#MoreVoices: Citation, Inclusion, and Working Together

by JONATHAN HSY

[UPDATE: a partial snapshot publication of this bibliography was published in postmedieval in December 2017; you can download that PDF here!]

Screenshot of the crowdsourced bibliography (in progress, June 13, 2017): "Race & medieval studies: a partial bibliography." The corner of the toolbar indicates anonymous contributors are at work (each represented by a colorful animal-shaped icon).

Over the past week or so, there has been an effort (launched by medievalists on social media) to crowdsource a bibliography on RACE AND MEDIEVAL STUDIES. This project grows out of an ongoing conversation about increasing the visibility of scholarship by people of color and ethnic/religious minorities in the field. The crowdsourced bibliography is soliciting references relating to race in medieval studies (including modern appropriations of the medieval past), with an emphasis on minority scholars and perspectives.

The bibliography-in-progress can be accessed through this online Google doc; feel free to go to the site and add new items! More references beyond the West and/or Global North are especially welcome.

Anyone with the link can edit and add items until the end of day tomorrow, June 14. After that point, the document will migrate to a stable platform with (moderated) comments.

Thanks to Julie Orlemanski for launching this effort through an initial kernel of eleven items (first posted as a comment on a public Facebook thread); the list has now expanded to over two hundred items (thanks to all the people who have contributed so far)!


FURTHER CONTEXT:

Why is this crowdsourced bibliography important? I see this collective labor as part of a larger effort to support people of color and ethnic/religious minority perspectives in medieval studies, especially when it comes to public medievalist discourse on topics relating to urgent cultural issues such as race, language, religion, and nation (we can all think of reasons why such topics are "hot" these days). I posted some my own thoughts about this last week on twitter but will repeat some of the main points here:

• It's very encouraging that white medievalists are openly addressing racism, xenophobia, and abuse of the medieval past, but it's disappointing that minority voices haven't been cited in such public discourse (other than, perhaps, on this blog).
• When writing about contemporary topics such as race, language, nation, religion, and cultural appropriation, please acknowledge the important scholarship that has come before. Some of these topics might be "new" to many in the field, but there are some scholars (among them racial, ethnic, and religious minorities) who have been thinking and publishing about such issues for quite some time.
• A key to white allyship and antiracism is to speak with and alongside minorities, not "about" (or for, or over) such voices; check out the readings for the recent Whiteness in Medieval Studies workshop at #Kzoo2017 and the post-workshop reflections.
• Learn from our colleagues in adjacent historical eras: classical studies (Eidolon blog and the group Classics and Social Justice) as well as early modern studies ("The Color of Membership" plenary session at the Shakespeare Association of America in 2017, new Shakespeare Quarterly issue on race).
• Coalition building can also mean reaching across period divides; note the upcoming GW MEMSI (Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute) symposium on "The Future of the Past: Race, Inclusion, Change."

For my part I hope this bibliography is just a starting point for more awareness and mindful public medievalist discourse in the future. Building a truly inclusive medieval studies takes all of us: people of color, ethnic and religious minorities, and (yes) people of whiteness. #MoreVoices #TheMoreYouKnow

How to Celebrate "Whan That Aprille Day" (2017)

guest posting by COURTNEY RYDEL

[cross-posted at Global Chaucers]

Cover the program for “Whan That Aprille Day” celebrations last year at Washington College. Program designed by Olivia Serio (President of the Poetry Club, Washington College, class of 2017).

Coming at the beginning of April, National Poetry Month in the United States, “Whan That Aprille Day” is a holiday begun by the @LeVostreGC persona behind “Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog” and “Chaucer Doth Tweet” in 2014. @LeVostreGC proposed medievalists unite in our efforts to celebrate “the beauty and great loveliness of studying the words of the past. Our mission is to bring to mind the importance of supporting the scholarship and labor that brings these words to us…and the teaching of these…languages. For without all of this, the past would have no words for us” [read the full 2017 iteration of this open call in this earlier post at In The Middle].

In spring 2016, I curated an event on Multilingual Chaucer, gathering students and faculty from across Washington College, the small liberal arts college in Maryland where I teach.  Since then, I’ve participated in another large-scale Chaucer project that was directed towards the larger community, #MedievalBirds with ornithologist Jennie Carr, work on which is still ongoing. Currently I am planning a major Chaucerian event for spring 2018, with guest speaker Kim Zarins, that will involve collaboration with the Education department and local high school teachers.

Based on these experiences, I would like to offer some suggestions for other medievalists looking to create exciting events to celebrate “Whan That Aprille Day” on their campus. Although the event originated with celebrating Chaucer, that context should not be limiting. “Whan That Aprille Day” has the goal of celebrating the “beauty and great loveliness” in all languages.  Any language, literature, or poetry is welcome!  In this contemporary moment when the NEA and NEH are threatened, we need to come together as humanists and poetry lovers.  The more that medievalists connect with scholars of modern languages and across disciplines, and with our larger community, the stronger we will be.

• Celebrate the gifts and skills of your students and faculty, and show them how they connect to Chaucer. At Washington College we hosted a reading of “Multilingual Chaucer,” which included students and faculty reading poetry in languages including Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Latin, Spanish, French, Russian, German, Hindi, Old English, and Middle English.  Some readers read their favorite poems in other languages, and some read Chaucer or Chaucer translations.  The mixture of languages and diverse poems brought alive how “The Father of English Poetry” inhabited a multilingual space, and allowed us to hear the many languages of our polyglot, increasingly international campus.

• If you’re going global, check out the fantastic Global Chaucers online archive, created by Jonathan Hsy and Candace Barrington. This resource for post-1945 global non-Anglophone translations of Chaucer offers sample texts, blog posts and scholarship on Chaucer in modern contexts, and reflections on his impact in the contemporary landscape.

• Look to interdisciplinary and collaborative research. My biologist colleague Jennie Carr and I undertook a project on #MedievalBirds in fall 2016, in which we combined her expertise on ornithology with my research to create an interactive downtown gallery exhibit on Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls.  We involved students in creating a physical tree that branched onto the ceiling, showing how Chaucer’s categories of birds overlapped with evolutionary development, and in creating videos of students reciting passages from the Parliament of Fowls with present-day English translations in closed captioning.

• Think about going beyond your college into the community. For Spring 2018, Washington College is planning an event that brings together high school teachers with our community to think about Chaucer in relation to the brilliant YA lit retelling of the Canterbury Tales by Kim Zarins, Sometimes We Tell the Truth. This event will give us an opportunity to bring together our LGBTQIA student groups as well as our secondary ed community with lovers of poetry and medieval studies.  Kim has graciously agreed to come and do a reading and craft talk, and the Education department is collaborating with us on a workshop with high school teachers to help them craft more in-depth lesson plans and relate Chaucer to contemporary issues.

• Consider contemporary retellings of Chaucer, like the aforementioned Sometimes We Tell the Truth. Students at the Multilingual Chaucer event also read from Patience Agbabi’s Telling Tales, giving us a chance to hear Nigerian-accented English in a different perspective on the Wife of Bath.

• Include other medievalists, faculty, and even emeritus faculty with a love of Chaucer! Our beloved emeritus faculty Bennett Lamond, who taught Chaucer for decades at Washington College starting back in 1965, read at our Multilingual Chaucer event.  He gave a hilarious, spirited reading of “To Rosamunde,” likening it to the Rolling Stones song “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.”

• Get students involved in their own retellings and rewritings of Chaucer. David Wallace’s undergraduate Chaucer course at the University of Pennsylvania in spring 2014 held an event in which students debuted both their own readings of Chaucer in the original Middle English as well as inspired, irreverent translations into present-day English.

• Direct your event to increase opportunities for outreach on your campus. Are there other departments or programs with which you want to collaborate?  How can Chaucer connect to other time periods and topics?  Maybe you want to celebrate Chaucer’s influence on later art and media with your Media Studies or Art History departments.  Perhaps you want to work with your Gender Studies department on an event that looks at gender roles in Chaucer, or with Comparative Literature or Modern Languages scholars on an event that highlights translation.

• Advertise! We had co-sponsors who also helped to publicize the event, including the Global Education Office, Department of English, Department of Modern Languages, Rose O’Neill Literary House, Poetry Club, and Sigma Tau Delta (English Honor Society).  Their efforts, along with our posters, tweets, and announcements, ensured a good turnout for the event.

• Use social media for collaboration, connections and archiving. This international holiday was created and promoted through social media, so it’s important to create records, post pictures and videos, and tweet, blog or Facebook with the hashtag #WhanThatAprilleDay17 (please note the spelling).

Of course, all of these reflections come from the perspective of a medievalist working in English, who teaches Chaucer. Although “Whan That Aprille Day” started from a Chaucer parody account and remains Middle English heavy, its goal is wide and universal, and it offers possibilities for global and multilingual exchange, just as Chaucer himself makes in his poetry.  In the words of @LeVostreGC, “we hope that the connections, affinities, and joys of this made-up linguistic holiday will widely overflow their initial medieval English context.”

Readers pose for a group photo after the “Whan That Aprille Day” event at the Rose O’Neill Literary House, Washington College (2016).

RELATED LINKS:

• Open Call for "Whan That Aprille Day" from @LeVostreGC himself (2017)
• #WhanThatAprilleDay video from Middle English Texts Series, with a nod to #MedievalDonut (2016)
• Online and social media celebrations of "Whan That Aprille Day" (2015)
• Recordings in dead languages by some of the ITM co-bloggers (2014) and twelve modern languages at Global Chaucers for "Whan That Aprille Day" (2014)

Hug A Medievalist Day 2016

by JONATHAN HSY

It’s HERE!

It’s International Hug A Medievalist Day!

Since 2011, this holiday has offered people a chance to express their love and affection for medievalists by, well, hugging them. Or if you’re a medievalist, hug yourself! Or snuggle with your favorite medieval book! If there’s a special medievalist in your life, consider giving them a hug today—with their consent, of course.

Some context, if you haven’t come across this before:

• Interview with the holiday’s inventor, Sarah Laeske (this interview is from 2013)
• Excellent writeup about the holiday in The New Yorker (Macy Halford, 2011)

Some useful links:

• Event site for 2016 on Facebook
• Photo contest (courtesy of The Lone Medievalist group on Facebook)
• Follow the #HugAMedievalist hashtag on twitter throughout the day

Some interesting medieval #hugpix newly circulating on social media this year:

• Monkey and cat (h/t Anthony Bale)
• Sculptural stone huggers in Lincoln Cathedral (h/t Elaine Treharne)
• Joachim and Anne (h/t Robert Miller)
• Cain and Abel, awkwardly (h/t Sjoerd Levelt)

Once again, always seek consent before hugging. Here’s a useful and humorous guide on how to hug your medievalist today (Natalie Grinnell, 2014).

HUG OFTEN, HUG RESPONSIBLY!

P.S. Remember that MORE festivities will ensue tomorrow (on Whan That Aprille Day)!

ITM Readers: We're proud to bring to you this guest posting from a very important person!

Maken Melodye on #WhanThatAprilleDay16

by GEOFFREY CHAUCER [aka @LeVostreGC]

Goode Friendes and Readers of Yn The Middel, 

Yt doth fill my litel herte wyth gret happinesse to invyte yow to the thirde yeare of a moost blisful and plesinge celebracioun.

On the first daye of Aprille, lat us make tyme to take joye yn alle langages that are yclept ‘old,’ or ‘middel,’ or ‘auncient,’ or ‘archaic,’ or, alas, even ‘dead.’ 

Thys feest ys yclept ‘Whan That Aprille Day.’ For thys yeare yt ys: 'Whan That Aprille Day 16.' #WhanThatAprilleDay16

Ich do invyte yow to joyne me and manye othir goode folk yn a celebracioun across the entyre globe of the erthe. Yn thys celebracioun we shal reade of oold bokes yn sondrye oold tonges. We shal singe olde songes. We shal playe olde playes. Eny oold tonge will do, and eny maner of readinge. All are welcome. We shal make merrye yn the magical dreamscape of 'social media,' and eke, yf ye kan do yt, yn the material plane of the 'real worlde' as wel.

Ye maye, paraventure, wisshe to reade from the beginning of my Tales of Caunterburye, but ye maye also wisshe to reade of eny oothir boke or texte or scroll or manuscript that ye love. Ye maye even reade the poetrye of John Gower yf that ys yower thinge. 

What are sum wayes to celebrate Whan That Aprille Daye?

Gentil frendes, yf yt wolde plese yow to celebrate Whan That Aprille Daye 2016, ye koude do eny of the followinge. Be sure to use the hasshe-tagge #WhanThatAprilleDay16 on yower poostes of twytter and facebooke and blogge.

• Counte downe to Whan That Aprille Daye wyth postes and readinges.

• Maken a video of yowerself readinge (or singinge! or actinge!) and share yt on the grete webbe of the internette.

• Planne a partye at yower classroome or hous to celebrate oolde langages, and poost pictures to the ynternette.

• Read auncient langages to yower catte, and the catte shal be moost mirthful.

• Make sum maner of cake or pastrye wyth oold wordes upon yt, and feest upon yt wyth good folke and share pictures of yower festivitee. (And yet beware the catte that shal seke to ruin the icinge.)

• Yf ye be bold, ye maye wisshe to share yower readinge yn publique, yn a slam of poesye or a nighte of open mic. (Bringe the catte?)

• Yf ye worke wyth an organisatioun or scole, ye maye wisshe to plan sum maner of event, large or smal, to share writinge yn oold langages.

• And for maximum Aprillenesse, marke all tweetes and poostes wyth the hashtagge #WhanThatAprilleDay16 – remember the ‘Whan’ and ‘Aprille.’

What ys the poynte of Whan That Aprille Daye?

Ower mission ys to celebrate al the langages that have come bifor, and alle their joyes and sorrowes and richesse.

Ower mission ys to remynde folk of the beautye and grete lovelinesse of studyinge the wordes of the past. And eke ower mission ys to bringe to mynde the importaunce of supportinge the scolership and labour that doth bringe thes wordes to us. To remynde folk to support the techinge of paleographye and of archival werke and eek, ywis, the techinge of thes oold langages. To remynde folk of the gret blisse and joye of research libraryes and the gret wysdam and expertyse of the libraryans that care for them across the centuryes. To call to mynde the fundinge of the humanityes, the which ys lyke the light of the sonne on the plantes of learninge and knowledge. For wythout al of thes, the past wolde have no wordes for us. 

Ower mission ys also to have ynogh funne to last until next Whan That Aprille Daye. 

Note that thys event doth also coincide wyth Aprille Fooles Daye, the which ys fyne by cause we do love thes langages and alle who love are yn sum maner also fooles. 

Ich do hope wyth al myn herte that that sum of yow good folke will joyne me on thys April first for readinge and celebratinge and foolinge. Lat us maken melodye on #WhanThatAprilleDay16

Wyth muchel love and admiracioun

Le Vostre

GC

P.S. Some other links for hose who might be interested:

• Inaugural Whan That Aprille Day (in 2014): roundup at the Global Chaucers blog [with the General Prologue's opening lines in twelve modern languages]
  
• Middle English Texts Series (METS) countdown to Whan That Aprille Day in March 2014 [full twitter archive]
  
• Recitations in Old English, Latin, and Middle English by some of the bloggers at In The Middle on Whan That Aprille Day 2014 [listen online]

• A curated archive of tweets from Whan That Aprille Day 2015

#FemFog Medievalism: Lessons Learned

by JONATHAN HSY

Two ITM postings in one day! This posting began as a set of reflections on a public Facebook status update but I'm reposting it all here as a kind of archive (and it's especially appropriate for MLK Day). Brief context: medievalists were engaged in important conversations on social media this week in response to the discovery of distressingly anti-feminist blogs/blog postings by established medieval scholars. Here are some initial thoughts on where we might go from here.

[UPDATED January 28, 2016: For more context on #femfog conversations since this post was made, see Dorothy Kim's post on ITM, this curated archive of #femfog tweets by @OldBooksNewSci, and coverage in the Chronicle of Higher Education and Jezebel (and read our note of thanks to Dr. Zuckerberg and our own affirmation of values).]

#FEMFOG MEDIEVALISM:

LESSONS LEARNED + PROACTIVE STEPS

What can we (medievalists) learn from Frantzen-gate and Fulton-gate, and what proactive steps can we make to change the field (and our world) for the better?

Some initial thoughts:

1. EVERYONE is implicated. Gay men can be mysogynist, and women can reaffirm patriarchy (and white hegemony). Retired profs can be toxic—and so can grad students. You can be disadvantaged in one way but also exert power/exclude in others. We all need to be aware and look out for each other (male, female, queer, white, nonwhite, nontenured, tenured—everyone).

2. KUDOS to courageous people. Thanks to Dorothy Kim for launching an extended private conversation on the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship Facebook page about enduring harmful scholarly (i.e. medievalist) fantasies of whiteness. I will give some credit to Rachel Fulton Brown (author of one of the blogs in question) for at least engaging with the criticism she is facing and making some efforts to understand. (Meanwhile the stridently masculinist Allen J. Frantzen did not engage any of his critics and un-friended people on Facebook after his viewpoints started circulating. ‪#‎GYB‬)

3. INVITE unexpected voices into conversations. This applies to conference sessions, seminars, blogs, scholarly collections and journals. Nominate many kinds of people to your leadership structures, advisory groups, editorial boards, conference organizing groups. (On that note, check out this GREAT wide-ranging slate of candidates for the BABEL Steering Committee. If you consider yourself a BABEL-er, vote by Friday!)

4. SUPPORT the work (scholarship and labor, physical and affective) of marginalized people in your social spheres. The meaning of “marginalized” or “minority” differs from context to context, but in any case build structures to support people who find themselves “outside the advantaged majority.” Do not amplify the voices of toxic people and do not help to advance the careers of people who are jerks.

5. MORE DISCOURSE, not less. When toxic views are published, especially by established scholars who hold positions of power, we should all be willing to respond to such discourse with more of our own. The conversations this week were not just about “individuals” but their blogging as symptoms of much broader structural and cultural issues we need to address for the sake of our field and our society more broadly. I’m glad that men and women (such as Peter Buchanan and Carla Jardim) offered timely, thoughtful, and forceful blog posts in response to Frantzen. Both humor and earnest critique can be powerful weapons.

6. MORE ALLIES. We need more white people to address white supremacy and white fragility (thanks for instance to Monika Otter and Suzanne Edwards on the SFMS thread and thanks to Jeffrey Cohen for the strong response on twitter and through this posting here on ITM calling out Frantzen on his scholarly and public misogyny, and thanks to Karl Steel for his post on ITM earlier this morning). We need more men (gay/queer and straight) to speak out against misogyny. We need more white women to point out problems with mainstream feminism. Rhetoric “lands” differently depending on who is speaking, and at times allies can do really important work.

7. RECOGNIZE that there’s a lot of energy/time/labor involved in responding to and educating people whenever this sort of thing happens. It really should not just be the “usual suspects” chiming in when these sorts of things happen and having the burden of educating people. Senior scholars should be able to educate themselves.

8. EXAMINE your own behavior and practices. If you receive criticism for your rhetoric or behavior, think about how to meaningfully change how you do things in the future (this could apply to the classroom, conferences, personal interactions, online communication, etc.).

9. USE YOUR AWESOME POWERS for good. Make medieval studies (and the world) more open, aware, inclusive.

10. DECIDE today what you can do to transform the profession and the world. It might be scholarship, serving on a committee, organizing a conference, curating a conversation, mentoring a student/colleague. If we want medieval studies to thrive, then we are all in this together.

#InclusiveSyllabus: Tips For/From Premodernists

by JONATHAN HSY

A brief posting for academics who are thinking ahead to the next semester:

Earlier this week, Aimée Morrison and Erin Wunker (two of the co-founders and editors of the excellent blog Hook & Eye) launched an important conversation about how to incorporate a wide range of perspectives and backgrounds into any new course. Wunker proposed using the #InclusiveSyllabus hashtag to carry these discussions over to twitter.

One big challenge that medievalists (and scholars in other historically distant fields) can face is this: how do you craft an inclusive syllabus if the discipline, era, genre, topic, or field is dominated by (dead) white men? You can check out this archived #InclusiveSyllabus convo for more tips (I'll be updating it periodically as the conversation continues).

[UPDATED DECEMBER 4, 2015]

In case you're not on twitter or don't want to scroll through the tweets, I offered ten ideas with reference to teaching pre-1500 British literature (but much of these ideas apply to other fields too):

1. In each course, include least two female authors. One woman can't represent an entire gender, and it's useful for students to access to varied modes of (gendered) writing.

2. Put texts in conversation, but not necessarily by obvious "identity category." For instance, a Kempe/Mandeville juxtaposition can reveal new insights into travel writing; a Kempe/Malory pairing might consider romance conventions.

3. Even if you can't avoid a "white male" syllabus, you can still include varied scholarly perspectives: women, people of color, non-Anglo perspectives, etc.

4. Use multiple translations or editions of a work to frame varied responses to a text (works by women and men, different media, forms, generations of scholarship).

5. Find "diversity" and inclusion even within a "white male" canon. Thinking about queerness or disability, for instance, can reveal nuanced facets of authorial identity.

6. Use the anonymity of many premodern texts to question classed/gendered assumptions about authorship.

7. Premodern literary cultures are inherently collaborative; scribes, authors, readers, and translators can all be active "players" in interpretation.

8. Even a "male only" syllabus can still stress role of women as patrons, readers, audience, and scholars who shape meaning and context.

9. Present texts in multiple forms (various print editions, different kinds of media, visual art or other adaptations) to show varied modes of accessing a work or tradition.

10. Lead with and integrate women and varied perspectives throughout the syllabus, rather than grouping "diverse" perspectives at the end of the term or within special segment of the term.

Medievalists and the Global Refugee Crisis

by JONATHAN HSY

[UPDATED September 8 with more links! Scroll to the end of this post.]

This entry falls somewhere between a compilation of links/resources and a proper essay. In this blog posting, I wanted to reflect a bit on the global refugee crisis that's currently in the news and consider how (or if) medievalists might respond to what's happening in Europe and elsewhere.

Part I: Medievalists on Twitter

[Images from my twitter feed yesterday (September 6), including premodern iconography of the biblical Flight into Egypt.]

The image above is a screenshot from my mobile device yesterday morning—and it happens to provide a sample of different ways medievalists (premodern academics) are engaging with media coverage of the plight of refugees in Europe and other places around the globe:

• The Refugee Tales Walk is a collective effort by activists and storytellers to showcase the stories of refugees indefinitely detained in the UK; taking its cue from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the project tells stories of lives in transit. Note this brief blurb on the Global Chaucers blog; you can also follow "Refugee Tales" on Facebook or on twitter.

• The Chaucer tweeter (@LeVostreGC) urges his followers to support the UN Refugee Agency.

• Kees Teszelszky, historian of early modern Dutch-Ottoman-Hungarian relations, chimed in on the plight of refugees by tweeting depictions of the biblical Flight into Egypt (Mary, Joseph, and infant Jesus on horseback) from 16th-century sculpture and stained glass; another tweet suggests the recursive history of refugees in transit through Hungary in particular. [Medievalists.net also linked to an article about medieval refugees fleeing Hungary during Mongol invasions.]

Popular media (especially social media) has deployed the adjective “medieval” to varied ends: sometimes the term targets refugees themselves, but other times refers to the perceived mentalities of governments (European as well as Middle Eastern) in response to this crisis [I won't link to particular examples here, but a quick search for "medieval" and "refugee crisis" certainly brings up examples].

In mainstream news media, people of varied religious backgrounds are discussing the ethics of refugee welcome, including

• Jewish traditions of welcome for strangers (from The Guardian, September 5).

• Coverage of the Pope's very recent call for Europe's Catholics to welcome refugees (The Washington Post, September 6).

• Forceful critiques of nativism and Islamophobia in responses to the refugee crisis in Europe and online (The Conversation, June 24).

Historical context: In an earlier conversation on twitter (after the mass murders in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, SC, and subsequent news coverage of an online racist screed attributed to the shooter), Karl Steel stated that we as medievalists must be prepared to disrupt racists’ idea of "Europe." As indicated in the article about nativism and xenophobia linked above, the refugee situation has laid bare political anxieties over a "Muslim takeover" of Europe, and related fantasies of a white, Christian nation can become the implicit or overt basis for excluding refugees from over land or sea—and not only in Europe but also across the so-called “Global North” of industrialized countries (e.g., Australia, Canada, New Zealand, United States).

Part II: Discomforts of Analogy

[Top half of image: The opening to The Man of Law's Tale (illus. Edward Burne-Jones) in The Kelmscott Chaucer (William Morris, 1896) depicts Constance set adrift on a rudderless ship. 

Bottom half of image: In the opening scene of the 2003 BBC adaptation of The Man of Law's Tale (written by Olivia Hetreed, directed by Julian Jarrold), Constance is a Nigerian refugee.]

In addition to addressing a broader historical view of "Europe" and its meanings over time, how might medievalists think more carefully about analogies made between the lives of medieval people and refugees today?

• The Refugee Tales Walk (mentioned in Part I) provocatively invites people to contemplate similarities between the plight of present-day refugees and experiences of medieval travelers, with a clear ethical and political objective: building compassion and solidarity with displaced peoples and using art and storytelling to combat prejudice.

• In a blog post from over a year ago, Steve Mentz reflected on Caroline Bergvall's book Drift (2014), a work that juxtaposes the Anglo-Saxon elegy "The Seafarer" with the story of a boat of Algerian refugees that was seen—but not rescued—by NATO vessels in March 2011.

• Chaucer's The Man of Law's Tale tells the story of Constance, a tempest-tossed and much-imperiled protagonist. Her story begins in Rome, but her subsequent transit to (Muslim) Syria and (pagan but Christianizing) Britain—with many travails and dangers in between—have invited comparisons between this story and refugee experiences in the present. In a 2003 adaptation of The Canterbury Tales for the BBC, six tales were set in modern multiethnic Britain. The Man of Law's Tale (written by Olivia Hetreed and directed by Julian Jarrold) casts Constance as Nigerian refugee who mysteriously washes ashore in northern Britain—and the story goes on to consider modern-day complications of race, trauma, religious community, and cultural assimilation. This adaptation is complete with a scheming mother-in-law figure and courtroom drama scene (all present in Chaucer's original), and I've found this attentive adaptation useful when teaching my medieval literature classes. [For more about this production, see Susan Yager's 2007 article; I also address some linguistic aspects of this adaptation in a 2014 essay collection.]

I'll end this post by referring, in a roundabout way, to my own discussion of medieval Constance narratives (Chaucer's rendition as well as analogues by Boccaccio, Gower, and Trivet) in my book Trading Tongues (2013). The focus of my analysis on that book was on perpetual disorientation of the protagonist and she moves across space and language. Earlier this year, Pamela Troyer reviewed my book in the Rocky Mountain Review, and I was intrigued by her account of how she brought my chapter into her classroom. I quote these paragraphs here not because of what Troyer says about my book itself but what rather for her attentive reflections on the varied perspectives and life experiences of students from recent immigrant backgrounds:

After reading Trading Tongues, I experimented with Hsy's ideas in a required course I teach that includes readings from Canterbury Tales. The class had students majoring in literary studies, secondary or elementary education, and creative writing. Three of them were bilingual and most of them from area public schools, which are now multilingual communities; the Denver Public Schools posts its "top languages spoken" as Spanish, Vietnamese, Arabic, Somali, Amharic, Nepali, and Russian. Since we only spend six weeks on Chaucer's works, I have never assigned the Man of Law's Tale, but after reading Hsy's treatment of the Custance story [...] I wondered if the students might identify with her traumatic experience of geographical and linguistic displacement. [...]

I fully expected the class to be perplexed and stymied by the strange elements of the story and by Custance's impossible travel trajectory—the story is so medieval!—but a surprising number of the students related to her vulnerability and powerlessness. They saw her as a recognizable victim of racial violence, religious persecution, and sexual harassment, bartered by "pimps" or "slave traders." A student whose parents immigrated from Guatemala wrote with unexpected clarity that Custance "is just like many women in the world today, a social outcast with no access to justice except the fantasy of God's grace." My students found Custance's peripatetic suffering plausible and accessible. What they found "medieval" and unrealistic was the conclusion of the story: Custance survives her travails (the French root of travel) without having been raped or beaten and without losing her healthy child to kidnappers or death. Unrealistically she is reunited with her people in material comfort in her homeland. One first-generation American summarized it as "typical immigrant wishful thinking." (Troyer 98)

Troyer's discussion tantalizingly ends there, and there's much more about this classroom experience that could be explored. How does an affective response to a seemingly alien medieval world change how one thinks about (im)migraiton, desire, hope, nostalgia, life trajectories? I'll just end this posting by asking few questions. What are the ethical investments of medievalists in this current humanitarian crisis (or any crisis, for that matter)? How (or should) we address urgent present-day concerns in our scholarship, in our classrooms, online, or in the streets?

UPDATES [September 8]:

• Steve Mentz: "Notes toward a Migrancy Syllabus" (September 8)
• Cynthia Haven: "'Mountainish inhumanity': Thomas More, Shakespeare, and the refugee crisis" (September 7)

TODAY: Whan That Aprille Day 2015 #WhanThatAprilleDay15

by JONATHAN HSY

Image search results for #WhanThatAprilleDay15 on twitter (11:20am EST). 

For current images, go here.

Hey ITM readers! TODAY is Whan That Aprille Day!

Last year, we responded to a call from the Chaucer blogger (@LeVostreGC on twitter) to launch a new holiday to celebrate old, dead, and/or zombie languages (check out the 2015 iteration of this open call; and here's the recording we posted last year featuring some of the ITM bloggers reading texts in Latin, Middle English, and Old English). The Global Chaucers blog celebrated the first holiday (somewhat mischievously) by posting the opening lines of the the General Prologue in twelve modern languages.

Whan That Aprille Day 2015 has already featured some notable participants. The TEAMS Middle English Texts Series (METS) staged a social media countdown throughout the month of March leading up to today (view the entire archive of tweets here); this effort was spearheaded by Jenny Boyar (@JennyBoyar on twitter). And check out this surprise video of METS staff reading from The Floure and the Leafe!

To join in on the fun, check out the #WhanThatAprilleDay15 hashtag on twitter and marvel at people all over the world tweeting in old languages. And, if you're so inclined, contribute something of your own!

#GWDH15 and Embodied Digital Communities: Openness, Danger, Care

by JONATHAN HSY

[First read JEFFREY’s moving post about loss and spaces of care.]

GW Digital Humanities Symposium 2015: DISRUPTING DH (poster by Shyama Rajendran).

[Click image to enlarge]

Dear ITM readers: It has been a while since I wrote one of my “post-conference blog posts,” and here I’d like to offer my reflections on DISRUPTING DH: a symposium held on January 30 and organized by the GW Digital Humanities Institute, in coordination with many units/programs across George Washington University.

This event brought together activists, students, publishers, members of the public, academics, and librarians to think critically about how communities create and use digital archives and other online media. Enacting a “big tent” vision of Digital Humanities (DH), we invited speakers and participants varied in rank, gender, and background (activists, academics, grad students, para-ac and alt-ac folks) and the day as a whole deliberately centered women and people of color (including participants who in other contexts identify as queer or are involved in LGBT communities). We gave no proscriptive directions to our speakers and varied modes of presentation emerged: everything from scripted papers (with or without slideshows) to more extemporaneous remarks. Some presenters have already made their materials public (links provided throughout this posting), and the event had an active twitter presence with an engaged audience well beyond the auditorium. Note for instance this impressive archive of #GWDH15 and #DisDH tweets gathered by @alothian (Alexis Lothian) and a curated collection of tweets by @transliterature (M.W. Bychowski).[1]

Our invited speakers included medievalists who are no doubt quite familiar to this blog’s readers: ITM’s own Eileen Joy (director, punctum books), Dorothy Kim (author of some of the most widely read/shared/retweeted postings on this blog!), and Angela Bennett Segler (creator of Material Piers). Non-medievalists included Jesse Stommel (Founder, Hybrid Pedagogy), Roopika Risam (Co-Founder, Postcolonial Digital Humanities), and Suey Park (Co-Founder, Feminist Killjoys). The event also follows a recent MLA session on Disrupting the Digital Humanities with a related collection (edited by Kim and Stommel) forthcoming from punctum books.

CRITICAL SPACES

Final roundtable at #GWDH15.

The day’s events began with an overarching question: how can different kinds of people come together to transform the spaces of the ARCHIVE, CLASSROOM, and IVORY TOWER?

In my own opening remarks (with my hat on as Co-Director of the DH Institute), I echoed Dorothy and Jesse’s call to reclaim “disruption” from its (over)use in corporate culture and Silicon Valley tech circles, and I maintain that we can be observant critics of discomforting spaces that surround us. I mentioned, for instance, my own unease with the histories of locations on my own campus: a dorm formerly named “Ivory Tower,” and a performance venue that was once racially segregated. In my view, digital archives and platforms offer an opportunity to both confront the histories of such spaces and shape new kinds of open communities.

ARCHIVE. The first session featured Angela Bennett Segler on “Medium Data—Machine Reading, Manual Correction, and the End of the Archive” [check out her reflections on this session, along with her archive of session tweets] and Dorothy Kim on “Disrupting the Medieval Archive: The Ethics of Digital Archives” [her prezi presentation is now online]. On her Transliterature blog, M.W. Bychowski (doctoral candidate and former Graduate Assistant to the DH Institute) offers an excellent summary of the session:

Bennett Segler and Kim set the tone for the rest of the day by grounding the disruption of DH in social justice, the invisible labor and exploitation of women, people of color, and other under-paid, under-publicized radical librarians who have been leaders in the movement to digital archives but have since been erased as institutions, directors and users who recode these projects as typically white male spaces. This is perhaps not surprising, notes Bennett Segler, “today’s revolution is tomorrow's institution” but this domesticating of women of color's digital labor can be resisted. Kim added that by refusing to see archives as a politically “neutral space” of universal access we can redirect social and financial capital back towards the exploited and forgotten progenitors who continue to revolutionize the field and disrupt the digital humanities.

As Dorothy notes in her posting on “divergent bodies” on ITM (and also in her excellent posting on twitter ethics), no archive is neutral and users are not always benevolent (in her talk and in the ITM posting, she notes the harassment that the @medievalpoc tumblr blogger has received from internet users who resist anything but a “monochrome” view of the historical past). Digital spaces—even medievalist ones—can invite trolls, harassment, and abuse, and we must explicitly prioritize the safety of our various communities, digital and embodied. [Just yesterday, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo admitted that “we suck at dealing with abuse” (particularly harassment and threats directed at women) and we’ll see how the company addresses this.]

CLASSROOM. This session turned to digital pedagogy and public humanities. Jesse Stommel’s “Stand and Unfold Yourself: MOOCs, Networked Learning, and the Digital Humanities” offered a preview of a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) on “Shakespeare in Community.” This endeavor seeks to “invert” the MOOC by not thinking along the lines of a “sage on the stage” (one professor, bazillion students) but rather setting the stage for dispersed authority (expertise arising from varied experiences of students, actors, poets, academics, enthusiasts). A clear point from Jesse’s talk was that we must not police the boundaries of “what counts” as DH. Roopika Risam’s “Toward a Postcolonial Digital Pedagogy” considered how even more conventional classrooms can also crowdsource knowledge (her example was students creating on online map-based Cultural Atlas of Global Blackness). While the content and presentation styles in this session were quite distinct, a few shared themes emerged. Both speakers agreed that teaching can mean abdicating your own authority and letting expertise emerge from students, and discomfort (on the part of the teacher and students alike) can be a productive pedagogical tool.

IVORY TOWER. The final pairing of the day included Eileen Joy who offered a forceful case for “The Importance of Illegitimacy.” In her artfully stylized talk, Eileen reflected on the need for independent “out-stitutions” and publishers (including open access venues) that can create new forums and new intellectual publics. In making a call to change a culture of authority into a shared ethics of care, her talk anticipated an intimate presentation by Suey Park. In “Theorizing Transformative Justice in a Digital Era,” Park not only revealed how activist communities can themselves engage in behavior that is bullying, controlling, or abusive; she also worked through racialized language of "toxicity" that has been used to describe activists and women of color on twitter, and she stressed the need to create online communities whose members safeguard each other and foster transformative (rather than reparative) justice. One of the most intriguing aspects of this pairing of speakers was how both talks revealed the intertwining potential of creation and destruction. In her remarks introducing Suey, my wonderful colleague and poet Jennifer Chang likened Park to a lyric poet, observing that tweets are an expressive and constrained form—beautiful, and dangerous.

The concluding roundtable including all the presenters was co-moderated by me and Lori Brister, founder of the DH Graduate Working Group at GW. The discussion quickly reoriented itself toward students (especially graduate students being cultivated as the “future” of the profession), considering the structural inequalities and constraints many DH folks can face. How do we remain committed to our various causes or “labors of love,” and how do we also address the realities of uncompensated labor or inequalities inherent in our various spaces?

COMPASSION, CARE, FUTURES

Conclusion of #GWDH15: roundtable participants conversing with audience.

I end with an observation about #GWDH15 from doctoral student Alan Montroso, who blogged from his experience as an audience member:

Although I had to miss the presentations by Jesse Stommel and Roopika Risam, it was a pleasure to see Stommel lead the collective of speakers out of their chairs during the roundtable discussion and onto the edge of the stage, thereby breaking the fourth wall that marked their bodies as authoritative and their space as exclusive. This act evidenced a real commitment to the democratization of information that each of the speakers desires, as well as the group’s willingness to relinquish the power granted them by the Academy – at least temporarily. Sure, the act was rather symbolic, but it was a risk nonetheless, and one which underscores the precariousness of our field and the digital humanities as a sub-discipline.

One of the aspects of #GWDH15 that will stick with me for some time were its moments of disturbance and discomfort. In the discussions that have unfolded in person and online (note JEFFREY’s public Facebook thread, for instance), I’ve been thinking a lot about how “breaking the fourth wall” (via blogging, tweeting, or otherwise putting oneself “out there” through publication or presentations) can be an empowering experience—but it can also make a person vulnerable. I do hope that our medievalist/academic/etc. spaces will increasingly become ones where we all feel safe and can be more adventurous.

CALL TO ACTION

The call for sessions at the next BABEL gathering (“Off the Books” in Toronto in October) has been extended to February 15, and the New Chaucer Society (NCS) Congress in London 2016 is now accepting submissions by April 15—and it’s very exciting to note that NCS includes some bold, risky options.[2] As the ITM community thinks ahead to these events, I hope we can all be more mindful of “divergent bodies” (to use Dorothy Kim’s coinage) moving through our professional / personal / public / digital environments. How can we be the change we want to see in the world?

I’m so very gratified that ITM has become a venue not only for talking about “medieval things” but also a way to provoke attentive, earnest conversations about what it means to be in medias res (“in the middle of things”)—to live with others in real life and also in variously mediated digital spheres.

If I can end this blog post with my own “call to action,” I’d just say this: let’s try to take more risks with how we think about our materials, experiment with writing styles and presentation formats, and carefully consider how we perform in our shared spaces. If you’re in a position of power (tenured professor, administrator, mentor, advisor, trustee, benefactor, journal editor, chair, peer reviewer, hiring committee member, the list goes on), support and defend people who take risks and chart different paths. Let’s create conditions where we can move out of our comfort zones and re-code what it means to work in/alongside/outside of humanist communities.

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[1] For a summary of events note M.W. Bychowski’s overview on the GW English blog (with other links) and a more detailed summary on her Transliterature blog.

[2] Katie Walter and I are co-organizing the “Corporealities” thread at NCS which includes a number of great collaborative endeavors.