Chapter 10 - Anglo-Saxons on Exhibit: Displaying the Sacred

Summary

THIS ESSAY represents reflections on what the conceptual field of ‘Anglo- Saxon’ looks like through different eyes, specifically views from Oceania. It is based in part on observing my University of Hawai‘i undergraduates in the fall of 2018 interact with the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms exhibit at the British Library and react to their visits to early medieval sites and museums, in comparison to their reactions to exhibitions of Oceania and other, primarily Asian, cultures more familiar to them from the Pacific. The aim of such a study is to re-imagine early medieval histories with an eye to how they might speak back into the present moment, that is, help us rethink ourselves as scholars and teachers who live in contested spaces. In particular, this study draws on Indigenous studies to argue that modern western secularism has devalued and marginalized the ‘sacred’ both in colonized spaces and in colonizing its own medieval past.

Despite the differences between Oceania and England, comparing these two frameworks allows us to question both the integrity of the ‘Anglo- Saxon’ narrative and the fragmentation of other people's narratives of themselves. Both stories bear the marks of nineteenth-century philological assumptions of ethnicity. Therefore, the decolonizing operations of deconstructing the story told of English origins and the restoration of Pan- Oceanic narratives are inter-dependent. Colonialism is not something that happened in the past and is therefore unchangeable. It is an evolving set of relationships between peoples with entangled histories necessitating an ongoing conversation about people and places, artefacts and stories.

Historiography and Methodology

As a historian I serve as a mediator between the living and the dead, listening to the voices of the past and retelling their stories. My main obligation is to primary sources from the past, that is, to the voices of people who lived before. G. K. Chesterton calls this ‘the democracy of the dead’, the voices of ancestors western modernity is increasingly deaf to. Consequently, I am committed to the idea of historical empathy with regards to voices from the past, particularly those less heard or suppressed. But listening to the past also entails an obligation to speak into the present, to the living.