Three Things Thursday: Babylon, Late Antiquity, and NDQ

As the semester staggers and heaves toward its conclusion, I’m caught in the typical bind between trying to wrap up lingering projects and looking ahead with no little excitement toward future ones. 

Here are three things that reflected my mood and captured my interest this week. 

Thing the First

I’m getting more and more invested in my crazy Bakken-Babylon paper. Yesterday I posted another fragment of it and it follows on fragments posted over the last two weeks. Without getting to much into the nitty-gritty (and I’m not sure there is any nitty or gritty there yet, but maybe), the paper explores the possibility that North Dakota’s Bakken oil patch is Babylon. This means, attempting to understand Babylon, which is no mean task.

Here’s another fragment:

There is only one explicit reference to Babylon in the Bakken: Williston is called the Babylon of the Bakken in Gary Sernovitz’s book the “shale revolution.” The connection between Babylon and the Bakken evokes a larger discourse of Babylon that is global in scope. The coincidence between the excavations at Babylon and elsewhere in the Near East and the emergence of industrial capitalism in the late 18th century produced what Nick Mirzoeff has called “Babylonian Modernity.” For Mirzoeff, Babylonian Modernity represents the decadence, alienation, and complexity that exists at the heart of the modern experience. As early as the 19th century Babylon became a metaphor for rapidly expanding, industrial, urban metropolises such as London or New York City. It also stood in Black Christianity and Caribbean Rastafarianism as the place of exile and separation from Zion. The intense feeling of displacement, elite, and alienation of Black communities in the Americas supported the development of the modern, globalized economy. Thus, Babylon became the forces of colonialism, capitalism, and the state which sought to preserve economic and racial inequality in the name of political stability. Thus, Babylon could represent, on the one hand, the oppressive forces of the state and capital which sought to control the labor of displaced Afro-Caribbean and Black workers and the unfettered and dystopian results of unfettered moderity on the other. Critics like Mirzoeff and Runions who have traced the significance of Babylon in contemporary political discourse, however, recognize that despite Babylon’s modern guise, it is not entirely free from its ancient past. The First and Second Gulf Wars and US occupation of Iraq brought the literal site Babylon to our living rooms with stories of the looting of antiquities set against regular reports of human violence and skyrocketing price of oil.

Thing the Second

I got word yesterday that I’ll likely be teaching a class on Late Antiquity next spring. I immediately started to think a bit about how I would organize it. I could envision three, four-week modules that cover Roman Empire in Crisis (say: Introduction to the Roman Empire, Christianity, the Third Century, and Diocletian), Late Antiquity (Christian Triumph, Constantine and Company, Cities and Change, and Persistent Paganism), and the Long Late Antiquity (Justinian, The Economy, Demographic Changes, Heraclius, the End of the Ancient World?). Each module would include a lecture and a discussion focused on a primary (or maybe secondary?) source.

I would love to assign a few books. Maybe Christina Sessa’s Daily Life in Late Antiquity (2018), or John Haldon’s The Empire that Would Not Die (2016) and Giusto Traina, 428 AD (2009) (and here I’m already cribbing from my friend David Pettegrew’s class!). The list of primary sources is potentially nearly endless, but I would certainly prefer to include a very wide range of translated sources: from inscriptions to hagiography, history, theology, and maybe even papyrus! I would also love to have a couple weeks where we look at material culture from ceramics to stratigraphy, survey data, architecture, and urban plans. 

Finally, I would also really want the class to consider the politics of periodization and how it informs and is informed by Orientalism, racism, and various other forms of colonialism even to this day. I’d also want to talk about how the “Fall of Rome” continues to hang over contemporary political discussions. 

Thing the Third

One of the projects lingering about this semester is the next issue of North Dakota Quarterly! Page proofs are out with authors and just waiting for me to process tomorrow. And this means that we have a cover!

This cover has a great story associated with it. Click over to the NDQ blog for that story.