[This post introduces another group of five posts, each of which is the script of a short, 10-minute video lecture that I prepared for my second-years last term. These are more of my 'short reads on late antiquity'. Please remember their original context as undergraduate lectures: they are all short and simplifying, possibly over-simplifying. That said, I hope they might be interesting, especially in the current situation where the idea that teaching the pre-modern world is somehow a less interesting alternative to teaching about race and sexuality and 'decolonising the curriculum' has been propounded by the management of the University of Leicester as a smokescreen for their cuts. What follows is the introduction to the five-lecture package that I put on the students' 'Virtual Learning Evironment'.]
One of the main purposes of
History is to challenge what we are told about how the world is, what is
'natural', what is 'the way things are', what is 'simply human nature'.
You can read my thoughts on this
issue here.
In this lecture I want first to
continue yesterday's theme by looking at a sub-category of ethnicity, which is
'race', to show that the racial categories of the modern world are neither
natural nor eternal. From there I am going to look at another set of
categorisations that we are frequently told are natural/unnatural: to do with
sex, gender and sexuality to make a similar point. We are often told that
there is a natural sexual order, or 'natural' categories, and that other
categories are socially constructed or, alternatively, even unnatural, or signs
of modern liberalism. I want to show that this is very far from being the
case. En route we will see again how 'unexpected' the world of late
antiquity, and the sixth century in particular can be.
Content Warning: The video
lectures for this lecture package might well contain ideas and discussions that
you could find uncomfortable. I am afraid that that is the way that history is.
Element A: The
difference between race and ethnicity. In this first element I want to talk
generally about how race is defined and how racial prejudice is different from,
say, ethnic prejudice or rivalry. Racism is a relationship of power, The
'science' that suports racial categorisation - whether in ancient or modern
contexts - is designed to support the system of categorisation; the categories
do not emerge from the science.
Element B: Race
in Antiquity. This video lecture moves on from the basis of the previous
one to look at how race and racism might have existed in the Roman world. It
makes the point that, even though race is not natural, its effects are felt as
being very real. How did Romans square their racial attitudes, which could be
absolutely murderous, with the fact that barbarians could rise high in Roman
society? I try and answer this with reference to Slavoj Žižek’s book The
Sublime Object of Ideology, which I have referred to before. Finally I ask
whether barbarians in the Empire experienced life as a racialised minority. The
Romans didn't assign great importance to physical, bodily (somatic) markers but
did Barbarians internalise the Romans' ideas about them? I can't answer this
but it is worth thinking about.
Element C: Late
Antiquity was not white. I use this video lecture to propose a solution to
a problem that has excited a lot of interest recently, ultimately about how one
stops the late antique and medieval past from being appropriated by white
supremacists by looking further into the issue of how Romans saw the world.
Returning to phenomenology I argue that Romans didn't see people in the same
way we do, so that the issue of modern categories of skin-colour didn't arise.
This permits a radical solution which I hope will stop people thinking that the
late antique past only belongs to particular people, according to what they
look like, and opens it to everybody.
Element D: Sex
and Society. In the second half of the Lecture Package I look at the ways
in which sex and sexuality were categorised in late antiquity. In this video
lecture, after a brief discussion of the schematic construction of masculinity
and femininity, I use Judith Butler's work to unpick the idea that 'gender' is
the social construction based upon a scintific or natural 'sex', to argue that
the reality is much more complex and that in practice sex is as social
constructed as gender (n.b. this does not mean that natural, biological
signifiers of male and female sex somehow don't exist; that's a common
misrepresentation of this argument). Finally I look briefly at some medieval
attitudes towards sexual practice.
Element E: Queer
late antiquity? This video lecture follows directly on from the previous
one by thinking about the relationships between sexuality and identity and at
how complex and diverse these were in late antiquity. It argues that late
antique people were much more tolerant of a wide range of sexual behaviours and
lifestyles, in a way that might surprise us. After a brief discussion of what
is known as 'Queer Theory' I talk through four examples from 6th-century Gaul
that illustrate how queer late antiquity could be.
