Carantes Announcement

We are Carantes (from Proto-Celtic *karants), and we want to invite you to help protect the field we all love from the global growth of Fascism and Far-Right movements. If that is all you need to hear, email us at caranteswg@proton.me and we will add you to our mailing list. But, if you want the full story, here it is. 

We are a group of young scholars who met at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies' Summer School in 2022, who, after the episode of the Association of Celtic Students' Podcast about Celtic Studies, Fascism, and the Far-Right, came together to form a reading group. As time went on, supervisors, senior scholars, fellow students, and others expressed interest in supporting us and getting involved. So, here we are today, with a shiny new logo from the wonderful ForFeda Project, to open our doors and invite you to join us as we learn to better ourselves and help safeguard Celtic Studies. 

If you have listened to the aforementioned episode of the Association of Celtic Students' Podcast, you will know a bit about the grim situation concerning the appropriation of the histories and traditions of Celtic peoples by White Supremacists and other Far-Right groups. Stormfront, the largest Neo-Nazi internet forum that has existed since the early 1990s, and has been associated with a number of violent crimes, uses a Celtic High Cross as its logo. High Crosses have been appropriated by White Supremacist movements outside the internet, and are listed in the Anti-Defamation League's database of hate symbols. They have appeared in flags at Far-Right rallies in France in the previous months. The 'Irish Slave Meme', used to dismiss and downplay the evils of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, proliferates itself across the internet where it is passed off as simple benign historic fact. Celtic Films, an American self-funded filmmaking group, reimagines the history of early Celtic peoples into a quagmire of antisemitic tropes, misogyny, racism, and White Supremacy by (mis)using recent scholarly publications from our field. Taking advantage of the public's  interest and the current death of easily accessible resources, several YouTube Channels run by Far-Right presenters spread misinformation under the guise of retelling medieval Irish and Welsh stories. This includes one who has gone so far as to falsify a translation of a part of the medieval Irish story Cath Maige Tuired ('[Second] Battle of Mag Tuired'). 

As a field, we also have some dark corners that must be closely examined. Possibly the most overt is our mysterious association with the journal Mankind Quarterly, a bastion of scientific racism, White Supremacy, and other malignant pseudo-sciences that support hate movements, such as phrenology, that has been rejected by scholars in other fields. However, as a field, we are fortunate. The obscure nature of our topic and general isolation, even from other parts of the academy, appears to have given us a degree of insulation. We have suffered glancing blows which have left infected wounds. While serious and demanding obesrvation, study, reflection, and excision, these are nothing compared to the deep-rooted rot that afflicts our companion fields of Medieval Studies, Norse Studies, and Early English Studies, and that our fellow scholars in those fields seek to remedy. 

With this in mind, as an organisation, Carantes seeks to help inoculate Celtic Studies. To teach people how to notice Dog Whistles. To examine the history of the field and learn from past mistakes. To provide an environment for scholars of any level to come together to read relevant scholarship and discuss these issues, while keeping in mind the busy schedules of students, ECRs, and senior faculty. 

If you sign up for our mailing list, we will send monthly suggested readings from a broad range of scholarly perspectives from varous fields, such as works by Mary Rambaran-Olm, Alan Tansman, and Stefan Quiroga. If you find reading groups to be helpful, we would encourage small groups to form in different institutions, but if you are an isolated Celticist, we would be happy to help facilitate setting up small online reading groups. Around each of the quarter days (Samhain, Imbolc, Beltaine, Lughnasa), we will hold an online event for everyone to come together and discuss what we have read in the past four months. Around Samhain, we will also host online lectures from invited speakers to cover specific topics. 

We have intentionally picked this dispersed structure and limited number of meetings to help avoid disrupting already busy schedules, and ensure that even younger scholars who are occupied with exams or writing these theses can participate. If you have the time and energy to commit to even more, you are welcome to, and can support you with that. But as we want to include as many people as possible from as many backgrouns as possible, making sure the organisation is open and accessible is our chief priority. 

If you are interested, even if you are only mildly curious, please email us at caranteswg@proton.me, and we can add you to our mailing list or answer any questions you may have. 

Please, come stand with friends and protect what we all love from the growth of malignant hate. 

- Emmet Taylor, Early and Medieval Irish, University College Cork.

- Fay Slakey, Comparative Literature, Princeton University.

- Carter Pruetz, Early and Medieval Irish, University College Cork.

- Gaëlle Clion, School of English, Irish, and Communication, University of Limerick. 

- Manon Metzger, Irish & Celtic Studies, Ulster University. 

- Sarah Vincent, Independent Scholar