Download PDF | Benjamin Anderson (editor), Mirela Ivanova (editor) - Is Byzantine Studies a Colonialist Discipline__ Toward a Critical Historiography (ICMA Books _ Viewpoints)-Penn State University Press (2023).
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Preface: The Historical Conjuncture
In the summer of 2020, two events, at first glance unrelated, rendered a series of questions about the study of the medieval Mediterranean unavoidable. What is the remit of the field called “Byzantine studies”? In which forums may Byzantinists speak with authority? What is the basis of that authority, and how should it be deployed? When are scholars compelled to engage in public debate?
The first event occurred on 25 May 2020, when a Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, on camera. The footage spread via social and mass media, becoming a metonym for an entire system of racecraft, of structural inequality upheld by racialized violence and newly exacerbated by a global pandemic.’ Renewed resistance to this system crystallized under a phrase. “Black Lives Matter” denotes in practice a social movement, but it is grammatically a credo— one rejected, moreover, by many in power. The footage of Floyd’s murder demonstrated that, to the agents of contemporary colonialism, Black lives do not matter.? The focus of the resistance thus expanded from the immediate context of US-American policing to a transnational reassessment of the enduring legacies of European colonialism and white supremacy.
Contemporary private cultural institutions—most obviously museums and universities—are founded upon the fruits of structural inequities: surpluses unjustly accumulated and dedicated to a perpetual, secular, mass of remembrance. At the same time, cultural professionals abhor outward demonstrations of racism and regularly seek to distinguish their institutions’ present activities from the circumstances of their founding. Perhaps unsurprisingly, therefore, such institutions took center stage in this new transnational reassessment of colonialism.
Many issued formal statements. Here is a characteristic document from the summer of 2020:At British Art Studies, we know from our work to date how thoroughly entangled histories of British art are with the legacies of colonial violence, oppression, slavery, and systemic racism. These histories manifest themselves variously in artworks, art-historical writing, museum displays, and other forms of heritage conservation.
Acknowledging the ways that British histories and cultural production have been complicit in anti-Blackness, colonial violence, slavery, and white supremacy is only the first step. Recognising and dismantling the racism that affects and is perpetuated in our institutions today is the essential next step.
The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and the Yale Center for British Art, the co-publishers of BAS, have both shared statements of solidarity in response to the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police on 25 May 2020, and the Black Lives Matter protests throughout the United States, United Kingdom, and around the world?
Somewhere between a mea culpa and a manifesto, this statement reveals how the murder of George Floyd caused those in positions of cultural authority to engage seriously with the relationship between their professional activities and the duties of global political citizenship. Could the study of British art contribute to a more just society? If so, then how? If not, why bother?
The relevance of colonialism to the study of British art, the cultural production of a colonial empire, seems obvious. So too does that of colonialism to those disciplines, such as classics, that have historically contributed to the assertion of Eurocentrism and white supremacy. For these disciplines, 2020 was not the first reckoning. After the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville in August 2017, the Society of Classical Studies, American Historical Association, and many peer organizations denounced the appropriation of their scholarship by racists. At this point, however, Byzantinists saw no need to enter public debate, even as members of the misogynist, racist “alt-right” increasingly turned to Byzantium (or their concept thereof) as a model for a patriarchal, Christian state.
In the following years, Adam Goldwyn and other Byzantinists consistently pointed out the importance of engaging in public debate beyond the confines of the academy, including on online platforms such as Reddit and Twitter. Thus, by the summer of 2020 it was no longer possible for Byzantinists to ride out the next reckoning. On 7 June 2020, the Byzantine Studies Association of North America (BSANA), of which one of us (Benjamin Anderson) was president at the time, published a statement via its listserv and website. It expressed solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and announced a small fund for Byzantinists of color as well as an initiative to decolonize Byzantine studies, spearheaded by the question “Is Byzantine Studies a colonialist discipline?”®
BSANA’s call led to a collaboration with the New Critical Approaches to Byzantine Studies Network, hosted at the Oxford Centre for Research in the Humanities, of which the other of us (Mirela lvanova) was a founding member. Our first joint venture was a webinar, Towards a Critical Historiography of Byzantine Studies, held on 13 August.’ The second is the volume before you.
Oswald Spengler writes that “a philosophical question is merely a thinly veiled desire to receive a particular answer that is already implied in the question itself.”* If this is true, then our question was not and is not philosophical. It is intended rather to initiate a conversation within and beyond Byzantine studies in the hopes that the answers would be unexpected. In our opinion, the present volume amply fulfills that hope.
Initial responses to our question ranged from curiosity and enthusiasm to ridicule and scorn.? Many sat in the middle: supportive of our broader aims, but skeptical of the relation between the practice of Byzantine studies and contemporary politics, in particular Black Lives Matter and the project of decolonization. And yet, at precisely the same moment, a second event, at first glance entirely distinct, triggered a public discourse in which Byzantinists felt compelled to engage, thereby demonstrating the thoroughly politicized nature of the existing discipline of Byzantine studies. These events are covered in detail in this volume by $ebnem Donbekci, Bahattin Bayram, and Zeynep Olgun; here we provide a brief outline.
On 29 May 2020, the Turkish government celebrated the anniversary of the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople (1453) both outside and inside Hagia Sophia.”° Built as a church in the sixth century, Hagia Sophia became a mosque after the conquest; since 1935, it had operated as a museum. The Greek foreign minister swiftly objected, specifically to “the reading of passages of the Quran inside Hagia Sophia.”” The protest elicited a response from Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who stressed the sovereignty of Turkey’s borders: “Greece is not the one administering this land, so it should avoid making such remarks. If Greece does not know its place, Turkey knows how to answer.””
Next, the Council of State (Danistay), Turkey’s highest administrative court, agreed to hear a suit to reopen Hagia Sophia to Muslim worship. Various national organizations of Byzantinists issued proleptic condemnations of the anticipated result, including the Greek Committee of Byzantine Studies (8 June), the Italian Committee of Byzantine Studies (23 June), the French Committee for Byzantine Studies (26 June), and the National Committee of Byzantine Studies of the Russian Federation (29 June).
The Danistay, undeterred, ruled in favor of the plaintiffs on 2 July; one week later, on 10 July, Erdogan transferred jurisdiction over Hagia Sophia from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism to the national Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet). Hagia Sophia was a mosque again.” This precipitated another round of letters. John Haldon, as president of the International Association of Byzantine Studies (Association Internationale des Etudes Byzantines—AIEB), wrote (13 July) that the decision “damages Turkish scholarship and research in both the humanities as well as the natural sciences in a way that is likely to have direct consequences for Turkish participation in international scientific enquiry for some years to come.” A few days later (18 July), the AIEB announced that the International Congress of Byzantine Studies, planned for 2021in Istanbul, would be postponed and moved, citing both the ongoing pandemic and “concerns associated with issues of heritage management.”
The conversion of Hagia Sophia into a mosque made evident that, despite earlier hesitations to connect our practice with political global citizenship in support of Black Lives Matter, Byzantine studies is, in fact, a political discipline. Our professional practice is inseparable from our geopolitical circumstances. When a historical monument of great significance to the discipline became a pawn of regional politics, Byzantine studies mobilized its national and international committees to intervene and to reprimand both the Turkish state and ultimately also our Turkish colleagues on the ground. A group of Turkish graduate students of Byzantine studies in Turkey wrote in response (20 July): “In an era of identity politics, it is all too easy to be stigmatized as ‘the enemy’ in our own field of study on account of presupposed affiliations. At a time when we need your support more than ever, we are left to feel ostracized.”"5
The historical conjuncture of (1) the global reassessment of the legacies of colonialism and (2) the controversy around Hagia Sophia requires that we ask what Byzantine studies and Byzantinists have stood for in the past and stand for today. As various as their answers may be, the contributors to this volume are united by their recognition of the value of this project and their desire to pursue it in a fashion both critical and generous.
We thank everyone who participated in the webinar (some forty colleagues in total) and those who responded to our question under separate cover. Sophie Moore and Alexandra Vukovich designed and implemented the three-part program of small-group discussions, a format that was inspired in turn by an earlier conference co-organized by Nicholas Matheou.” Roland Betancourt, series editor for Viewpoints, and Eleanor Goodman, executive editor at Penn State University Press, welcomed our proposal for a collaborative volume that would continue the conversations begun in the webinar.
In order to preserve the dynamic and multivocal character of that meeting, we solicited short contributions (“position pieces”) in response to one or both of the following questions: Is Byzantine studies a colonialist discipline? How can we write a more critical historiography of Byzantine studies? We furthermore asked authors to focus on one object, site, text, problem, subfield, or scholarly practice and to advance their arguments with minimal footnotes.
Our introduction to the volume, by contrast, attempts a synthetic account of the critical historiography of Byzantine studies. Rooted in the discussions held during the webinar, it has continued to evolve in dialogue with the position pieces and the two anonymous reviewers, to whom we are deeply grateful for their detailed comments on the draft manuscript. We presented sections of our draft introduction during a roundtable discussion (“Theorizing Byzantium and Byzantine Studies”) at the Twenty-Fourth International Congress of Byzantine Studies, Venice, on 23 August 2022 and shared a complete draft of the preface and introduction with the Research on Art & Visual Culture workshop at Cornell University on 6 October 2022. We thank all who joined and discussed.
Taken as a whole, accordingly, this book offers a multitude of views on Byzantine studies during a fascinating moment of self-reflection. It reveals, in brief, a field in motion.
We conclude with thanks to those who helped lend this volume its final form: to Sam Barber for assistance in preparing the final manuscript for submission, to managing editor Laura Reed-Morrisson for copyediting the manuscript, to Ayla Cevik for preparing the index (and the Department of History of Art and Visual Studies at Cornell University for funding her work), and to editorial assistant Maddie Caso and production coordinator Brian H. Beer for shepherding the volume into print.
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