The Far Right's Byzantium | Watch the full talk

Presented by Roland Betancourt at Politics: A RaceB4Race Symposium in 2021

Roland Betancourt analyzes contemporary white supremacist invocations of Byzantium. The alt-right ideas of a New Byzantium share links with premodern narratives of defeat and reconquest, including Greek laments from the 15th century accenting the role of divine will in military affairs and prophesying the Christianization of Istanbul. Betancourt demonstrates that these genocidal prophecies are not only active in white supremacist circles today—with roots in Greek, Serbian, and Russian nationalist discourses—but have become interlinked with contemporary MAGA politics and dreams of Trump and Putin together within a conquered Istanbul. Key to these politics is the Hagia Sophia, which is imagined as a site of conquest: a reclaimed, reconsecrated church at the center of a re-Christianized Constantinople (Istanbul). Reviewing memes and postings from alt-right circles, Betancourt argues that “Byzantium” is part of a vocabulary of hatred and genocide. At the same time, he outlines the common condemnations of Byzantium on gendered, racial and religious grounds in medieval and early modern Anglophone discourses. What previously defined US imaginings of Byzantium may now play into white supremacist rhetoric, and medieval scholarship and contemporary politics are necessarily intertwined.