New publication in Byzantine Studies featuring many of our members!
Is Byzantine Studies a colonialist discipline? Toward a Critical Historiography. Edited by Benjamin Anderson and Mirela Ivanova
Description:
Rather than provide a definitive answer to this question, this book defines the parameters of the debate and proposes ways of thinking about what it would mean to engage seriously with the field’s political and intellectual genealogies, hierarchies, and forms of exclusion. In this volume, scholars of art, history, and literature address the entanglements, past and present, among the academic discipline of Byzantine Studies and the practice and legacies of European colonialism. Starting with the premise that Byzantium and the field of Byzantine studies are simultaneously colonial and colonized, the chapters address topics ranging from the material basis of philological scholarship and its uses in modern politics to the colonial plunder of art and its consequences for curatorial practice in the present. The book concludes with a bibliography that serves as a foundation for a coherent and systematic critical historiography. Bringing together insights from scholars working in different disciplines, regions, and institutions, Is Byzantine Studies a Colonialist Discipline? urges practitioners to reckon with the discipline’s colonialist, imperialist, and white supremacist history.
Table of Contents:
Preface: The Historical Conjuncture
Introduction: For a Critical Historiography of Byzantine Studies
Benjamin Anderson and Mirela Ivanova
Part 1: How Is Byzantine Studies (Re)Produced?
1. Hieronymus Wolf’s Silver Tongue: Early Byzantine Scholarship at the Intersection of Slavery, Colonialism, and the Crusades
Nathanael Aschenbrenner and Jake Ransohoff
2. Byzantine Archaeology: Teaching the Tenth and the Twentieth Centuries
Hugh G. Jeffery
3. Byzantium in Exile
Şebnem Dönbekci, Bahattin Bayram, and Zeynep Olgun
Part 2: How Is Byzantium (Re)Produced?
4. Methodological Imperialism
Nicholas S. M. Matheou
5. The Price of Admission
Anthony Kaldellis
6. Byzantine Studies: A Field Ripe for Disruption
Averil Cameron
7. Subaltern Byzantinism
Maria Mavroudi
Part 3: How Are Byzantine Texts (Re)Produced?
8. Byzantine and Western Narratives: A Dialogue of Empires
Arietta Papaconstantinou
9. The Ethnic Process
Alexandra Vukovich
10. Publication and Citation Practices: Enclosure, Extractivism, and Gatekeeping in Byzantine Studies
Matthew Kinloch
Part 4: How Is Byzantine Art (Re)Produced?
11. The South Kensington Museum, Byzantine Egyptian Textiles, and Art-Historical Imperialism
Arielle Winnik
12. From Ethnographic Illustration to Aphrodisian Magistrate: Changing Perceptions of an Early Byzantine Portrait
Stephanie R. Caruso
13. Expanding and Decentering Byzantium: The Acquisition of an Ethiopian Double-Sided Gospel Leaf
Andrea Myers Achi
14. Equity, Accessibility, and New Narratives for Byzantine Art in the Museum
Elizabeth Dospěl Williams
A Collective Bibliography Toward a Critical Historiography of Byzantine Studies
List of Contributors
Index