Cambridge University is teaching students that the Anglo-Saxons never existed as a distinct ethnic group, in an effort to “dismantle the… myths” of English nationalism, the Telegraph reported on Saturday. Liberal academics have long decried the term for its association with “whiteness.”
Cambridge’s Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic (ASNC) will seek “to dismantle the basis of myths of nationalism – that there ever was a ‘British’, ‘English’, ‘Scottish’, ‘Welsh’ or ‘Irish’ people with a coherent and ancient ethnic identity – by showing students just how constructed and contingent these identities are and always have been,” the British newspaper reported, citing information from the university.
By denigrating the idea of a distinct Anglo-Saxon identity, the university said that it aims to make its teaching more “anti-racist.”
The controversy over the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ began in 2019, when Canadian academic Dr Mary Rambaran-Olm resigned from the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists over the “inherent whiteness” of the field. Rambaran-Olm, who is not white, went on to write that “the Anglo-Saxon myth perpetuates a false idea of what it means to be ‘native’ to Britain,” and that the term is “historically inaccurate.”
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This is such IdPol but it’s funny
Why is this IdPol?
What im seeing here is that a scholar is saying the Anglo Saxon identity is effectively a retroactive construction that serves a nationalist function.
This seems pretty intuitive to me. It’s hardly the first time history has shown us that ethnicity is a social, cultural construction just as race is.
A lot of nationalist narrative are a fairytale like this as well.