The Alt-Medieval: How White Supremacists Wrest the Premodern from the Past

Sévère, Richard; Sévère, Richard

This session confronts the phenomenon of white supremacists and alt-right extremists using the literatures and cultures of the premodern past to legitimize their ideologies. As white consciousness continues to fail as a means to navigate an ever globalizing and diversifying world, white extremists have adopted cultures and histories to portray themselves as victims while lashing out desperately in ways that have become a significant threat. This threat has only increased in recent years. White extremist rioters utilize medieval symbols on their websites, on their flags, and on their clothing, including at Charlottesville, VA, and elsewhere, when extremists gather to intimidate, and to advance their noxious, fantasied ideology of a past where Christian supremacy and whiteness reigned supreme.

Medieval symbology has appeared on the weapons and in the manifestos of white supremacist mass shooters: Anders Breivik in 2011, Brenton Tarrant in 2019, and Payton Gendron in 2022. Gendron cited both Breivik and Tarrant as influences for his terrorist attack in Buffalo, NY and placed the Black Sun symbol on the first page of his manifesto. Our panel explores the historical contexts and muddy intricacies behind white extremists’ use of medievalisms, confronts the (un)intentional complicity of academia in this phenomenon, and mines medieval texts themselves, which have potential for lighting the path to dismantling white nationalist narratives of the medieval era.

Roland Betancourt will discuss the role that medievalisms gathered from the history and cultures of the Byzantine Empire play within the white supremacist imaginary. Additionally, he will take the time to reflect on how Byzantium and "Byzantinisms" have been powerful for queer figures and queer BIPOC communities in pop culture and art. In short, he aims to reflect on how Byzantium is co-opted by the far right, but also how it presents powerful subversive possibilities in its own right.

Dorothy Kim will discuss the #ChristChurch white terrorist through a digital medieval analysis in order to show how the online events leading to his attack are an example of a larger pattern emerging from the alt-right: the weaponization of the medieval past has generalized and now all of the Middle Ages is up for grabs as a pressure point to attract alt-right attention. The white terrorist who murdered 51 Muslim men, women, and children in March 2019 released what Joan Donovan described as a “press kit” rather than a manifesto. He organized a media plan that included Facebook live video, “cut and paste” manifestos in several digital platforms, and images on Twitter. This media kit included the following medieval references: black sun, Valhalla, Charles Martel, Acre, Deus Vult, Bissonette, Knights Templar, etc. If the alt-right previously had very specific reasons to use certain medievalisms, this represents a shift. Now, invoking the medieval past has become a more generalized sign of the alt-right, and a successful way to activate other white supremacist terrorists globally.

Maggie Hawkins will explore the reasons for white nationalists’ niche interest in Anglo-Saxon peoples and Old English poetry. By first foregrounding isolated heroicism, displacement, and ironic nostalgia in the Old English poems The Wanderer and The Seafarer, Hawkins will examine how and why these poems are echoed in white nationalist texts and online forums. After identifying the psychosocial reverberations and resulting manipulations of the medieval, as well as postcolonial thought by white nationalists, Hawkins addresses how scholars of early English literature can teach these texts in a way that dismantles white extremist and nationalist identification.

Chaired by a Black American, Professor Richard Sévère, our panel consists of Professor Dorothy Kim, a Korean American scholar who is a favorite target of the academic right, Professor Roland Betancourt, a Latinx art historian and Byzantinist who works on queer and intersectional studies, and a graduate student, Maggie Hawkins, who is compiling a digital data repository of white supremacist documents at the University of Texas in Austin, a project supported by several academic units and ethnic studies communities on campus. Professors Sévère, Betancourt, and Kim are members of the Medievalists of Color, an academic and activist collective formed to combat racism in the academy and beyond. Our panel is multi-ethnic, multi-racial, and ranges in rank from graduate student to endowed professor. We represent the diversity necessary in today’s medieval studies to challenge the pernicious fantasies of white ideologues. While the topics we contend with are painful and oftentimes enraging, we mean to confront and challenge them with a celebration of our diversity.

414 The Alt-Medieval: How White Supremacists Wrest the Premodern from the Past: Calls for Papers