colonized Latin America in the late fifteenth century had not yet fully modernized. As such, they allegedly transported medieval political, social, and economic culture to the Americas in the forms of feudalism, despotism, and theocracy. This narrative has its origins in the Black Legend, a global sixteenth century discourse that posited a medieval Spanish mentality that manifested in the particularly brutality of Spanish conquest and colonization. With formal independence from Spain in the early nineteenth century, many Latin American liberal reformers took up aspects of this Black Legend as they imagined that while they had liberated themselves from Spain, the real struggle of the nineteenth century was to liberate the new polities from colonial Spanish heritage. By the early twentieth century, these critiques focused on the legacies of feudalism, which defined debates within the Left about the relationship between Latin America’s unique agrarian issues and the social possibilities of revolution. Popular social classes also took up these broader narratives to demand political and economic reforms, including the abolition of forms of coerced labour and agrarian reform.  

In the aftermaths of Independence, nineteenth-century Latin American liberal reformers frequently evoked the ‘medieval’ character of their societies as a trope for discussing both the ongoing colonial legacies of Spanish rule and for demanding reforms. Liberals deployed this discourse to challenge the conservatives and caudillos who, in the aftermath of the first wave of early nineteenth century liberal reforms, sought to re-establish the primacy of the Catholic faith, communal land tenure, and the system of two republics. Against these efforts, late nineteenth-century liberals frequently lambasted conservatives for returning longing to return to a past governed by religion and despotic traditions. Liberals, and conservatives, both, however, used these temporal categorizations of past and present, medieval and modern, to define the limits of citizenship. By locating racialized others in a past governed by superstition and a preference for dictators, liberals and conservatives both argued that peasants, Indigenous peoples, and former slaves, were incapable of self-representation and needed forms of tutelage, including coerced labour. The medieval, the feudal, the non-modern all defined the gulf between the promise and the practice of democratic politics. The Argentine president Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1868-1874), for example, drew upon the concept of medievalism to justify the repression of political opposition, and to launch the ‘conquest of the desert’ which aimed to eradicate the Mapuche peoples who lived there. Throughout the nineteenth century, however, Indigenous peasants, and others, redeployed the languages used to against them to demand the end of feudalism and the rights of citizenship.  

By the early twentieth century, the ‘feudal’ diagnosis of colonial inheritances referred less to political, social, and judicial patterns than to economic matters. By the 1940s, a new age of economic reforms, including import substitution industrialization, helped to shift scholarly debate about the prevalence of feudalism or capitalism in colonial Latin America. The prevailing trend was to use feudalism or feudal-like legacy to explain distinctive features, particularly the agrarian question, that set Latin American societies apart from much of the ‘modern west’, especially the United States. José Carlos Mariátegui, in the 1920s, for example defined Peru as essentially feudal in his seminal, Seven Interpretative Essays on Peruvian Reality. Subsequently, scholars debated the relative feudal or capitalist nature of colonial Latin America in battles to define possible strategies for social revolution. In 1970, for example, Severo Martínez published his monumental La Patria Criollo in which he asserted that “the colonial period could not be located in ‘a time past,’ but rather found ‘everywhere’ since “[t]he colonial experience saw the formation and consolidation of a social structure that has yet to undergo revolutionary transformation.”1 Martínez referred directly to the feudal nature of Guatemala’s agrarian structure. Martínez participated in lively debates about the relative feudal nature of Guatemala’s situation precisely at the moment when the Guerrilla Army of the Poor were redefining their armed insurgency to incorporate Guatemala’s Mayas population as the principal base of support. Martínez deployed the concept of feudalism, in this instance, to define class as the primary axis of struggle, while others, including Jean Loup Herbert and Carlos Guzmán Böckler, emphasized the internal colonial and racial dimensions of Guatemala’s social structure.  

The concept of medievalism in Latin America has thus constituted a central and ongoing locus for political debate within the region. The context of who and what gets defined as ‘medieval’ –or more broadly as the ‘past’ — formed a crucial access for defining the limits of citizenship, and thus for also advocating reforms, whether that entailed limiting citizenship, or advocating for revolution. The medieval, defined by a its opposite the modern, thus has provided a crucial and potent means for contesting political realities and social inequalities.  

Footnotes:

[1]: Severo Martínez Peláez, La patria del criollo: ensayo de interpretación de la realidad colonial Guatemalteca (Mexico: Ediciones en Marcha, 1990), 275.

Further Reading 

Adelman, Jeremy. “Introduction: The Problem of Persistence in Latin American History” Colonial Legacies: The Problem of Persistence in Latin American History, ed. Jeremy Adelman. New York: Routledge, 1999. 

Altschul, Nadia R. Politics of Temporalization: Medievalism and Orientalism in Nineteenth-Century South America. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020.   

Chiaramonte, See José Carlos. Sociedad y economia en hispanoamerica. Mexico, 1984. 

Earle, Rebecca. The Return of the Native: Indians and Myth-Making in Spanish America, 1810-1930. Duke University Press, 2007. 

Gibbings, Julie. Our Time is Now: Race and Modernity in Postcolonial Guatemala. Cambridge University Press, 2020. 

Mariátegui, José Carlos. Seven Interpretative Essays on Peruvian Reality. University of Texas press, 1971, first published in 1928. 

Martínez Peláez, Severo. La patria del criollo: ensayo de interpretación de la realidad colonial Guatemalteca. Mexico: Ediciones en Marcha, 1990. 

Stern, Steve J.  “Feudalism, Capitalism, and the World System in the Perspective of Latin America and the Caribbean” The American Historical Review, vol 93., no.4 (1988): 829-72. 

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Medievalism blog

Grandma Stole the American Dream: Immigrants, Nostalgia, and the Myth of a Pure America

Robert Zecker, St. Francis Xavier University

“Why can’t those people come here legally and work hard, become Americans, like we did? At least they could learn the language!” Too many wall-builders and anti-immigrant foot soldiers in the United States’ xenophobic army have sanctified the myth their ancestors arrived with worthy notions of liberty, self-sacrifice and almost innate American patriotism. Current nativists, however, rely on a nostalgic vision of the past in which virtuous ancestors effortlessly passed through Ellis Island. This nostalgia relies on a selective fashioning of the southeast European immigrant, a shtetl of the mind that wilfully forgets some of the less palatable aspects of an earlier era’s newcomers, and the moral panic an “invasion” of Slavs, Italians, and Jews triggered in old stock Americans. In part, the “invasion” of Southeast Europeans around 1890 caused old stock Americans to create genealogical societies that looked back to Plymouth Rock and a time America was free of the “gross little aliens” polluting the land. Sadly, today descendants of these earlier pariahs all too often stigmatize current newcomers, suggesting a continuity in American nativism, even if today it is Asians, Muslims, and Latino/as who raise restrictionists’ ire.

Figure 1: Fostering Idea of Original Americans

“Mayflower Descendants Hold Quiet Celebration This Year.” Americans with colonial forebears did everything they could to distinguish themselves from Southeast European newcomers. Philadelphia Inquirer, February 22, 1908, 2. Source: https://www.genealogybank.com/newsletter-archives/202202/mayflower-descendants-who%E2%80%99s-who-part-9

At the end of the nineteenth and start of the twentieth centuries, to old stock immigration restrictionists, the migrants reverently valorized today posed nothing less than an existential crisis for the nation. Henry Cabot Lodge asserted the Slovak was a bad investment for the United States, equating his indolence and supposed love of drink to the canard of Chinese addiction to opium. By 1882 Chinese migrants were infamously excluded by Congress from migrating to the U.S.; Lodge and other politicians hoped the same would soon be said of Slavs.

Tropes of pollution, disease, menace, and invasion were deployed by cartoonists, journalists, and politicians to characterize southeast European newcomers. Sociologist Edward Alsworth Ross asserted “a Pole could live in dirt that would kill a white man” (among many other dime-store assessments of Slavic and Italian unsuitability for the republic.) Cartoons published in Puck, a popular satirical political magazine, depicted a terrified Uncle Sam cowering at the base of the Statue of Liberty as rats with knives in their mouths labeled “Italian” swarmed into New York Harbor. Another cartoon showed a bewildered Uncle Sam, “a stranger in his own land,” surrounded in New York by signs in Yiddish, Italian, and other incomprehensible foreign tongues. Progressive Era photos or magazine exposés of immigrant neighborhoods characterized New York’s Little Italy or the primarily Jewish Lower East Side as at best sites of exotica, but more often seats of squalor, danger, and dysfunctionality.

Figure 2: At Ellis Island

Physical examination of female immigrants at Ellis Island, New York City, 1911. Inspectors scrupulously guarded the country’s gates against “unfit” newcomers. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C., https://www.loc.gov/item/95506353/

Such anxiety was not entirely unfounded. Ethnic nostalgia exhibits much amnesia in forgetting immigrant street gangs (Brooklyn’s Murder Inc. or the Sicilian camorra, not always as cinematic as Goodfellas or The Godfather would have us believe.) Allen Street on the Lower East Side was circa 1900 the center of New York prostitution, a fact sensationalized in Munsey’s Magazine exposés of alleged Jewish control of the “white slave trade.” Disease, crime, and juvenile-delinquency indices in immigrant enclaves such as Brownsville, Brooklyn – now remembered with fondness as home to egg creams, labor lyceums and second-generation strivers all bound for City College and glory – were alarmingly among the highest in the city. Dysfunction and boot-strapper achievement were close neighbours in immigrant quarters. Only maladjustment, though, was seen by a nativist like Lodge, while nostalgic descendants of ghetto dwellers have developed amnesia about the deviant while celebrating immigrant achievers. One person’s nostalgia was, for 1900 nativists, another man’s angst.

Figure 3: Little Italy in New York

Italian neighborhood with street market, Mulberry Street, New York, circa 1900. This photograph, published by the Detroit Publishing Co., likely evoked images of menace among nativists alert to the Italian “invasion” of “their” country. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C., https://www.loc.gov/item/2016817801/

To progressive journalist Frank Julian Warne, the “sclavic” (sic) immigrant was an invader of coal-mining regions of Pennsylvania, driving down the wage rate of established miners. Ironically, by 1904, many of those miners were Irish American, whose labor militancy and Catholicism in an earlier era had raised alarm bells, too. The fear that a secretive society of Irish Catholic Molly Maguires was terrorizing eastern Pennsylvania led to a militant pushback culminating in the 1877 execution of six Irish American “Molly Maguires” in Pottsville, Pennsylvania. By the early twentieth century, though, it was Slavic migrants who were often characterized as inherently violent, prone to drink and a menace to respectable, white America, which by that point tentatively included Irish Catholics. Yesterday’s outsider was admitted as a grudging insider when new “wretched refuse” arrived at Ellis Island and infiltrated the mine and mill towns of America.

Figure 4: Staking a Claim to Thanksgiving

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

By 1944, Polish Americans could claim Thanksgiving as part of their heritage as loyal Americans. This advertisement from the International Workers Order’s Front Line Fighters Fund urged readers to send a Thanksgiving “care package” to soldiers overseas. “The pilgrims, our ancestors, came from the old world to America in pursuit of freedom and a better life,” the ad asserted in Polish. A few decades earlier, nativists would have bristled at Poles claiming the pilgrims as “our” ancestors. Wayne State University, Walter Reuther Library, Don Binkowski Papers, Box 5, Folder 5-29, Głos Ludowy, November 25, 1944, 6, “Radość Dnia Dziękczynienia Należy do Naszych Dielnych Bojowników” (“The Joy of Thanksgiving Belongs to Our Brave Warriors.”)

Fear of worrisome migrants swarming into industrial America spurred the birth of colonial genealogy societies seeking to reclaim a purer, nobler heritage. Old stock Americans founded the Society of Mayflower Descendants in 1897, the Colonial Dames of America in 1890, and the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1890. Nostalgia for a time when the country unequivocally belonged to White Anglo-Saxon Protestants and homages to one’s pioneering ancestors were often juxtaposed to anxiety about southeast European “hordes” muddying the American gene pool. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also saw a rise in the performance of historical pageants venerating colonial nation builders, a respite from the anxieties of an urbanizing, polyglot country. Today’s descendants of Slavic or Italian migrants often express patriotism and love of America’s traditions. In the age their ancestors arrived, however, that colonial heritage was often wielded by WASPs to reclaim America from the grasp of Slavic, Italian, “gross little alien” hands. Colonial lineage was resurrected and celebrated, at least in part, out of an anxious nostalgia for an America old stock residents feared was slipping from their hands. More than a hundred years later Slavic or Italian Americans often join in similar cries to “make America great again.”

Everybody is yearning to breathe free in their fabricated America; nostalgic invocations of a pure past when the country was free of the huddled masses polluting the body politic resonated in 1900 no less than 2023. Slovak, Jewish, Italian, or Polish Americans who invoke hard-working, model minority ancestors might do well to remember at one point their forebears were the “mongrel” and the “underman” who would invariably cause America to “sink to early decay unless immigration is rigorously restricted.” Henry Cabot Lodge, Madison Grant, and other immigration restrictionists wanted to build a wall to keep out the “beaten men of beaten races.” They wanted the great-grandpa of many of today’s restrictionists on the other side of that wall.

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Medievalism blog

Excavating the Nostalgia of Archaeology in Moon Knight 

Sara Ann Knutson, University of British Columbia 

A crunching shovel. These stories often begin with a shovel crunching into the earth. A foreigner, dressed in colonial beige, gazing into an ancient pharaoh’s tomb. A gift-shop clerk, peering into museum glass that defends indefensibly looted materials. A reader, hunched over the pages of a whitewashed ancient past. In Hollywood, archaeologists seem almost as enduring as the immortal past they chase. They are aggrandized “mummy detectives” à la Agatha Christie, “intellectual grave robbers,” or the treasure-hunting “adventure archaeologist,” who claims objects for museums.  

Few societies receive such intense attention and enduring “cultural fantasies” as the ancient Egyptians. Hollywood especially continues to interweave images of an imagined ancient Egypt and (often foreign) archaeologists into pop culture. In 2004, Mark Hall observed that since the 1920s, not a decade has passed without the release of at least one film that explores the supernatural or horror possibilities of an archaeology of ancient Egypt. With the recent (2022) Disney TV series Moon Knight, this observation perseveres.  

Moon Knight offers more of the same yet also something new to Hollywood’s archaeology and ancient Egypt. Scholars often dismiss such pop cultural representations, but these cultural fantasies shape the public as well as the discipline of Archaeology itself. Most significantly, Moon Knight identifies dreamscapes and nostalgia as possibilities to excavate perhaps Archaeology’s most powerful tool—not the shovel, trowel, or sieve, but the mind.  

Excavating Moon Knight. Some people claim that we are no longer in the Indiana Jones era of archaeology, so far as looted objects in museums are concerned. But the fetishized archaeology of ancient Egypt continues to feed the popular imagination. In National Geographic’s documentary series (2019-2022) Lost Treasures of Egypt, the title sequence claims Egypt as “the richest source of archaeological treasures on the planet” and that “beneath this desert landscape lie the secrets of this ancient civilization” (emphasis added). Such narratives persist and fetishize archaeology as a vertical activity: above and below ground.  

Below ground, cinematic audiences anticipate the buried “treasures”— valuable, exotic trinkets, relics, or tombs that await “recovery.” The antagonist of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) captured this expectation of recovery with the thought experiment of his watch: “Look at this, It’s worthless—ten dollars from a vendor in the street. But I take it, I bury it in the sand for a thousand years, it becomes priceless.” This Indiana Jones film presents archaeologists competing to find the long-lost Ark of the Covenant. Moon Knight’s plot similarly hinges on a race: to uncover the tomb of the Egyptian goddess Ammit, a hidden site infused with supernatural forces. The fetishized recovery of “untouched” artefacts and sites, enduring only the sands of time, creates a purity narrative: ancient materials are most valuable when archaeologists are the “first” to uncover them. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Hx05Ia_byQ

Above ground, archaeologists cannot so easily claim traces of ancient Egypt as “lost treasure” or “untouched.” Structures like the Pyramids of Giza, the Sphinx, the Necropolis of Saqqara, or Luxor Temple are commonly described as ruins. Unlike the “timeless” buried object, the ruin implies ancient, decayed architecture—enduring remains of the no-longer-living, distinct from contemporary living societies. Moon Knight likewise fetishizes the Pyramids, including as night-shrouded ruins in the end-credits, miniature museum models, aquarium decoration, table centerpieces, and the convening site for the ancient Egyptian gods. 

Moon Knight reinforces some colonialist tropes in archaeology, not least the extractive “discovery” of untouched materials and exploration of ancient “ruins.” The plot commences at the British Museum, naturalizing the museum as a locus of ancient Egyptian history, and takes a colonizer perspective as we follow the protagonist’s journey from London to Cairo. However, Moon Knight also destabilizes certain tropes. The series’ heroine, an antiquities dealer, asserts that she does not steal artefacts—”they have already been stolen” (Episode 3). Steven Grant’s dreamscape in Episode 4 introduces a fictional film, Tomb Buster, in which the archaeologist, dressed in colonial attire, navigates the Mesoamerican jungle—a nostalgic spoof of Indiana Jones.  

Moon Knight endorses that excavation involves the mind as well as land. Excavation is a well-worn metaphor for pursuing memory and the psyche, promoted by thinkers like Sigmund Freud and Michel Foucault. Moon Knight unearths this legacy for popular audiences and deliberately folds ancient Egypt into the contemporary psyche and dreamscape. Some characters notably accept the mission-driven adventure of archaeology as “a dream worth dying for” (Episode 4). Through the metaphor of shattered glass, the broken mindscape becomes the most important excavation site, as Moon Knight maneuvers fragments of the hero’s trauma, personalities, and ruptured relationships.  

In these excavations, the superhero resources his nostalgia for archaeology to navigate trauma, invoking an idealized past in response to a deficient present. Audiences are also lured into this nostalgia for an ancient Egypt. But popular films that explore the nostalgic possibilities of ancient Egypt and archaeology leave palpable traces on contemporary Egyptian identity. We must therefore be mindful of what nostalgia can do and whom it serves. Although nostalgia produces useful commentaries on the present, it can also misrepresent memory of a past that never was. Despite its attention to the mindscape, Moon Knight misses the possibilities of multiple “ancient Egypts” and the recognition that our ideas of ancient Egypt are just that—our own ideas. Instead, Moon Knight promotes its ancient Egypt as a single, if supernatural, reality. 

Waking from the Nostalgic Dream. This article began with the gaze. But the ancient Egyptian past does not begin with European shovels. Nor does it end with Anglophone commentaries on this past. For their part, Hollywood archaeologists—or the Marvel superhero—must look up and around. The most celebratory part of Moon Knight is not the archaeology, but the nod to living Egyptian communities. We witness the representation of Egyptian actors and the self-proclaimed arrival of the Arabic-speaking, Egyptian superhero Layla El-Faouly. We hear the Arabic lyrics of Egyptian pop artist Ahmed Saad in Episode 2. But Moon Knight can do more. The possibility for future seasons offers an opportunity Moon Knight to envision archaeology without the clinking of excavation tools but rather as a practice rooted in the will of local communities. We cannot hope to properly understand the experience of ancient Egyptians by gazing into a pharaoh’s tomb that they deliberately protected. What the ancient Egyptians did leave visible are in no way separate from the histories of subsequent generations who engaged these sites and left their own legacies of relationships and connections to the past. To see these, we must look up and acknowledge not the “ruins” but the contemporary communities.  

Embed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sfC3bV2DL0  

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Interviews

Suzanna Wagner Q&A, Issue 32. no.2

Suzanna Wagner is an independent scholar, focusing on Canadian health history between 1890 and 1930. She is currently the Historic Sites Program Coordinator with the Government of Alberta. She is the author of “Households Large and Small: Healthcare Civilians and the Prominence of Women’s Work in the Edmonton Bulletin’s Reporting of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic ”. You can read her article in JCHA/RSHC 32 no. 2 (2022).

Your work focuses on the history of health between 1890 and 1930. How did you come to be interested in this period?

It all started with a job I didn’t want. In the midst of my undergrad, I got a much-coveted summer job working at a living history site. I campaigned for a position focused on the fur trade – but was instead assigned the 1920s. To say I was disappointed would be an understatement. Fortunately, it didn’t take very long before I became intrigued by the diversity and contradictions of the 1920s in Western Canada. The juxtaposition of modern technologies with time-honoured technologies, the dramatic differences between rural and urban life, the many and varied situations of women and especially the post-war experiences intrigued me.

I found the stories of the First World War Canadian Army Medical Corps Nursing Sisters so fascinating that I went to grad school to investigate further. This resulted in a thesis that considered the nursing sisters’ work in Greece and Egypt from 1915-1917. As I read about the social and healthcare/nursing landscape from which these nursing sisters came and their post-war legacy, I found more and more intriguing histories including public health infrastructure development, material histories, and changing healthcare attitudes and practices. So, I ended up focusing on healthcare and social history from 1890 to 1930.

In your conclusion, you say that “for a time after the crisis passed the value of that care […] was acknowledged and praised”. What would you say was the long term effect of the increased importance given to domestic labour?

I wish I could say that there was a long-term effect, but at this point at least, I’m not convinced that domestic labour or care-work were publicly appreciated in any significant way once Edmonton had gotten over the worst of the influenza. Nor does it appear that the prominence of domestic labour and care-work during the epidemic changed the way this labour was experienced or considered afterwards.
Given both the timing of the epidemic and that care-work and domestic labour were (and still are) highly gendered activities, this query could be tied to the question of whether women’s work in the First World War did anything to advance their claims to equal rights, suffrage and opportunities afterwards.

While there are a range of answers to the latter, in both cases, it seems that the desire for a return to normalcy encouraged people to push back on anything tangible and controllable that had changed. For instance, while it was out of Edmontonians’ power to bring back those who died, they could stop talking about laundry in the newspaper. Taking small steps to return to normalcy had the side effect- likely unintended and perhaps not even initially observed- of pushing domestic labour back into the confines of private homes and out of public view.

Regardless of how hidden the work may be, exploring the practicalities of daily life remains vital because it allows us to get a better sense of the diversities of lived experiences. More recently, COVID has once again demonstrated that domestic burdens can disproportionately affect women. It’s a timely reminder of the basic importance of studying these issues.

What were the main challenges you encountered in primarily working with the Edmonton Bulletin newspaper?

You mean aside from blurry printing? I shouldn’t complain- the Edmonton Bulletin has been digitized and is keyword searchable.

The limited demographic focus of the paper’s writing was a challenge. The Edmonton Bulletin certainly illuminates the impressions and experiences of the elite of the city well, but overall it provides incomplete impression of Edmonton’s population in 1918. I was struck, for example, by the scant references to Catholic institutions and clergy. I’m currently working on research that will help to sketch out this part of the Edmonton influenza story.

The biggest remaining question for me at this point surrounds the internal workings of the newspaper. I would like to have had more information about the Edmonton Bulletin’s writers and how their work was influenced by the epidemic.

Where is your research headed now?

Out east (of Edmonton)! I’ve started to investigate how the 1918 influenza affected rural populations in the east-central part of Alberta, including the Ukrainian bloc settlement area. The experience was markedly different than what we see in Edmonton and is important to help us understand the ethnic dynamics at play during the influenza epidemic.

I’m also expanding my research on Canadian military nursing sisters of the First World War in several separate directions simultaneously, prompted by questions I wasn’t able to address in my thesis and the discovery of some exciting new primary sources!

Have you read anything good recently?

I’m in the middle of two fascinating books right now: The Culture of Flushing: A Social and Legal History of Sewage by Jamie Benidickson (UBC Press) and Good Intentions Gone Awry: Emma Crosby and the Methodist Mission on the Northwest Coast by Jan Hare and Jean Barman (UBC Press).

I’ve long been intrigued by the development of sewers and public health policies, so when I saw The Culture of Flushing on sale, I added it to my cart without so much as a second thought. Good Intentions Gone Awry was another impulse purchase: it seemed appropriate for grappling with some of Canada’s tragic histories while simultaneously gaining a more well-rounded understanding of the role of Protestant women in missionary work. The book uses the letters of Emma Crosby, a late 19th century Methodist missionary(’s wife) alongside commentary from Hare and Barman to paint a vivid picture of the thought world which supported the missionary work, the peculiarities of white women’s work and experience of missionary callings of as well as the tragic, if unintended, consequences of these efforts.

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Interviews

Rachel Hope Cleves, Issue 32. no. 2 Roundtable

Rachel Hope Cleves is a Professor at the University of Victoria. Her work focuses on American history, particularly through a gender and sexuality lens. Her book Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America was also a finalist for the Wallace K. Ferguson Prize. Her latest work Unspeakable: A Life beyond Sexual Morality won the 2021 Wallace K. Ferguson Prize and is the subject of a roundatable in JCHA/RSHC 32 no. 2.

How did you come to this project about Norman Douglas?

This project originated in the archives, like most of my books and articles have. In 2014, I went on a family vacation to Capri and during the trip I decided to read one of the most famous novels set on the island, Norman Douglas’s 1917 South Wind. The novel satirizes the sexually transgressive cosmopolitan elite who lived in Capri at the turn of the twentieth century. Reading South Wind made me curious about the historical figures who inspired the novel, so I tracked down Douglas’s 1933 memoir Looking Back. The memoir is a minor modernist masterpiece, but it is also shockingly forthright about Douglas’s sexual relationships with youth, both female and male. Looking Back made me question how attitudes towards intergenerational sex in the early twentieth century differed from present attitudes; a famous author could publish a memoir in the 1930s about having sexual encounters with children and was still widely admired, something of course unimaginable today. I followed that question to the New York Public Library, where many of Douglas’s manuscripts are archived. There I discovered his travel diaries, which included explicit descriptions of his encounters with youths. Although I hadn’t been planning on writing a book about Douglas (my plans were to integrate him briefly into a different book project), as a historian of sexuality I felt an immediate responsibility to bring Douglas’s diaries to light. They offered a rare window onto the widespread practice of sex between men and children or youth in the first half of the twentieth century. A lot of work on the history of pederasty has drawn from legal records or from cultural texts like poetry, art, and pornography. Douglas’s travel diaries offered a highly unusual social historical dimension to the conversation. I knew a book seeking to understand this world would alienate a lot of readers, but to not shine a light on what I had discovered would, I thought, make me complicit in covering up the history of intergenerational sex. As a tenured professor, I was willing to take the risk of writing on a topic that I was fairly certain would generate significant backlash.

You worked with a number of sources such as diaries, letters and police records for this project, including some produced by the children Douglas encountered. What were the biggest challenges you encountered in studying children’s and youth’s perspectives on such a fraught and difficult subject?

The key challenge I faced was how to interpret the letters and diaries by Douglas’s boys that expressed love and affection for him. The book would have been far more palatable if I didn’t have those sources. If I had been left only with silences, I would have been able to fill the silences with assumptions based on our present trauma model of child abuse. But the evidence didn’t support the claim that the children saw their relations with Douglas as traumatic. That raised a new question: were the children suffering from false consciousness? Should I interpret their affection for Douglas, which often extended throughout their adult lives, as akin to Stockholm Syndrome? To make that argument would put me in conflict with one of the major tenets of the history of childhood: that we ought to take seriously the words and actions of children. I didn’t want to erase the agency of these historical children by overwriting their own words with my modern adult assumptions. On the other hand, judging from the evidence it was clear to me that Douglas’s sexual encounters with children were exploitative and harmful. I didn’t want to let him off the hook as a moral actor by uncritically accepting the children’s declarations of affection. I had to analyze the sources in light of their material context. Douglas represented a source of material opportunity for poor children and youth, and they often had instrumental reasons for expressing affection for him. Material interests, however, could not explain away all of the evident affection the children held for Douglas. I had to acknowledge that many experienced their relationships with him as beneficial, even if I didn’t see it that way. To handle these complexities, I introduced multiple lines of analysis in the reflection sections at the end of each of the book’s four parts. I raised the possibility that childhood experiences of intergenerational sex might differ over time and place depending on historical contexts including material circumstances and dominant ideologies, while also giving evidence of the very real damage that Douglas caused to the people around him.

How did you approach the need to historicize the subject of your scholarship against contemporary understandings of child abuse?

As a historian of sexuality, I remain committed to the axiom that the meaning of sex and sexual practices change over time and place. I am skeptical of any claims to a transhistorical sexual morality. Our contemporary understandings of child abuse, however, treat sexual encounters between adults and children as a universal wrong. Our taboo conflicts with a historicist understanding of intergenerational sex as having shifting historical meanings. For this book, I had to ask the question of whether it was possible that before the rise of the contemporary taboo on pedophilia in the 1950s, sexual encounters with adults held different meanings for children and youth. Just by asking this question I know that I alienate many historians of childhood who tend to feel protective of their subjects. On the other hand, at talks I’ve given about Douglas I have been approached many times by adults who were sexually abused as children who have told me that the contemporary trauma model feels reductive or restrictive to them. They express appreciation for my attention to children’s agency in Unspeakable.

Where is your research headed now?

I am finally back at work on the project I had started before Norman Douglas dragooned me: a history of the connections between good food and illicit sex in the Anglo imagination between the late eighteenth century and the present day. Initially, I thought Douglas might take up a page or two of this project, since he was a well-known epicure who often linked food and sex in his writings. His final, posthumous, book was a tongue-in-cheek collection of aphrodisiac recipes titled Venus in the Kitchen (1952). As I mentioned above, my discoveries in the archives made me feel ethically compelled to write a book about Douglas, even though I knew it would be unwelcome. Now that Douglas is behind me, I’ve returned to the far more appetizing task of tracing how the connections between food and sex have changed over time. Look for a new book from me, to be published by Polity, a few years down the line.

Have you read anything good recently?

I’m always reading good things! I’ve been teaching a graduate seminar in U.S. history this semester, organized around the theme of recent books that have won multiple awards. What a joy! We’ve read Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War (2018); Douglas Winiarski, Darkness Falls on the Land of Light: Experiencing Religious Awakenings in Eighteenth-Century New England (2019); Sophie White, Voices of the Enslaved: Love, Labor and Longing in French Louisiana (2019); Jonathan Gienapp, The Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era (2018); Joanne Freeman, The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War (2018); Amy Murrell Taylor, Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps (2018); Beth Lew-Williams, The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (2018); Johanna Fernández, The Young Lords: A Radical History (2022); Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (2018); and Gary Gerstle The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era (2022). Is that too many books to recommend?

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Interviews

Nicole Demarchi Q&A, Issue 32. no.2

Nicole Demarchi is a PhD candidate in medieval history. She is enrolled in a joint program at the University of Padua, Ca’Foscari Venice, University of Verona, and University of Lorraine. She is currently working on the role of emotions and pain in the works of Paul the Deacon. She is the author of “Between Expiatory Religious Processions and Individual Escapes: Responses to Bubonic Plague Epidemics in the Historiae of Gregory of Tours and Paul the Deacon”. You can read her article in JCHA/RSHC 32 no. 2 (2022).

Your work largely focuses on the role of emotions and pain in Paul the Deacon’s writings. How did you come to this topic?

In a totally random way. During my master’s degree in philosophy, I took a course on the philosophy of emotions and the professor recommended Barbara Rosenwein’s books. I immediately became so fascinated with the history of emotions that I combined this new interest with that of early medieval history in my PhD project. I decide to study pain – as an emotion – for two main reasons: the first one is that the experience of pain plays a central role in Paul the Deacon’s life and works. The second reason has to do with the fact that currently there is relatively limited research on the role of pain in the early medieval context. I think studying pain as a historical phenomenon is important because it helps us understand not only how it has been conceptualized, expressed, and judged differently, but also how the pain of certain marginalized social groups has been rejected and ridiculed by dominant elites throughout history.

You stress the need for a comparative approach to be taken when studying the responses to plague outbreaks in Western Europe, which is what you set out to do in this article. How did you go about choosing your main sources for this study?

I became intrigued by the subject of individual and collective responses to plague epidemics by reading Paul the Deacon’s accounts on plague during the first Italian lockdown in 2020. This theme is not the main focus of my doctoral thesis, but it inevitably caught my attention. I thought: what do Paul and other early medieval authors tell us about how people dealt with epidemics in the past? So, I decided to compare Paul’s reports on plague with those of one of his main sources, namely Gregory of Tours, who lived in a completely different political, social, and cultural context. I think that this comparative approach between authors who are chronologically distant but somehow interconnected through textual references is very promising.

In your conclusion, you mention the difficulty in obtaining a complete picture of attitudes towards plague during this period given a lack of non-elite perspectives. Both authors you focus on are religious leaders. How did you deal with this hurdle in your analysis?

I think a good starting point is to read historical sources critically. This means asking questions about the author’s agenda, the structure and purpose of the text, and the context in which a text was written. Being aware that an author’s plague narrative is influenced by his political, religious, and pedagogical aims is essential to understanding why he represented plague responses in a certain way rather than another. This critical reading of historical sources also avoids generalizing the author’s claims, as he can only offer us a specific perspective on plague outbreaks.

According to Paul the Deacon, in 589 the river Tiber flooded Rome, damaging ancient buildings as well as the church granaries where thousands of bushels of grain were stored, causing famine. The flood also spawned swarms of snakes (multitudo serpentium) and an enormous dragon (magnus draco). What do you think this dragon was?

The presence of a dragon/snake during the flood of 589 is reported not only by Paul the Deacon, but also by Gregory of Tours (Paul’s main source) and John the Deacon. It is even mentioned in the Liber Pontificalis. Many scholars have argued about the religious and cultural significance that Gregory attributed to the dragon/snake. For example, Alain J. Stoclet have identified the dragon with the pagan God Asclepius. The exodus of the reptiles (Asclepius and his snake servants) would represent the banishment of paganism from the city of Rome. Martin Heinzelmann has suggested that the dragon and serpents in Gregory’s account may be understood as apocalyptic omens. Therefore, the dragon and snakes seem to be part of a complex interpretative framework that draws on pagan historiography and Christian symbolism.

Where is your research headed now?

In recent months I have been focusing on the role of love, affection, and intimacy in family relationships, with a particular emphasis on the Carolingian era. I became interested in these issues during my doctoral research when I examined the epitaphs written by Paul the Deacon for the three infant children of Charlemagne and his wife Hildegard. I was impressed by the fact that the epitaphs include many emotional expressions related to family affection and parental grieving. Thus, I decided to extend this initial analysis to other texts produced by different authors who worked at the court of Charlemagne and his successors. Currently I am still examining the primary sources, but I hope that soon I will be able to compare them to get a clearer overall picture of the role of intimacy in the Carolingian royal family.

Have you read anything good recently?

I am reading How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa F. Barrett. Barrett, a neuroscientist and psychologist, argues that many of the main beliefs we have about emotions are wrong. She argues that it is not true that emotions are universal, that they are hardwired and automatically triggered in distinct regions of the brain, and that emotions look the same everywhere. For example, just because someone smiles, it does not necessarily mean they are happy. Our emotions are not innate. Instead, they are a construction made by the relationship between the brain, our interpretations of bodily sensations, and the external environment. Thus, culture plays a fundamental role in learning and constructing our emotional concepts. As a historian who deals with emotions, I really enjoyed reading this book because it provides another piece of evidence to support the theory that emotions – and the way they are experienced, expressed and understood – can change over time and according to culture.

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Interviews

jason chalmers Q&A, Issue 32 no.2

jason chalmers is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at Concordia University. His work deals with decolonization and memory from a Jewish perspective. He is the author of “Decolonizing the Holocaust: Curatorial Possibilities at the Montreal Holocaust Museum.”. You can read his article in JCHA/RSHC 32 no.2 (2022).

Your work primarily deals with decolonization and memory from a Jewish perspective. How did you become interested in this area of research?

I find research most exciting when it brings together unexpected and ostensibly unconnected areas of knowledge. My interest in the Holocaust and Holocaust memory has developed quite organically. My maternal grandparents are Holocaust survivors who came to Canada as war orphans in 1948, and I grew up hearing my grandmother’s experiences of survival. Her story was published as Buried Words by the Azrieli Foundation. This area of research is very personal to me and I was drawn to it more by instinct than conscious decision.

In contrast, my interest in settler colonialism and decolonization was more intentional. Canada is characterized by an interesting paradox: while the country was created through settler colonialism, the state is also invested in the denial of colonial violence. As a consequence, Canadians are surrounded by colonial violence but often unaware of it. Yet the onus of decolonization and reconciliation falls largely onto settler society, so I feel a distinct responsibility to do this work.

While completing my dissertation, I realized that colonial violence is often a blind spot for Holocaust studies, and I wondered how I might address this blindness. I thought that by bringing together these two areas of scholarship, I can help to make the invisible visible.

What challenges did you face in conducting primary research?

A big challenge is that very few Holocaust museums are willing to have meaningful conversations about settler colonialism. There seem to be a few reasons for this. I think that most Holocaust museums don’t see these issues as relevant to their mandates, so they don’t feel the need to open up dialogue about colonialism and decolonization. But I also think people are resistant to these conversations because they are so difficult and uncomfortable – because these issues challenge people to think about themselves and the world in new ways. So I was faced with a dilemma: How can I have a conversation when others are reluctant to join in? And it’s this reluctance that compels my research. My article attempts to show that issues of settler colonialism, decolonization, and Indigeneity are relevant to Holocaust museums. I want to show that the Montreal Holocaust Museum and similar institutions are not only capable of addressing these issues, but that they need to have these conversations.

Memorial room in the Montreal Holocaust Museum, Montreal QC

Memorial room in the Montreal Holocaust Museum, Montreal QC

You discuss the construction of the Holocaust as Canadian memory. Can you elaborate on this?

Holocaust memory is a seed that flowers differently in different environments. In places like Poland, for example, where the actual killings took place, Holocaust memory focuses on the physical sites of destruction but also the contemporary absence of Jews. In Israel, there is often emphasis on narratives of redemption and homecoming. In places like Canada and Australia, which absorbed tens-of-thousands of survivors after the war, memory turns towards stories of survival, arrival, integration, and home-building. One consequence is that Canadians tend to remember the Holocaust in a way that is shaped by colonial ideologies, mythologies, power relations, and modes of representation. Holocaust museums, monuments, and memorials can therefore be informative sites of analysis that illuminate both transnational memory as well as socio-political dynamics in specific places.

You state in your article that decolonization is “an ongoing process without a clear end in sight”. What kind of challenges does this pose in your research?

This is an absolutely crucial point. Decolonization is a horizon that we can always approach but never quite arrive at. This of course poses a challenge to researchers, curators, and heritage experts, but also to Canadians in general. It is a challenge to critically reflect on ourselves, the places we live, and our relationships to one another. It is a challenge to think about the state, social institutions, and the ways they reproduce structural and systemic inequality. To settlers in particular, it is a challenge to restore Indigenous land and sovereignty.

Another implication is that my research will likely (or hopefully) be outdated in the near future. Compared to some other institutions, the Montreal Holocaust Museum hasn’t taken many steps towards decolonization. As such, the recommendations I offer are only the tip of the iceberg; my intent is to inspire conversation, provoke action, and provide a framework for future developments. Why not translate the exhibit into Kanien’kéha or other Indigenous languages, for example? I hope that when the Montreal Holocaust Museum re-opens with its new permanent exhibit in 2025, my article will be obsolete and we will already be navigating more radical conversations about decolonization.

How does your work engage with other recent work in Canada about decolonization?

This area of research is interesting because people define decolonization in so many different ways. If you ask ten people what decolonization means, I suspect you’d hear ten unique but equally insightful responses. One place where I engage in these conversations is with the Thinking Through the Museum (TTTM) research network based out of Concordia University, which takes a critical approach to museums and difficult histories. My colleagues at TTTM are a great source of wisdom and inspiration in thinking through decolonization and related processes. It is a particularly productive environment because TTTM includes scholars, heritage professionals, and artists from Canada as well as Poland, South Africa, and the United States. As such, it helps me approach settler colonialism and decolonization from a Canadian perspective while also addressing other national contexts.

Is this article part of a larger project?

This article is part of my postdoctoral research at Concordia University. I began to ask these questions in an article I published in American Indian Quarterly, which considers how the National Holocaust Monument in Ottawa reproduces settler mythology. I received an enthusiastic response from scholars working in Holocaust and genocide studies, and it seemed like a fruitful direction for my research. I have a related article coming out in Canadian Jewish Studies that explores how Jewish community archives are responding to reconciliation.

National Holocaust Monument, Ottawa ON

Alberta's provincial Holocaust memorial, Edmonton AB

Alberta’s provincial Holocaust memorial, Edmonton AB

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Béatrice Craig Q&A, Issue 31. no. 2

Béatrice Craig is an emeritus professor in the Department of History at the University of Ottowa. Her work deals with the economic and social transformation of eastern Canadian rural society in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. She is the author of Les femmes et le monde des affaires depuis 1500 (2019). You can read her article “Producerist consumers? Men, women and consumption in rural eastern Canada, 1830-1867.” in JCHA/RSHC 31 no.2.

Your work primarily deals with rural Canada. How did you become interested in this area of research?

Totally by accident. I was placed as a French assistant at the University of Maine at Presque Isle as part of a US exchange program. I was looking for an MA topic I could not do at home, and came across the Upper St John valley “Acadians” (I had no idea who the Acadians were- and was quite surprised to find out there were French speakers in New England). Some were even in my classes. One thing led to another, and one question to the next more or less organically. My good luck was that everything I was thinking could be an interesting question about the Madawaska region, and happened to be a question that was beginning, or had begun to interest a fair number of historians (migration, intergenerational property transmission, farm productivity, farmers and markets, “transition to capitalism” etc.). I was always at the right place at the right time to catch the wave. The consumption research is a follow up (I found my first account books in Madawaska), and this too was a growing wave. 

How does the juxtaposition of consumption and production complicate or enrich our understanding of labor in rural Canada?

The majority of people work to acquire the necessities and decencies of life. That’s pretty universal, isn’t it? And it has been known a while. See for instance Adam Smith who defined necessities as “not only the commodities which are indispensably necessary for the support of life, but whatever the custom of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even of the lowest sort, to be without.” We are not dealing here with two separate and independent processes (production and consumption) which can be “juxtaposed”. They are really two sides of the same coin. Production is useless if nobody wants the output, and consumers cannot consume goods that are not produced. (Adam Smith said that too – consumption is the basis of the “wealth of nations”.) 

What challenges did you face working with subjects who were often hidden from the public eye?

Same as the ones faced by any social historian! “People often hidden from the public eye” are usually not as hidden as their “unpublic” life would lead one to believe. Most people leave traces of their activities behind, and when you deal with groups of individuals, the collective traces are usually sufficient to be able to say something interesting about them. In the case of women, as shown in this article, it is usually a matter of looking differently at existing sources – something that women’s historians have had to do since the beginning of the subfield. Women are usually hidden in plain sight.  

Is this article a part of a larger project or series? Looking back on this article is there anything that you think could be expanded upon?

It is part of a larger project on consumption in rural Lower Canada and northwestern New Brunswick before Confederation.  More than a dozen account books, in 6 different places between the end of the 18th century and the confederation of Canada. A nice “little” retirement project. I have already published three other articles using this corpus (another in the Journal of the CHA on alcohol a while back, one in the CHR and one in RHAF this year). You are not going to get rid of me any time soon! 

 Could this article be expanded upon? This is an article about women’s hidden work- and how it can be made visible. There is quite a bit of work being done on the topic at the moment. I got my inspiration from a conference in Glasgow called “invisible hands”, and Jane Humphries’ question about “who turned baskets of goods into livings?” There is still work that can be done on the subject, but I think I went as far as I could with account books- and my project is about consumption- not women’s invisible work, therefore, I am not going to continue in that direction. 

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