Dear friends,

As the days heat up, we hope you’re keeping comfortable. It’s the end of term for academics, so hopefully things will wind down a little from now on. All of us in the Steering Committee have been intensely busy, and we hope this hasn’t negatively impacted anyone in the network. We’re so appreciative of every one of you who’s signed up to mailing list, on the discord (email us for an invite!), and everyone who’s attended public meetings. Not having enough time to do everything we want to do with Carantes has always been a thorn in our side, but it’s felt particularly prickly this term! Maybe this is the antifascist lesson we can draw from the past few months: it can’t be big things all the time, and for many of us the work has to happen on top of jobs, alongside taking care of ourselves and our loved ones. So let’s find the small places where antifascism fits, make them bigger if we can and if we can’t, do what we can. Below are a few options!

First of all, we would like to draw attention to a petition circulating to save the second floor of Cardiff University’s Arts and Social Studies Library. This floor houses the Salisbury collection, meaning all the Welsh and Celtic studies books, along with about 7km of books including subjects such as Philosophy, Ethics, Religion, Archeology, History, Music, Fine Arts, Language, and Literature. In the context of a global trend of de-funding the arts and the humanities, such a decision to remove this section is another step towards weakening and undermining our field and the humanities more broadly. If you want to learn more and/or sign the petition, you can find it here.

Also in Wales, a symposium is being held on May 29-30, at Aberystwyth University on Gender in Medieval Insular Literature. Attendance is possible both online and in-person, it’s free, and features some of our members as speakers! You can find the program and other information here.

Additionally, and also involving some of our members, a conference is being held in Caen (France) on 12 June entitled ‘Marginalities in the Insular Worlds of North-Western Europe (8th–13th c.)’. It will examine the treatment of various marginal communities in the medieval period, from mechanisms of exclusion to the treatment of disabled people. It is also a hybrid event! You can find the program and other information here. For the link, email organisers at sarah.vincent@unicaen.fr.

It is exciting to see events like these happening in Celtic studies, addressing topics that are close and dear to us here at CARANTES, and hopefully some of you will be able to attend!

Now, to go back to our regularly scheduled program, our Beltane Public Meeting took place on the 15th of this month. We discussed this article: Holzberg, Billy. “Fear: Great Replacement Ideologies as Paranoid Border Politics.” In Affective Bordering: Race, Deservingness and the Emotional Politics of Migration Control. Manchester University Press, 2024. For a presentation and brief summary of this piece, and the key concepts it covers, you can check out last month’s newsletter!

Keeping the summary of this meeting short and sweet, the impact of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory on policy making brought to mind many current examples, from the rhetoric used to justify ICE actions in the US, to recent anti-immigration discourse and policies in the UK and France. The inner workings of this conspiracy theory were also highlighted, as it includes many aspects that are staples of far-right rhetoric. On top of being overtly racist, anti-semitic and islamophobic, it also tends to connect with pro-natalist, anti-feminist and anti-LGBTQIA+ propaganda. Additionally, it contributes to the division of the working class and the maintenance of a status quo that favours the wealthy, white elite.

We also discussed the idea of ‘white innocence‘, which the article describes as such: “Wekker’s lens of white innocence highlights that white dominance is reproduced not simply through the construction of migrants and racialised minorities as threats but also by the fear that the mask of innocence might slip, so that the structural violence that European societies are built upon is shown and the affective fantasy of an innocent Heimat [i.e. homeland, a term with strong fascist connotations] and European way of life tainted.” (132) This plausible deniability that western nations use to profess innocence through feigned ignorance permeates much political decisions and discourse, often times preventing any real change or reparative measures from being adopted. The recent example of the UN vote regarding the recognition of the slave trade as being among the gravest crimes against humanity was brought up, as only three countries voted against the resolution (Argentina, Israel, and the United States), and 52 abstained. Among these abstentions, we find every single members of the European Union, as well as the UK. This list is telling, as many countries that benefitted from the transatlantic slave trade are both effectively rejecting a resolution that would begin to institutionalize a form of accountability towards affected regions, while trying to save face and dodge criticisms by not outright voting against it.
To underscore the importance of governments being accountable to their people for past wrongs, someone brought up the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, by which Japanese Americans received reparations for the internment camps of WW2. It was an imperfect process, but the attendee mentioned an article (possibly this one) that showed, with necessary nuance, that the impact of reparations can bring individual prosperity within the reach of people who have suffered socio-economic injustice, and much more. The checks, in many cases, were invested by their recipients into their communities, and could result in multi-generational opportunities. We ended with a wishful thought: what if our taxes, instead of funding various war efforts, went to the communities most impacted by the structures of power that we (a predominantly white group) benefit from everyday?

In the second half of the meeting, we began to workshop a document to encourage our various institutions to remove themselves from online platforms whose collusion with the United States government has become inescapably obvious. We have a shared document to work on this together, so if you’d like to participate with a few sentences or some proof-reading, send us an email and we will share the link with you.

Overall, this meeting once again reminded us that, although we might feel lost and scared in the face of the horrors that every day events have been flinging at us, real change and support is found through collective and direct action, like that undertaken by the Japanese American Citizens League and the delegates, led by Ghana, who brought the resolution to the UN. We can, and will, come together to push back against fascist actions and ideas, in whatever way we can.

As usual, do keep safe and keep in touch. Your friends at

Image credits:
– Henri Rivière, ”Le Trieux à Kermarie” (1912), public domain.
– logo by Forfeda