Abstract
This article demonstrates the way wounds, and affects generally, are figured by the writing of history. It traces patterns of thinking about the labyrinth primarily in histories, theories, and myths of the past 150 years to demonstrate how the labyrinth has been cut by colonization. From the Mycenaean colonization of Indigenous Cretans (inaccurately named “Minoans”) to the emergence of white feminism and its present day practice, figures of the labyrinth iteratively cut history to perpetuate the un/common loss of colonized communities and to enact white racist sensibilities of exclusion. Entangling Karen Barad’s cutting together-apart and Kent Ono’s colonial amnesia, colonizing cuts are constitutive exclusions that wound and exclude colonized communities from history and world making.
Europeans and proto-Europeans have spent 3000 years pursuing theories, histories, and archeological expeditions of the Cretan labyrinth. One British archeologist at the dawn of the 20th century attempted to bring this hunt to a close. After winning a contentious bid against other foreign archeological institutions, Arthur Evans acquired a prized piece of land rumored to bear the remnants of an ancient civilization (D’Agata, 2010). As he unearthed the expansive structure, he saw in the ruinous complex a maze; he saw in the large limestone cones bullhorns; he saw in the throne chamber the seat of King Minos. A mythic past was woven into the future of Evan’s archeological findings, so much so that Evans began manipulating the archeological evidence to fit a “Minoan” totalizing narrative (Hitchcock & Koudounaris, 2002).
Evans’ archeological practices raised suspicion. The architectural landscaping of the palace, he admitted, was not completed through restorations but “reconstitutions” (Hitchcock & Koudounaris, 2002, p. 46). Minoan wall paintings were “overconfident restorations” of fragments “rarely found in situ” (Shaw, 2004, p. 65). Evans manipulated 25% of archeological photographs published in his yearly reports of the excavation with particularly incriminating fabrications. With each of these reconfigurations, he was defending his preconceived theory that the Minoans dominated the Aegean in the Late Bronze Age, even as evidence at the site was pointing to the contrary (German, 2005). The Minoans did not dominate Mycenae; Mycenae colonized Indigenous Cretans (Iacovou, 2008).
Nevertheless, the legacy of Crete’s Bronze Age palatial culture is regularly and inaccurately described as Minoan, from the myths of King Minos. Evans promoted the Minoans as “the first great European culture” (Papadopoulus, 2005, p. 87) by homogenizing the many temporalities of people who lived there into “a concrete futuristic vision of a timeless legendary past constructed in a Victorian present” (Hitchcock & Koudounaris, 2002, p. 42). Although there is no substantiating archeological evidence of a governing king, the use of Minos’ name as period indicators, that is, “Early Minoan” or “Middle Minoan,” is such an entrenched practice even critical scholars of the classics, such as Bernal (1987), have been lured by its patriarchal mythos.
The manipulation of archeological evidence, the suturing of Indigenous Cretan culture into European culture, and the dating of Bronze Age Knossos as Minoan are examples of what I am calling colonizing cuts. Conceptualized with the work of Ono (2009) and Barad (2012), colonizing cuts are “constitutive exclusion[s]” (Barad, 2012, p. 21) that wound and exclude colonized communities from history and world making. As an apparatus, colonization composes and is composed of specific material-discursive practices that reconfigure phenomena through cuts. Colonizing cuts are inspired by the way Ariadne gives Theseus both sword and thread to navigate the labyrinth and kill the Minotaur; cuts from the sword are sutured simultaneously with the thread. They reiteratively reconfigure our world by “cutting together-apart” (Barad, 2012, p. 13) and “withdraw life support from those who do not matter in the same way” (Hill, 2016, p. 286).
All world making and historical memory is cut together-apart, but colonizing cuts promote the capacity for particular kinds of world making and historical memory through domination, oppression, and violence. Western history is woven through colonizing cuts to constitute post-colonial beings who are “beyond thinking about colonialism” (Ono, 2009, p. 13). Evans, for example, did not consider the possibility that Indigenous Cretans were colonized. The eventual conclusion that they were came from others who traced the entanglements of his erasures. Colonizing cuts, such as Evans’, result from white sensibilities that do not feel the loss and wounds of colonization and Western colonialism.
Although the colonization of Bronze Age Indigenous Crete is not the same event as Western colonialism—distinguished by the emergence of empire, race, and racism—each is woven into the history of the other. The colonization of Crete was a proto-European colonization winding toward Western colonialism, and figures of speech referring to Bronze Age Crete during and after colonialism cut the myth together-apart to iterate wounds of racism. The past and the future are not closed temporalities. Through ongoing violent cuts the present disperses what has been lost and who experiences loss. Colonizing cuts make possible “nostalgia for a past that never was” (Theriot, 1983, p. 12) as well as a future “in which colonial relations still operate but do so despite having amnesia about colonialist history” (Ono, 2009, p. 114).
The entangling history of Crete’s labyrinth is a notable example of colonizing cuts and the wounds they cultivate; indeed, it is a figure of loss and the lost. In this study, I “work carefully with the details of patterns of thinking” (Barad, 2012, p. 13) in scholarship primarily written about the labyrinth over the past 150 years. By tracing the entanglements of the labyrinth with Bronze Age Indigenous Cretans, I demonstrate how they are iteratively cut together-apart with figures that are not of their own making. The labyrinth infects this ill-known community with figures of sacrifice, violence and death borne of different colonizing relationships. These tearing relationships reconfigure contemporary white racist sensibilities, exemplified below through white feminism.
In my writing of the labyrinth’s histories, I struggle to hold onto a proper tense. The figure is made of its own labyrinthine movements and requires a constant recursion, forwards and backwards, between different temporal-locations, roughly estimated: Indigenous Bronze Age Crete, the inaccurately named “Minoan” period (30th—15th centuries BCE); Mycenaean Bronze Age Crete (15th–11th centuries BCE); Archaic and Homeric Age, when the Iliad and Odyssey were transcribed (8th—7th centuries BCE); Classical Greece and Athenian Democracy (5th—4th centuries BCE); and Greco-Roman Period when today’s familiar forms of the labyrinth myth were put to print (1st century BCE–2nd century CE).
The forward and backward movements of the neocolonial present can be disorienting, but I hope you will find your way (Ono, 2009). The path I wind here leads with a discussion of the hesitations historians have voiced in describing Bronze Age Indigenous Cretans as a colonized community and how these hesitations mitigate the consequences of Myceanean occupation. I then turn to the way the labyrinth myth cuts Indigenous Crete’s material culture into the Western tradition, emphasizing how the myth emerged after, not before, Mycenae colonized Crete. I continue by tracing the pathogenic movements of the labyrinth into the “deep muscle tissue of rhetoric’s sensorium” (Rice, 2015, p. 39) by drawing out the infection of racism festering in our post-colonial society as evidenced in the iterative treatments of the Minotaur and white feminism.
Colonizing cuts
Unbeknownst to him, when Evans locates the birth of European culture at the Cretan Palace of Knossos, he locates it at an event of colonization. While there is no consensus about what counts as colonization during pre-history, there is growing acknowledgment that colonizing processes of cultural oppression and domination occured during this time. Most modern historians are skeptical of describing any civilization that existed before the Archaic period as colonized. The general consensus is that colonization did not occur until the emergence of Greek poleis, city-states, in 8th century BCE. If a polis had to establish a settlement in another territory, and no poleis existed before the 8th century, then any activity prior to the 8th century was pre-colonial migration and settlement (Graham, 2001). Arguing against tradition, Iacovou (2008) explains this conception of colonization does not account for the process of Hellenization that occured to palatial cultures prior to the 8th century, specifically on the islands of Crete and Cyprus. Hellenization on Crete constitutively excluded Indigenous world making.
During the Early and Middle Bronze Age, Crete was pre-Hellenic. It had “its own particular cultural expression” (Iacovou, 2008, p. 221; Perna, 2014) and its own distinct prehistoric languages derived from non-Hellenic influences—the still undeciphered scripts of Linear A and Cretan hieroglyphics. The archeological record during the Middle Bronze Age indicates strong relationships with the Assyrians and Egyptians, situating Crete as a Northern Mediterranean hub of trade (Morris, 1992).
In late-Bronze Age, Crete’s Indigenous palatial culture became absorbed by Mycenae, a proto-Greek civilization. Linear B script was developed during Mycenaean occupation of Crete and was eventually deciphered for its relationship to the Greek language; no such relationship exists for Linear A because Indigenous Cretans were not proto-Greek (Iacovou, 2008; Perna, 2014). Today, Linear B is considered the earliest form of Greek writing. Through Mycenaean colonization, Crete was carved into the southernmost “boundary of the Hellenophone ethnos” (Iacovou, 2008, p. 223).
Both Crete and Cyprus experienced a “more significant and long-lasting . . . Greek colonization [than] anywhere else in the Mediterranean” (Iacovou, 2008, p. 221). The Mycenaean people perpetuated the loss of Indigenous Cretan ways of life without needing a polis. It is more appropriate to say that Indigenous Cretans were cut together-apart by different poleis, as well as modern scholars, in the creation of Western history.
Sacred weapons
Colonizing cuts weaved history by constitutively excluding Indigenous Cretan world making. These inflicting pricks gathered many temporalities at once. For example, the artifacts from Evans’ archeological dig at Knossos were flushed with multiple space-times making it easier for Evans’ to justify his interpretations. Three Bronze Age Mycenaean tablets were found with dapuritojo written in Linear B. They were later translated as labyrinthos given Linear B’s relationship to Homeric writing. Evans and other scholars used these tablets as evidence of the “Minoan” labyrinth even though they were not in Indigenous Cretan script; history was backstitched. One of the tablets mentioned a mistress/goddess of the labyrinth, the potinija dapuritojo, but further context about the what of the labyrinth or the who of the mistress/goddess in relation to Indigenous Cretans remains undetermined (Borgeaud, 1974; Kerenyi, 1976; Sarullo, 2008). There was no evidence that Indigenous Cretans conceived of the mistress/goddess of the labyrinth as Ariadne. No Minos, no Minotaur, no Daedalus, no Theseus found on artifacts or in Linear B at Knossos.
The word labyrinth is still difficult to decipher. It appears to have a pre-Greek etymology perhaps connected to Indigenous Cretans. However, the most frequently cited translation for labyrinthos is house of the double-headed ax, crafted by Evans. The etymology of the suffix -inthos, “house,” was stitched with a variety of place names that could have been encountered during travel across the Mediterranean (Kern, 2000). Evans believed the architecture of the “house” was a maze design. However, there was no evidence found at the site beyond conjecture that the labyrinth was a physical maze holding the Minotaur, as portrayed in later Greek and Greco-Roman myths. He cut the word labrys to the sacred double-headed axes found at the site, a now disputed etymological link, and amplified a distantly tangled relation between Minos, house, maze, and sacred axe (Sarullo, 2008).
Sacrificial dances
The first-known mention of any Minoan characters was in the emergence of the Greek literary tradition at least 300 years after the creation of the Mycenaean tablets at Knossos. In the Iliad, Homer discussed a shield that the Greek God Hephaestus made for Achilles’ mother. As an aside, Homer compared this shield to a gift that Daedalus gave Ariadne, a gift of choros (18.592). This is believed to be the earliest mention of the names Daedalus and Ariadne, with Minos and Theseus appearing in the Odyssey, and the Minotaur not until the Archaic period on vase art (Morris, 1992; Crane, n.d.). The gift, choros, is a difficult word to translate, arguably a word that resists translation (Rickert, 2013). Some translations include a dance floor, choreography, and animated dancing figures (Morris, 1992). All translations entail a being and becoming of choros, both a dance floor and dance. Homer appeared to be “aware of both meanings” (Mariotti, 2013, p. 75) and used choros to simultaneously indicate motion and place.
The dance floor and dance were cut into the configuration of the labyrinth. After Daedalus gave Ariadne choros, Homer explained that a dance ensued where a chain of young men and maidens held each other’s wrists and wove around in rows (18.592). Speculative reconstructions of the dance, chopped from other Basque dances, demonstrate how the last person of a chain would be encircled and could only escape by following the chain of dancers out, similar to what later Greeks and Greco-Romans may be describing when Theseus follows Ariadne’s thread (Kern, 2000, p. 45). Notably, however, Homer used the concept choros and not labyrinthos. The latter does not appear in any of his works, indicating that the slicing together of choric dancing with Ariadne’s thread likely came later by those entwining Homeric, Greek, and/or Greco-Roman periods.
When the Greco-Romans tell the story, the labyrinth is a maze—discussed below—and dancing is not located as or at the labyrinth. Dancing instead occurs after Theseus and Ariadne flee Crete and after Theseus abandons Ariadne at Naxos. Theseus stopped on another island, Delos, where he participated in the Crane Dance as part of a sacrifice to the island god. The dance was composed of “certain measured turnings and returnings,” explained Plutarch (1905) “imitative of the windings and twistings of the labyrinth” (p. 19). The Crane Dance cut a relationship between navigation and a labyrinthine form. Cranes navigate by taking “deviations, U-turns, corners, swerving, tortuousness” (Mariotti, 2013, p. 78).
Although Homer did not use the word labyrinth, it is tempting to assume he knew what we do not about the Mycenaean tablets and that the labyrinth must have something to do with choros and dancing. This likely influenced Evans who unearthed dance-inspired Indigenous Cretan hieroglyphic art and Bronze Age frescos (German, 2007). But to say that the Linear B labyrinthos has to do with dancing by way of Homer is to demonstrate the “ongoing openness of the narrative to future retellings” (Barad, 2012, p. 11). Labyrinthine retellings continuously move and form into an architectural shape, cutting one form of art into another.
Funerary mazes
Creating movement across mediums, the Iliad cuts a relationship between choros, the cunning feet of dancers, and the movement of feet on a pottery wheel. Daedalus’ choros is composed of swift dancers that “run round with cunning feet exceedingly lightly, as when a potter sitteth by his wheel that is fitted between his hands and maketh trial of it whether it will run” (18.590–606). Pottery is an important medium for conveying Greek relationships, particularly for the painted scenes that express mythic dramas.
The cut of choros with the spinning of Greek pottery inspired a geometric shape of the labyrinth. During the writing of Iliad, a style of art achieved its peak form: Greek geometric. This style was made from an “almost mathematical logic” (Cook, 2013, p. 15) of precision in vertical and horizontal rhythms. It emerged from Protogeometric Mycenaean artists who fashioned the continuous meander design known today as the Greek key-pattern. The emphasis on sharp angles and mechanistic ornamentation flourished for two centuries, spanning 900–700 BCE.
While art historians consider the Greek key-pattern a novel design of the Greeks, the meander is not. Meandering patterns have been used to decorate artifacts in Egyptian civilizations from at least the third millennium BCE (Kern, 2000). Maze-like designs are characteristic of early Egyptian seals and coins. Early seals referenced the location of a king’s tomb in a sanctuary, and each king’s seal was impressed on items therein. The intricate seal designs evolved over each dynasty evidencing the pattern’s emergence as a significant Egyptian form. Further complex maze designs, with false turns and hidden shafts, were iterated on Egyptian art to protect the body and property of the departed. The pharaoh of the 12th dynasty Amenemhet III, for example, has a mortuary temple in Hawara with wandering obstacles (Deedes, 1935).
Greek historian Herodotus (1862) living in 4th century BCE visited and described this and another Egyptian temple as labyrinths. He did not, however, draw a relationship to or even mention a Cretan labyrinth in his histories. “Classical and late Greek texts always speak of the Cretan labyrinth in the past tense,” explains Borgeaud (1974) “as an edifice of which no trace remains” (p. 2). Nonetheless, by 3rd century BCE, the geometric maze was cut with the figure of the Cretan labyrinth. The Greco-Romans treated the Greek-key pattern as “the figure of the labyrinth in linear form” (Kerenyi, 1976, p. 90). This constitution inspired Evans and many modern scholars to homogenize Indigenous Cretan art with their Mycenaean and later Roman colonizers.
The Greco-Roman cutting together-apart of Mycenaean and Indigenous Cretan art can be re-membered by tracing the diffractive patterns of style. Unlike the Mycenaean Protogeometric, one of the most distinctive features of Bronze Age Indigenous Cretan art was the “passion for absolute mobility” in organisms and organic forms (Groenewegen-Frankfort & Ashmole, 1972, p. 129). Indigenous Cretans emphasized wavy lines over straight, circular subjects over square. The island artists had a distinct expression of nautical life, an appreciation for the aquatic as well as terrestrial gardens. Tentacles and tendrils curl around themselves; flowers and leaves blow in the wind; landscapes move without receding space. This style is on pottery and seals, as well as frescos and friezes, distinguishing them from their Egyptian and Mycenaean neighbors. Eventually, however, this style falls into “a certain rigidity” and “tendency to mechanical repetition” with Crete’s colonization and transition to the Mycenaean Protogeometric (Groenewegen-Frankfort & Ashmole, 1972, p. 131).
Taken together, the labyrinth is woven by iterative cuts in the colonization of Crete: house of the double-headed axe, dance floor and dance, and geometrical maze. It must be emphasized, from Mycenae to Evans, none of these labyrinthine figures were produced with evidence primarily from Indigenous Cretans. Decolonial sensibilities were not used in modern scholarship of the past 150 years. Instead, white sensibilities were used to ascribe Cretan world making, applying future sensibilties to past histories. White sensibilities were reiterating the loss and wounding of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color with weapons, sacrifice, and funerals born of Western Imperialism.
White sensibilities
While the previous section emphasized the way colonizing cuts sutured multiple labyrinthine forms, this section will address white sensibilities that were sliced together from its tangling history. White sensibilities emerged from reiterative treatments of the Minotaur by Theseus and Ariadne in scenes of victimization, sacrifice, and murder. I begin by briefly discussing the emergence of these scenes for Classical Athenians and Greco-Romans, and then discuss the revival of the myth during the 19th century and birth of white feminism. I trace iterations of history that do not demonstrate cause–effect relationships but rather presencing-effects from “what resonates, the vibratory rhythms of a gathering of incalculable practices” that “pervade the prevailing political economy” (Keeling, 2016, p. 318). The labyrinth myth is not always cut this way, but it can be and has been. I emphasize how the labyrinth continues to arrive in its 3000-year history not so much a commonplace, topos, but as an un/common loss, choros, as a continuous rebirth of whiteness that perpetuates the suffering and death of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.
Politics of exclusion
Contemporary iterations of the labyrinth myth found in youth literature and encyclopedias of mythology were formed during Athenian Democracy. For the Athenians, the central protagonist was Theseus, a celebrated hero who united the demes of Attica into Athens, also known as the sunoikismos (Kennerly & Woods, 2018). The sunoikismos occurd after his adventures with the labyrinth: Theseus traveled to Crete as a sacrificial tribute required of King Minos, received Ariadne’s thread and sword, killed the Minotaur in the labyrinth and successfully escaped with Ariadne in tow, returned home, became King of Athens and united the demes. Theseus has his own suspicious history that speaks to the strange idolization of a king during democracy, but it is the Minotaur whose arrival demonstrates a key, Greek-key, mythic sensibility (Walker, 1995).
The Minotaur cuts into the myth during the Archaic period and becomes a popular figure on vases and in plays to be consumed during the Classical period. As a figure that is not fully human and requires containment, the Minotaur speaks to the way exclusion and entrapment were aesthetic and political sensibilities for the Athenians. It resonates with their slave-ownership, perspectives on immigration, ethnic purity, and sexism (Hedrick, 1994; Kennedy, 2017).
Greco-Roman and Roman authors put the myth to script, with Plutarch’s Life of Theseus, Apollodorus’ The Library Book 3, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses as some of the more popular literary sources iterated today. At the time of these writings, Athens was colonized by Rome, and Crete was already colonized by Mycenae, Macedonia, and then Rome in 27 BCE. During Roman occupation of Crete, coins were produced using a variety of labyrinth maze motifs generating an economic relationship between the myth and colonization of Crete (Chania Archeological Museum, n.d.). Prior to radiocarbon dating, modern scholars used these coins as evidence that the “Minoan” labyrinth existed in maze form (e.g., Deedes, 1935). After dating the coins to the Romans and not Indigenous Cretans, they now demonstrate how invested the Romans were in labyrinth mythology.
Roman interest is further evidenced by the way the myth became resourceful in crafting figures of speech, particularly for expressing a politics of exclusion. Cicero (1804), for example, made a comparison between the Minotaur and political opponents who would destroy an institutional order. In a letter to Conificius, he described his friend’s adversaries Calvisius and Taurus as “the horrid Minotaur” for their “impudent” behavior that conjured “the censure of the senate” (Cicero, 1804, p. 242, emphasis in original). Cicero figured the Minotaur as a coalition acting uncivilly in opposition to their strategic goal, needing to be tamed. Roman tropes, artifacts, and literature of the labyrinth slivered their way into the birth of Europe, defining “the labyrinth for early Christian and medieval writers, establishing a rich storehouse of labyrinthine characteristics and associations and laying the groundwork for the literal and metaphorical mazes of later literature” (Doob, 1990, p. 17).
A deadly romance
By the 19th century, Greek mythology was deeply cut by Western Imperialism and an Aryan model of Greek civilization (Bernal, 1987). It is in this event of Western civilization and slavery that “Greek myth seemed to represent a complete fabric of human experience” for establishing “enduring moral structures” (Nichols, 1995, pp. 16–18). At least since the 16th century, the British were using Ancient Greek and Roman texts as examples for “ideals of the empire” (Atac, 2006, p. 644).
Interactions between Ariadne, Theseus, and the Minotaur were iterated as moral fiber for the Victorians. By then, Ariadne was known as the mistress of the labyrinth, daughter of King Minos, who gave Theseus thread and sword to kill the Minotaur. She escaped with Theseus but he abandoned her on his way home. Her story received a revival in Victorian literature “plucked . . . from relative obscurity” (Nichols, 1995, p. 16). She became the operatic figure of fragility in Western art, singing “emotions of loneliness and suffering, born of desertion by Theseus” (Babbage, 2011, p. 36). The operas emphasized the spectacle of and attention to her emotional performance. Victorians enunciated the tragic romance of her life, death, and Dionysian rebirth. Her death, which played out in many ways on stage and page, always followed the murdering of the Minotaur.
The figuration of the Minotaur as a bestial threat to public good was a virtual resource of politics and world making used to cut People of Color, particularly Black people, amid post-Civil War reconstruction, immigration, and segregation. A United States Senator from South Carolina, aptly known as Pitchfork Ben Tillman, iterated this most brutally. Conjuring “the raging urge of Negro men to rape white women,” Tillman argued for the right of the South to lynch Black men “as an instrument of ‘justice’” (Gossett, 1997, p. 270). In a speech to the Senate, Tillman decried, “forty to a hundred Southern maidens were annually offered as a sacrifice to the African Minotaur, and no Theseus had arisen to rid the land of this terror” (Gossett, 1997, p. 271). He charged Southern men to become Theseus, kill the Black Minotaur and protect white Southern Ariadne.
Simultaneously at the dawn of the 20th century, Ariadne was being studied for her bravery in escaping the house of Minos. Her abandonment of Cretan culture for Greek appeared radical for white women who were never forced into colonization. The Minotaur, a half-sibling of Ariadne, was the main obstacle to overcome in reaching freedom. Exemplary of “heroines in conflict,” she was carved to “deliver the first challenge to family and establishment from which [white] feminist principles were later to spring” (Nichols, 1995, p. 16).
White feminism
It is Ariadne’s relationship to colonization that makes her a particularly appropriate figure for describing white feminism, not only for her actions but also because she is cut by colonization and not Indigenous Cretans. Contemporary white feminism iterates Ariadne’s sensibilities of exclusion that wound Black, Indigenous, and Feminists of Color. Sensibilities of exclusion are a loss of common sense or less sense in common from un/common loss. White sensibilities of exclusion are, for example, the inability to see homogenization and barriers, feel mourning and exhaustion, hear intelligence and urgency. All feminists are gathered by the “connective tissues of publicness” (Rice, 2015, p. 37). However, sometimes, this gathering entangles large knots that make what is near to white feminists different than what is near to Black, Indigenous, and Feminists of Color. Channeling Lorde’s (1984, p. 157) reference to the “white labyrinth” as “the deathlands,” white feminists do not see, feel, and hear Black death with the same frequency. The wound is not similarly felt.
The Greco-Roman labyrinth myth is a parable about the “institutionalized rejection of difference” (Lorde, 1984, p. 115) typical of white feminism. It is heard in the voices of Black, Indigenous, and Feminists of Color who describe white feminists with Ariadne’s actions: She thrives “upon the pain of others” (Griffin, 2012, p. 151), seeks her own advantage and works to suppress the threat of radical change the Minotaur would bring upon escape. She uses tears to prioritize her own wounding, positions herself as the victim (Calafell, 2012; Moon & Holling, 2020) and sacrifices her half-sibling whom she does not see as fully human (Calafell, 2015; Hill Collins, 1986; Moon & Holling, 2020).
Black, Indigenous, and Feminists of Color, each winding their way through the maze differently, are given obstacles and barriers that “halt, restrain, arrest, stop” through “disciplinary containment” that hides labor, interests, and inequities (Flores & Gomez, 2020, p. 237; see also Flores Niemann, 1999; Griffin, 2012). In rejecting their racial homogenization, the “outsider[s] within” (Hill Collins, 1986) are named monstrous, “hyper aggressive,” “angry,” “out of control, uncivil, and scary” (Calafell, 2012, p. 123; see also Calvente et al., 2020; Griffin, 2012; Holling, 2019). As Calafell (2015) argues, racist monstrosity plays out in our lives because it is “intimately connected to our pasts, presents, and futures as a society” (p. 5).
Made of the same colonizing movements, racism, too, is a way of cutting and racist is a way we can (be) cut. All white feminists are cut with asymptomatic lethality, explains Tallie (2020). Like COVID-19, a feminist who does not show symptoms of racism nevertheless has the “deadly potential” (Tallie, 2020, para. 8) to harm Black, Indigenous, and Feminists of Color at any moment. “For centuries,” he writes, “white people have had easy access to histories of racial power and deploy them, almost like a pathogen, against Black people” (Tallie, 2020, para. 1). If racism is an asymptomatic illness, then no white feminist can profess their health. Doing so creates white toxicity and perpetuates racial and gendered violence (Mack & Na’puti, 2019; Moon & Holling, 2020).
The presence
This racially twisted history of the labyrinth is made with the thread and sword of colonization. The labyrinth myth is a Hellenization of Bronze Age Indigenous Crete that cuts Crete into the emerging European corpus at the same time colonizers are discarding the thought and material culture of its Indigenous people. Evans’ positioning of the “Minoans” as the first great European civilization established European identity on a community that was not Minoan or proto-European, at a site of colonization, suggesting that colonizing cuts are at the heart of what it means to be European and of the “West.” Mycenae’s colonization of Crete is a notable event in the iterative emergence of what Asante (2006) describes as Westernism, “the capacity of the West to reduce almost every human achievement or behavior to the particular experience of the West” (p. 152). Crete did not have to be “Western”; indeed Crete’s Westernism was only reestablished in 1913 when it became a Greek island, just as Evans arrived. Previous to that Cretans were under occupation from a variety of both “Eastern” and “Western” nations and nation-states.
This essay used the figure of the labyrinth to trace colonizing cuts and make “our obligations and debts visible” (Barad, 2012, p. 20). In being woven together, white people in particular are cut with racist sensibilities of mutual exclusion. This is also a cautionary tale for white feminists feeling loss and lost in the wounds of racism, told by a white feminist with blood on her hands. White feminism “has historically failed” (Moon & Holling, 2020). Heeding the words of Black, Indigenous, and Feminists of Color, white feminists should not respond with Ariadne’s sobbing victimage or Theseus’ heroic violence. Instead, they must attend to the wounds they created, hearing intelligence and urgency. If topos inspires dialogue, then choros inspires hearing un/common loss. As Wanzer-Serrano (2015) explains, an ethic of decolonial love gives “the gift of hearing” (p. 183). It will take a lifetime of work (Frankenberg, 2001; Hanchey, 2019), but “[d]oing this work, especially in this moment of crisis, could literally save lives” (Tallie, 2020, para. 15).
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Donovan Conley and Ben Burroughs for organizing and editing this special issue. Additionally, she thanks Donovan Conley, T.J. Tallie, Jason Kalin, an anonymouse reviewer, and Mediating Pathogens symposium participants for feedback on earlier drafts, as well as Jenna Hanchey and Michelle Holling for research leads.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The author received financial support to conduct research in Crete from the College of Arts & Sciences and International Center at the University of San Diego.
