6 - Imperial Ambitions and the Ethics of Power: Gender, Race, and the Riddarasögur

Summary

My research on Arthuriana from the Global North Atlantic tends to focus on two interrelated axes. First, I pay careful attention to the dissemination of Arthurian texts throughout Europe, depicting the nonlinear circulation of the materials, and how they shape and are shaped by the political, historical, and commercial interconnections between Africa, Europe, and the Islamicate worlds. Second, I focus on the ideologies that circulated within these texts, finding that they tend to support Christian chivalric ideologies because ethically speaking, these texts are part of a system constructing a medieval European self by erasing European diversity, dehumanizing Muslims and other racial and religious groups, and normalizing these violent ideologies. In other words, these Arthurian texts function within an ethical framework of whiteness because the texts normalize certain forms of dehumanization; the texts normalize exclusionary violence based on race.

Nevertheless, the inclusion of this chapter in a volume on Arthurian ethics has less to do with the ethics inherent in the texts and more to do with my own ethics. Shokoofeh Rajabzadeh's work has helped me articulate my own ethical stance vis-à-vis my research. She writes:

Who I am shapes my canon. It determines what I read, why I read, how I read, and what I experience while reading. And yet, scholars’ fears of anachronism, their desires to protect objects of study yield criticism that welcomes me only as an academic, not as a Muslim. The depoliticized observational and analytical objectivity that we have learned to value as reliable, authoritative, and accurate in scholarly academic inquiries asks me to decenter my Muslim, Iranian heritage and to sideline my rage with the Islamophobia in the objects of study. But I cannot. I will not. As a result, I am left with the laborintensive process of making explicit for myself the Islamophobia and racism of the primary material that scholars have chosen to keep implicit in their scholarship.

Rajabzadeh points out that what we have learned to value as academics – what she calls a “depoliticized observational and analytical objectivity” that is supposedly “reliable, authoritative, and accurate scholarship” – is ultimately tied to whiteness because it is tied to exclusion.