It is difficult to decide if the week of 9/11/01 is the best or the worst time to review the Postcolonial Middle Ages, a collection of thoughtful, provocative essays on the relationships between nations, ethnicities, genders, and religions in medieval literature, culture, and history. The volume intends to "decenter Europe" (7) and to look at relationships of power more acutely than we have ever been able to by re-casting the medieval landscape as 'postcolonial'. This dramatically highlights power relationships between peoples by applying the doctrines and insights of, among others, Said and Bhabha, to moments in time that are parallel to colonial moments and that often themselves figure metaphorically in the actual discourses of Colonialism. That is, some essays make imaginative comparisons between historical eras and some explore how Colonial discourse itself often used things medieval as its models.
Concerning the first type of project, the danger, of course, of calling the Middle Ages and in fact calling anything pre- colonial 'postcolonial', is that if everything is postcolonial, then nothing is, and the specific events and histories of Colonialism are lost. The peoples and nations of the Middle Ages and their representations demand and receive complex study in this collection, but I am not sure if this is because of or in spite of Postcolonial theory. I know that the book's many references to Bhabha are obligatory; I myself cite him in an essay on Marco Polo ( Exemplaria 9.1) in references that are no doubt as predictable as those I criticize here, but I believe that our work with such theory is teaching us that our period is only impressionistically 'postcolonial'. But this should not diminish the force of these essays as experiments, and as I see them as experiments, that pose a series of provocative questions about the culture of the Middle Ages. I believe this is what Jeffrey Jerome Cohen had in mind here, for his work is always innovative, whether with monsters or with masculinities, and is, in fact, always brave. He never speaks ex-cathedra but always challenges us to see beyond traditional categories of thought. This experiment is a good one, producing essays that taught me about so many texts and authors and events in medieval cultural history that I had never experienced before. Perhaps the 'theory' here was the catalyst without which we could not have had the scholarship?
To return to the issue of 9/11/01, the reader of this volume will have to experience things 'eerily reminiscent' of events in the news: Muslims, devils, cowardice, Jews, even an essay about news reports on the Taliban. This brings up a major question that has implications for the whole of our profession: what, if any, relation does our work as medievalists have to do with the complex problems of understanding and responding to the violence and terrorism experienced on 9/11/01? Each reader will phrase this question differently, and I have done so poorly, I know. One of the premises of cultural studies is that some good comes out of our inquiry, that knowing the history of race and nation is important when races, religions, and nations clash, or appear to clash, or demonize each other, or get confused about who and what to demonize. President Bush went to a mosque and spoke about Islam this week; he also called for a "crusade" against terrorism, while Osama Bin Laden, in a letter today (9/24/01) has embraced the Holy War against Islam led by the Jews and "Crusader Bush" under the "cross of the flag", vowing to target "Americans and Jews". That is, the "medieval" paradigm, broadly stroked, may mean more to Bin Laden than to Bush, and Bin Laden's politics do not transcend those of the Song of Roland. Furthermore, calling America Satan displays no greater refinement of thought than did Richard the Lionhearted (see Heng) who, upon seeing the charred head of his Saracen dinner, asks who the "devil" is. In other words, so much 'overcoding' is going on that medievalists ought to be able to contribute to public discourse about the history that produced our modern world, particularly at a time when 'medieval' conflicts arise today.
This book could not have anticipated such questions, or maybe the point is that it did. Perhaps the best thing to say about the volume is that it shows medievalists inquiring into such questions of moment or at least exploring histories, poems, and all sorts of detailed archives in multiple languages to try to understand the history of nation, race, and power in our period. Thus we find no answer here to our conflict, but we see that our ongoing work as teachers and scholars cannot but involve considerations of these questions. Who could teach the Man of Law's Tale now without students asking, imperfectly, "so is that why Islam hates us?" Won't the politics of the Song of Roland almost look like grounds for Islamic justice? What is important here is that we have the knowledge to combat such perilous reductionism from both East and West and from both then and now.
Most of the essays are compact, short, to the point, and richly noted and detailed. They sometimes relate to one another but do not build a master narrative. Reading the book is enjoyable because the essays are vignettes, allowing the reader to take in and ponder the argument. Some essays offer bold provocative theses, such as Bower's contention that the Canterbury Tales' unfinished state reflects the unfinished state of English nation building. Others offer exposition, content to bring obscure or unread texts to light in the hopes that the information will provoke further thought and study.
Cohen's introduction surveys the volume's contents and is one of the most richly theoretical texts in the book, opening with a discussion of "multiple, hybridized temporalities" as observed today in Washington, DC's Malcolm X Park. It goes on to explore postcolonial theory as opening a window, in Michelle R. Warren's phrase, "'into any time or place where one social group dominates another'". (3) A survey of the book's premises includes "insisting on cultural, historical, even textual specificity", rethinking history as "effective history", and "displacing the domination of Christianity". (7) Cohen notes that the field we here approach is vast and the effort at hand "amounts to no more than some few steps along a long road being built by many hands". (8)
In "From Due East to True North: Orientalism and Orientation", Suzanne Conklin Akbari develops and adjusts Said's work by exploring the fascinating transition from "maps oriented toward the East to those oriented toward the North", thus arguing that the "'West', as we know it, appears to be an invention of the fourteenth century". (31) She studies too the geographical and racial divisions with respect to weather and heat, citing for example Bartholomaeus Anglicus (via Trevisa) on why the hot dark men of Africa are "cowards". (Such a discussion is highlighted by the recent debate among medievalists on MEDTEXT- L concerning George Bush's characterization of 9/11/01's attacks as "cowardly".)
In "Coming out of Exile: Dante on the Orient Express", Kathleen Biddick confronts Orientalism for Said's failure to "critique...temporal practices" (36) by which I believe she means his "tell[ing] the history of Orientalism according to the highly conventionalized chronologies of an Enlightenment history of progress...[thus] produc[ing] the Middle Ages as a medievalism, that is, a fantastic origin that sets in motion a progressive history". (36) Biddick's solution to the problem of how medievalists can "intervene in the politics of temporality" (40) is enacted in her analysis of Orham Pamuk's novel the New Life, referencing Dante's great work. Biddick promises that Pamuk's novel and Dante's work "form a double lens that renders visible an invisible history of technology and temporality relevant to medieval studies and the critique of Orientalism" (41), but what follows reveals only superficial and strained connections between the two and thus no credible solution to the problems of temporality in Orientalism that Biddick labors to establish. The novel, as generally referenced, unlocks nothing medieval for us, and the use of the term technology, so prominent in Biddick's work, continues to elude me beyond its evocation of some spectral horror associated with any industry or mechanization. However, in the midst of these strained and tenuous arguments, Biddick does offer some insightful readings of Dante's text and of medieval iconographic history; here technology clearly refers to the method of producing religious images in the thirteenth century. Despite the tone of high theory here, the best part of the essay is its close study of the language and imagery of Dante's work.
In "Chaucer after Smithfield: from Postcolonial Writer to Imperialist Author", John M. Bowers traces how vernacular works like the Canterbury Tales were "quickly appropriated to the expansionist agenda of the new Lancastrian regime during the first decades of the fifteenth century" (53 epigram). Bowers, whose use of postcolonial language is more aggressive than one is accustomed to hear in relation to Chaucer, describes the father of English's problem thus: "as a decolonizer of Anglo-Norman culture. . . . Chaucer faced the quandary of so many postcolonial intellectuals. How was he to represent the distinctiveness of his native society without being fatally compromised as a bilingual reader whose primary literary authorities belonged to the indigenous tradition" (55). The Canterbury Tales thus exemplify "Chaucer's English Nationalism. . . . in a crowded pageant of uniquely crafted personalities" (56). Vernacular works such as the CT "would become essential for the cultural construction of nationhood as a form of social and textual affiliation" (59). The relations of the CT to colonization are then explored, as Bowers notes chillingly that "the road to Canterbury, it should be remembered, was also the road to France" (63). These are, no doubt, fightin' words which, if true, will completely reshape our apprehension of the CT, demanding that we teach it as a colonial text and its author as an "agent for this form of Lancastrian cultural imperialism" (63).
In "Cilcian Armenian Metissage and Hetoum's La Fleur des Histoires de la Terre d'Orient", Glenn Burger explores a travel narrative, essentially a book mapping the world, that is little known today but was very popular throughout the Middle Ages and after in manuscripts and in print. Burger explores the complex functions of this Armenian history as its author manipulates the powers of East and West, of Western Christian, Eastern Muslim, and Mongol as he pursues his own political desires. Hetoum thus acts as a "go-between" (77), and even in his support of crusade he "harnesses a European crusade ideology to 'Eastern' tactical needs, focusing on the means by which significant external resources can be harnessed for the defense and security of the Cypriot and Armenian kingdoms". (78) Burger compares how crusade and travel accounts map the world "conceptually" while Hetoum maps it "strategically". (78) The essay is deeply informative, convincing and carries no overt political burden.
In "Hybrids, Monster, Borderlands: the Bodies of Gerald of Wales", Jeffrey Cohen explores from a colonial perspective English-Welsh relations and representations in Gerald's Itinerarium Kambriae, "a fascinating composite of travel narrative, imperialist cartography, and localized history". (89) Cohen wants to link Bhabha's notion of "hybridity" to the depiction of the Welsh and also to the Welsh strategies for resisting Anglo-Norman efforts to "annex those territories that dared to stand so invitingly at their borders". (86) Cohen discusses some monstrous oddities in the text, such as the wild grass-eating Welshman, the knight who gave birth to a cow, and a priest's concubine whose buttocks get stuck to the tomb of St. Osana. In many of these episodes, "Gerald's narrative disciplines these bodies by hybridizing them with a material fragment of the ecclesiastical institution whose regulatory power over themselves they now must recognize". (91) A certain hybridity of identity is found in the author himself: "Multiple, conflicting possibilities course through Gerald's mixed blood: Cambro-Norman citizen of the Welsh March; Welshman; royal servant of the Angevin empire; ecclesiastic with allegiances to England, Wales, Rome, and--through his activity in support of the Third Crusade--Jerusalem. As a result, anxieties over his constitutive incongruences circulate throughout Gerald's voluminous writings." (93) These observations could just as well have been made without reference to Bhabha, and even by chapter five in this volume the reader tires of such phrases as "Homi Bhabha has called" and "in Homi Bhabha's formulation". But if Bhabha's insight pricked Cohen here to look at English-Welsh relations as never before seen, then Cohen has made his point: postcolonial theory gives us a vocabulary and a framework in which to examine nations and power in the medieval period itself.
More problematic are the connections of these issues in Wales to Chicano/a studies and the work of the "lesbian feminist" Gloria Anzaldua. (96) Cohen links Anzaldua's depiction of the borderlands and the "new mestiza", ("part human, part serpent...a body that spectacularly displays its constitutive histories of difference, colonialism and violent struggle without pretending they can be synthesized" [96]), to his medieval subject, arguing that this cultural mestiza's "queer composite of races, religions, temporalities and species" is "just like Wales". (96) The danger of this comparison is that both cultural moments become mere allegories of one another, and the essay is thus a poetic through experiment and not a critical argument. In other words, what do we do with this medieval-modern link? Whom does it enlighten and about what? Such theories, if they are to be more than ingenious, must find a home in the classroom, and I cannot evaluate its worth until I experiment with the ides in my medieval classes here in Los Angeles, where our population is 40% Latino/a. Will this bring Chicano/s into medieval studies; will it demystify the otherness of our period; will it illuminate the position of Chicanos in the borderlands; or will it just dilute the historical specificity of each moment? Again, if everything is postcolonial, then nothing is. Cohen, here and throughout the volume, makes no promises, but he boldly provokes and challenges us to consider these questions, not just "recovering neglected pasts" but "also opening up a possible future". (98)
Kathleen Davis's "Time behind the Veil: the Media, the Middle Ages, and Orientalism Now" is the essay most 'eerily reminiscent' of what is on television twenty four hours a day this week. Davis discussed how the media's reports on the oppression of women in Afghanistan signify the "moral and cultural superiority of the U.S. and its global allies over 'backward' Islamic societies". (106) Davis could not have known that last night (9/20/01) George Bush would refer again to the oppression of Afghani women as evidence of the extremism of our enemies in the war on terrorism, continuing the kinds of significations that Davis locates. Davis' point is that calling such cultures "medieval" as in Diane's Sawyer's comment that the Taliban has "'returned women to the Middle Ages'", perpetuates the stereotypes of "medieval/ modern, depraved/righteous, and stagnant/progressive" creating a temporal narrative of progress that (I assume) would justify the violent treatment of the "medieval" people. (106) Davis is particularly interested in how "women bear the burden of representation for the collectivity's identity", all displaying the "increasingly violent imposition of signification upon women in supranational cultural confrontations" in the aftermath of colonialism. (106) Is Davis' thesis at all undermined by Bush's reference last night to how men in Afghanistan can be jailed if their beards are not long enough? Does this take the pressure off woman as a cultural signifier? Is all this really a "feminist" issue, per se? Also, if one is to approach the complex orientalism involved in U.S.-Afghan relations, one must note that the U.S. is the single strongest humanitarian agent in Afghanistan, feeding the poor and keeping them alive (Davis fails to mention this, but in fairness to her I am not sure if it was true or known at the time of her essay's composition).
Davis advises "deconstructing the temporalities of today's Orientalism" if medievalists are going to "intervene in the discursive traditions of past and present". (107) She then goes on to read the Man of Law's Tale (whose antifeminism she accepts as a given [see 115-116]) and to adjust slightly Susan Schibanoff's study of the tale by arguing that "its Orientalist discourse works through, rather than in addition to, its discourse on women". (116) By putting Chaucer, Diane Sawyer, and Said together, Davis hopes, paraphrasing Benjamin, that medievalists can in this way "blast open the 'times' of history" and, one hopes, "blast away its genders too". (118) It is amazing that the history Davis studies is unfolding, literally minute by minute as I write. This testifies to the timeliness of the article, and what remains unclear is how exactly medievalists will "intervene" in the new conflict and exactly how a sensitivity to the media's (and Chaucer's) depiction of women in particular will figure into our continued intervention.
John Ganim's "Native Studies: Orientalism and Medievalism" traces a tangible history of the uses of the medieval, as image, metaphor, model, and fair exhibit in actual colonial discourse. Thus no great leaps over time have to be made here by the modern reader; rather, Ganim studies those who themselves made such leaps between the medieval and modern in their own times. He traces how, for example, the Victorian legal scholar Henry Maine "attempted to justify the British modernization of India by claiming it was an inevitable indigenous development, and he did so, remarkably enough, by analogy to the Middle Ages" via the model of "Roman law on Germanic villages". Thus "where the English were in the Middle Ages, so was India in the mid-nineteenth century". (127) Ganim then moves on to a study of nineteenth and twentieth-century "international exhibitions" that display his thesis about medievalism's role in colonial discourse. Ganim is deeply read in history and anthropology, and thus can trace "the anthropological status of the Middle Ages from its earliest formulations as a category of knowledge", revealing how "the Middle Ages repeatedly has been represented as both domestic and foreign, as both historical origin and historical rupture, as both native and "'native'".(131)
Geraldine Heng's "The Romance of England: Richard Coer de Lyon, Saracens, Jews, and the Politics of Race and Nation", perhaps because it is excerpted from a chapter of a book in progress, is the longest in the collection--twice as long as most--and thus a bit out of rhythm with the volume as a whole. Heng studies the racial politics of the Middle English poem about a Crusading king and unwraps its pernicious racial politics with particular reference to the famous two scenes of Richard eating Saracen flesh, then feeding other young Saracens to their older kin who came as ambassadors, displaying in this repeat of the joke (which she glosses via Freud) the "intimidatory power of Christian military-gustatory aggression". (140) The trouble is that such episodes do not need too much unpacking, and to locate vile racial politics here demands no great feat of theory or textual insight. Heng's piece, though aggressively composed and rich with textual and historical detail, suffers from its over-determined politics and reads like one long indictment of the West and its scheme of nation building founded upon hatred. Surely it is a problem to let one poem stand as a culture's entire identity and being, but Heng tries to contextualize this poem as an almost national Romance by exploring the ecclesiastical and legal history surrounding its composition and reception. But the politics here are no less unsubtle; the friars being reduced to "an essential component of enforcement and ideological reproduction" for example. (138) She elsewhere complains of the "panopticonic institution" of the Inquisition and "the panopticonic gaze", and the history she traces is all one long Foucauldian nightmare. (138) Particularly troubling is Heng's leap from treatment of the Muslim in RCL to treatment of the Jews at large in English society; based on one passage about Muslims poisoning the wells, she concludes that the Muslims are therefore "virtual Jews" (143), since that accusation was leveled elsewhere at the Jews. Her conflation of Muslims and Jews continues with a series of unlikely parallels, including the comment that the markings on the heads of the roasted Saracens "seem queerly to reproduce the Jewish badges of shame that also proclaimed identity and filiation". (148) So too she says that one English Jew's movement from Judaism to Judaism with a brief conversion to Christianity "thus queerly mimes" the conversion from, and then back to, Christianity experienced by the renegade at Orgulous in the poem. (148) These connections are all tenuous and heap all medieval racial relations together. Further, Heng has a tendency to speak ex-cathedra on matters of race and nation, and her points resemble pronouncements: "the manipulation of domestic minorities is a formative moment in the self construction of national majorities". (149) Does she mean this for all nations for all times?
The essay uses more broad jargon than most of the others in the collection, often creating stilted and garbled passages; the shaping of nations by cartographers is a "profoundly performative moment, a moment that enacts and points to the performativity of nationalist discourse". (151) Is a nation only the performance of its racism? Are Friars only soldiers of disciplinary ideology? Everything in Heng's field of vision becomes an allegorical fixture in a Foucauldian universe of power and control. No one would defend cannibalism or the racist doctrines inherent in the scene in RCL, so critically Heng fights a straw man, while she writes as if she has found the master text that decodes the entire history of Christian-Muslim-Jewish relations in the thirteenth century. Lest she be perceived to leave out class issues, she continues the essay with an indictment of the English kings for failing to distribute wealth equally to all classes as promised.
Thus just as Bowers sees the CT as a colonialist text, Heng sees Romance, here embodied in RCL "with its many experiments in service to the discourse of the nation" as "a genre of the nation: a genre about the nation, and for the nation's important fictions". (160) This comes close to seeing Romance as a state-sponsored literature, and I would wonder if a detailed textual and reception history of RCL can support this conspiratorial reading. What Heng says about the textual history of RCL and the habits of a reading public could be said of scores of other medieval poems, even Piers Plowman (though Wynkyn de Worde did not print Piers in 1481), and Heng is right to concede that "the limitations of documentary evidence mean that arguments on the audience of Middle English romances remain necessarily circumstantial". (159) All in all, Heng finds under Richard's table the sermons she herself has placed there.
In "Marking Time: Branwen, Daughter of Llyr and the Colonial Refrain", Patricia Clare Ingham studies Mathew Arnold's fascinating work, "The Study of Celtic Literature", which was instrumental in establishing the chair of Celtic Studies at Oxford. She very informatively explores its double purpose "to disable late-Victorian racism" but also to render "illegitimate the passionate efforts of Welsh linguistic resistance". (177) Arnold argues for a study of Welsh literature but also argues that "the sooner the Welsh language disappears as an instrument of the practical, political, and social life of Wales, the better" (quoted 176). Ingham then explores one of the branches of the Mabinogi itself, the tale of the Welsh Branwen who marries the Irish king Matholwch, resulting in the "almost total annihilation of one people and the near destruction of the other". (179) In its depiction of loss and trauma, the tale depicts the past differently from the way Arnold does, showing that "loss results from a specific set of geopolitical and historical actions rather than from the irresistible, disembodied passage of time". (178) Ingham sets the text, its manuscript, and its themes in the complex world of English- Welsh-Irish relations of the fourteenth century, and her close reading of the personal and political relationships in the text focuses on issues of orality, cultural preservation, scribal technology, and loss. Arnold's view of the Celtic past "obscures this particular traumatic history". (185) Ingham hopes, rather idealistically, that such studies as hers will resonate in the modern world, wondering if we might "recover Branwen's story" "in the hope of a more compassionate postcolonial future". (186)
Steven F. Kruger's "Fetishism, 1927, 1614, 1661" is much less an argument than a romp through some histories of the term "fetish", including its etymological history in relation to its colonial uses. Kruger advertises his essay as "admittedly oblique" (193) and delivers on his promise, ranging through Freud, Foucault, medieval drama, the slave trade and Marxism, all in nine pages. Kruger also lapses into an infuriatingly broad premise: "the medieval history of Western-European religious controversy might productively be read via the fetish: debates within Christianity, and among Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, consistently focus on questions of presence and absence, and they consistently contain avowals of plentitude that are simultaneously disavowals of a feared emptiness". (200) But, such as it is, the premise remains unproved and even unexplored in this, the most impressionistic, unsatisfying, and, indeed, "oblique" essay in the collection.
Kellie Robertson's "Common Language and Common Profit" explores the history of defense of the vernacular production of the Bible, looking closely at late fourteenth-century defenses of translation and their relation to the notions, both social and mercantile, of "common profit", i.e., the social good, a "translation of bonum commune, itself an extension of the classical concept of res publica". (212) This topic is compelling, unlocking a drama about language, authority, economy, scripture and the complexity of "common profit" in the late fourteenth century, with references to Wycliffite writings, Langland, and Chaucer. Robertson's conclusions about the relationship between economic and social history, between book and coin and the commune are provisional but provocative and absolutely important.
The essay falters only when it attempts to read this drama as if it were an allegory of Bhabha's notion of "hybridization" (see 216ff.). This speaks to the problem inherent in the book as a whole: why dilute one's discussion of these important medieval issues and histories by aligning them with anachronistic terms from another discipline? The thesis of such writing becomes proving that the medieval 'texts' at hand display the postcolonial critic's theory, throwing the focus away from proving one's thesis about the texts themselves. The premise is that doing so opens our eyes to things we did not see before. But Robertson's (and many others' in this volume) scholarship itself does this, and I found myself fighting through the volume's tenth, tedious homage to Bhabha and the cultural theories of Talal Asad and Tejaswini Niranjana, for I just don't see how their work "provided a framework for explaining why justifications of English at the end of the fourteenth century were primarily associated with dissenting social positions". (211) I was anxious to return to the generous quotations from Middle English and the complex postulate that "idiomatic translation [of Scripture], like mercantile trade, threatened a worldview that saw value as inherent in both words and objects". (219) If one strips away the postcolonial allegory, one has much medieval matter here to ponder.
In "Alien Nation", despite some otiose references to Foucault, Claire Sponsler writes a short, sonnet of an essay exploring how Lydgate's two mummings of 1429, in their depiction of foreign travelers coming to England "fantasized a new metropolis, in which aliens joined natives in endorsing existing structures of rule for the profit of all". As such "Lydgate's mummings stand as early instances of the kind of wishful thinking that would continue to haunt narratives of invasion and displacement for many years to come". (240) In the process, Sponsler teaches us much about the status of aliens in relation to membership in medieval guilds and charts the potential reaction of various social groups who would have attended the performances. Further, the "festive occasion worked to contain that threat [of economic invasion] and diffuse the latent danger of welcoming aliens fully into the corporate body". (248)
Sylvia Tomasch's clear and bracing essay, "Postcolonial Chaucer and the Virtual Jew", I have already worked with and cited in my own writing (see "Performing the Prioress" in Texas Studies in Language and Literature 44:1 ed. Liz Scala, forthcoming). Tomasch argues persuasively that even (or rather particularly ) after the expulsion of Jews from England, the Jew "was central not only to medieval English Christian devotion but to the construction of Englishness itself" (244); and later: "[f]or the sake of security, Jews had to be removed; for the sake of self-definition, the 'Jew' had to remain". (245) This figure Tomasch calls the "virtual Jew" and she uses both the visual arts and poetry to trace its depiction, drawing very helpfully from other texts of Chaucer's than the Prioress Tale, including the Monk's and the Parson's tales. The essay defends the application of postcolonial vocabulary to the English Jews via McClintock's distinction between "colonization" and "internal colonization". (250) But whether we have such a label or not, the reality of the virtual Jew is well established in Tomasch's fine essay. (In the spirit of Said, it is difficult not to think of the modern status of the Palestinians in relation to these issues).
In "Imperial Fetishism: Prester John Among the Natives", Michael Uebel, one of the foremost scholars and the translator of the "Letter of Prester John", here characterizes that letter as "a vast list, a superabundance of things available for the asking" (262), making the letter "a rather special document, one that spatializes its facta into a containing coherence and temporalizes them as part of a dynamic process wherein devolution to disorder is inescapable and. . . . potentially transformative". (263) The letter thus functions "as both thesauros (treasury, treasure trove) conserving a rich knowledge about the East, and montage consistently attracted to the paratactic, the fragmentary, the unfinished". (263) Uebel's richly theorized language and breadth of reference make the essay a meditation on fantasy, otherness, and wealth. Throughout the essay Uebel is thus able to show that "Prester John functioned as the fetish par excellence of medieval and early modern European imperialism". (272) The second half of the essay traces the Prester John legend through the reappearance of the letter in 1530 to the pope and emperor, igniting the "dream of Christianity without boundaries" (270), to its influence on Columbus, and, finally, to its manifestation in John Buchan's "colonialist novel of revolutionary South Africa" [1910], Prester John", which features an "anticolonial reincarnation" of the mythical king. (276) (It is particularly interesting to read about Prester John this week, as many nations of the East have written letters of sorts to president Bush, offering their own lists, not of magic gems, but of airspace, logistics, intelligence-- all in a modern and real life re-incarnation of the mythical ally who aids the Western power in its battles with the East; now however, so many of these letters come from Muslim nations.)
As the reader will see, this reviewer has not been able or willing to disassociate the events of 9/11/01 from Cohen's book, and I do not see how any proponent of postcolonial studies could separate them. The point of the volume is that such histories are not discrete. It will no doubt be an ongoing project for medievalists to confront and negotiate these issues of nationhood, race, violence, wealth, and power, and I believe that The Postcolonial Middle Ages will continue to be a provocative starting point in these profoundly dramatic and difficult times. Reading it with and through 9/11 was a bracing, awakening, and dynamic experience for me, as it will be for all medievalists.