The Afterlives of Crisis: Harold and Custer on The Slipstream

Abstract

ABSTRACT My contribution to this cluster seeks to situate and understand the Vita Haroldi through slipstream — a genre of Indigenous Sci-Fi writing that enacts temporal sovereignty in the past, present, and future. The Vita Haroldi (BL Harley MS 3776), a story about King Harold II’s life living in the Welsh borderlands after the Battle of Hastings, can be understood as an alternate temporality constructed as a response to a crisis. Specifically, this essay will read Vita Haroldi alongside Gerald Vizenor’s short story “Custer on the Slipstream” which details the resurrections of General George Armstrong Custer, the infamous US soldier who graduated bottom of his class at West Point in 1861 and was killed by the Oceti Sakowin and their allies at the Battle of Greasy Grass in 1876. This essay will not “i/Indigenize” Harold or early English people more broadly, but instead open up the productions of early medieval settlers to the gaze of contemporary Indigenous scholars, and offer a temporally sovereign theoretical approach to early medieval narrative.