Abstract
This essay attends to questions of history and affective attachment through the Old English poem The Grave, unearthing and dismembering dichotomies of life and death, body and soul. It considers how the same attachments and revulsions that are exposed in The Grave offer a critique of medievalist attachments to the past – past histories, past affiliations, past friends and mentors – at the expense of the present. The possible affective links and historical creations allowed and encouraged by these memorials are capacious. The body is distorted by its constraint in the grave; the space is individual, measured, and repeated by the community by all (or at least most) bodies, and yet its existence remains uncomforted, misaligned from the living. By presenting both grave and corpse as simultaneously inhabiting past, present, and future, The Grave allows its audience to create and recognize affective ties to personal, cultural, and institutional pasts, presents, and futures.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Sierra Lomuto identifies many ways in which contemporary political and academic discourses about the medieval can uphold white supremacy, and how debates about the adequacy or anachronisms of some terminology ‘must end once and for all.’ ‘When we refuse to see race in the Middle Ages,’ she argues, ‘we are refusing to see how hierarchical structures of difference operate in all of their nuanced complexities, including within multicultural and transnational contexts. We are allowing the Middle Ages to be seen as a preracial space where whiteness can locate its ethnic heritage’ (Lomuto, 2016).
I thank the editors of this collection for asking me to make an account of my use of ‘we’ in this essay – an attempted inclusion that often marks who is being excluded by it. As Adrienne Rich suggests, this exclusion may well be inevitable to some extent: ‘You cannot speak for me. I cannot speak for us. Two thoughts: there is not liberation that only knows how to say “I”; there is no collective movement that speaks for each of us all the way through’ (Rich, 2003, 37). I use ‘we’ not to assume unified interpretation of texts and ideas, but to represent a community of scholars, students, and readers who are committed to anti-racist action. I recognize that my ‘we’ excludes many scholars in medieval and literary studies, but I hope that it includes the readers of this issue.
All quotations of the Old English text of The Grave are from Jones (2012) and are cited by line number.
Unless otherwise noted, translations of The Grave are from Oberman (2017). Oberman makes manuscript damage legible by marking off the approximate space of silence with brackets.
References
Ahmed, S. 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Baldwin, J. 1955. Stranger in the Village. In Notes of a Native Son, 163–79. Boston, MA: Beacon.
Berlant, L. 2008. Thinking about Feeling Historical. Emotion, Space and Society 1: 4–9.
Butler, J. 2004. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York: Verso.
Chaganti, S. 2019. B-Sides: Chaucer’s ‘The House of Fame.’ Public Books, 14 February. https://www.publicbooks.org/b-sides-chaucers-the-house-of-fame/.
Heng, G. 2018 The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Jones, C. A., ed. 2012. Old English Shorter Poems Volume I: Religious and Didactic. Vol. 15, Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Karkov, C. 2019. We are All Migrants. Seminar presentation. IONA: Seafaring. Vancouver, Canada.
Lerer, S. 1997. Genre of The Grave and the Origins of the Middle English Lyric. MLA Quarterly 58: 127–61.
Lomuto, S. 2016. White Nationalism and the Ethics of Medieval Studies. In the Medieval Middle, 5 December. http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2016/12/white-nationalism-and-ethics-of.html.
Lorde, A. 1984. Poetry is Not a Luxury. In Sister Outsider, Essays and Speeches, 36–9. Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press.
Mbembe, A. Necropolitics. 2003. Translated by L. Meintjes. Public Culture 15(1): 11–40.
Oberman, M. 2017. The Unstill Ones: Poems. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Rich, A. 2003. Notes Towards a Politics of Location. In Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, eds. R. Lewis and S. Mills, 29–42. New York: Routledge.
Siebert, E. 2006. A Possible Source for the Addition to The Grave. ANQ 19: 8–16.
Stewart, S. 1993. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Taylor, D. 2018. ¡Presente! PMLA 133(3): 482–90.
Trilling, R. R. 2009. The Aesthetics of Nostalgia: Historical Representation in Old English Verse. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Housley, M. Uneasy presences: Revulsion and the necropolitics of attachment. Postmedieval 11, 434–441 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-020-00194-5
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-020-00194-5