#RaceB4Race and how you can help create a better future for the field

If you have been following the hashtags #ASS #ISAS #medievaltwitter #Shakerace and more on social media you know the disheartening struggles that continue to unfold in the field ... as well as some of the profoundly good interventions well underway. The latter center around the foregrounding and amplification of the voices of scholars of color, especially early career. In the aftermath of the submissions from Medievalists of Color being rejected from a major medieval conference, it was obvious (to some at least) that there had to be a better way: a door that opens and sustains community, a place of welcome, a shelter for forging a better future for the past. This kind of access is wholly consonant with the ASU charter and with Ayanna Thompson as the new director of ACMRS it made sense to hold something at ASU if possible as an affirmative counter-vision. The project that came from this impetus was a convergence of MOC and #Shakerace called Race Before Race, which through (admittedly cobbled together) funding enabled ten extraordinary scholars to have the space, time and agency to found a new kind of community. Race Before Race 2 just unfolded in DC in partnership with the Folger. Ayanna Thompson as director of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies is an absolute rockstar -- and the now twenty scholars who are the guiding geniuses of the collective have made it clear that there really is a better way.

We will soon be setting up a dedicated #RaceB4Race account to fund young in the field as well as independent & under-resourced scholars of color to access future symposia, enabling even more to be a part of these gatherings as they continue. In the meantime, however, starting immediately ANY donation that anyone now makes at the ACMRS website will be used to fund this participation and inclusion. Just choose the "Public Programs" option and know that any resources you provide go directly to building a more capacious field at a time when too many seem intent on policing its boundaries. Build doors not walls. And when the doors are built keep them open and place a welcome mat in front.

Follow the link below if you would like to help. And thanks. It means a lot!

https://acmrs.asu.edu/about/donate

Ravens, Doves, Stowaways: Some Thoughts From Noah's Ark

(From the ongoing project Noah's Arkive: Towards an Ecology of Refuge, by Jeffrey Cohen and Julian Yates)

This story is about waywardness, about being peripheral to the story and making the best of it, finding yourself unable or unwilling to participate in expected conclusions. A satisfying ending is built upon the casting away as jetsam the alternatives, the tales full of challenge that cannot culminate in the desired destination, that might even wreck the narrative ship. The Queen Mary Psalter (BL Royal MS 2 B VII, c.1310-1320) offers one of our favorite multiplications of narrative trajectory within a visualization of the seabound ark. The obedient lines (beginnings to ends) upon which closure depends are disrupted by errant spirals, metaphors with unexpected transport, a proliferation of alternative plots. Aboard the vessel that should be the focal point Noah appears twice. On the left he stands on the deck grasping two birds, a svelte dove and bulky raven [une columbe and un corbeu, as the Anglo-Norman text reads underneath]. Both birds look forwards and upwards with him, the trio filled with a shared expectancy of something better to come, some landing or event that will at last enable the voyage to terminate. On the right Noah appears within an ark window, leaning out with upraised hand for a bird’s return. Time has elapsed. The ship’s enormous rudder looms to his side, suggesting counterintuitively that this toy of the waters can be steered, leaving open the question of control and destination. The dove is now winging its way back to Noah’s waiting hand, the expected olive branch clasped in its little beak. The raven meanwhile has decided to go off plot, to ignore Noah’s demands and satisfy its own creaturely appetites. The bird curves into the snug bend of the upper left corner, king of an island where leaves that should have been plucked and returned to Noah sprout luxuriantly. The raven is too busy to note the demands of its mission. It plunges its beak deep into the eye of horse’s head awash on this emerging shore. Given the sweet life that the raven can make for itself in the flotsam of the deluge, why would the bird return? 

Two trajectories then: the dove’s forth and back that enable movement towards completion of the narrative arc; and the raven’s veering into a space of no returns, a disaster born paradise that provides everything it needs but nothing to trigger return (it will certainly not be winging back with chunks of scavenged flesh). The actions of the dove are fully part of the biblical narrative; the raven’s fate is never there narrated. Yet by the early fourteenth century a long history existed of depicting the raven’s delight in the eyes of the dead; these illustrations possess no textual authority. The raven is an actor who has gone off script, but has done it so long that its story has become a supplemental reality: it would be strange at this point in history to depict a raven who had not found a feast, as if the dove had never grabbed an olive branch. The two birds work together, parallel but asymmetric. The ark and its many passengers are metaphorically all doves: they know where they are going and they are eager to get there and for the rainbow to shine. Genesis attests as much. But this psalter image is as full of corvid tarrying as dovish destination, fated denouement abandoned for dangerous attunement to the mess of the world. Immediately under the ark animal corpses float on a transparent sea, unmoored from gravity, whirled with arresting tranquility. Among these dead beasts is a brightly painted bird, upside down and drowned, a reminder that the dove and raven had kin not admitted to the shelter that they enjoyed. Perhaps that is why the dove is so obedient: it realizes with gratitude the magnitude of Noah’s choice, the unlikelihood of its having been among the conserved. Perhaps that is why the raven is errant: it realizes the price of salvation, the legions denied accommodation so that the pairs could be housed. Meanwhile two men swim in the water, not yet become the carrion into which their animal companions have been transformed. Although far from at ease, the pair do not seem especially distressed. Nor with their brightly slashed and striped clothing and carefully coiffed hair are they in the least bit generic: the figures seem to convey particular persons rather than universal sinful humanity. They are unexpectedly alive in a place of death. Their presence cannot help but to recall the illustration of the loading the ark on a previous folio, where father Noah is forcibly carrying up the ladder into the ship a son who kicks and looks back at his family and the animals still outside.

 

It is strange to see living people outside the ark this late in the Flood, since the rains have ceased and the boat is hurrying towards its mountaintop. No intimation is given that this day is the two men’s last, and yet how can it not be so? The ark is limned by suffering to come, even as the waters recede. But that is not all. Directly beneath the boat, the devil is emerging from a hole, drill in hand. Now that the story of the ark is coming to its close le diable is swimming to freedom, intent on ensuring that the world will never lack the unruly plots to which he dedicates himself, the deviant stories of sex and sin that caused the Flood’s arrival in the first place. We knew this escape was coming from an earlier illustration, back when the ark is being built by an axe-armed Noah. The devil in the unconvincing form of a man convinces Mrs. Noah to assist him in stowing away. She plies her husband with wine and finds a means (6r). Now, the voyage nearly complete and the dove and raven having been released, we can see the devil departing under water, through the bottom of the boat. The tail of a snake has been pulled through the hole that the devil has fashioned, the poor creature become an unwitting plug so that the ship does not sink. Strange to think that the devil cares for those on board, but stranger still to think of a devil who would want a world not sufficiently stocked with a diversity of actors for the dramas that he stages. We do not know the precise origin of the story of Satan secretly sheltered aboard the ark, but it is hard not to see it told in part to explain why the world should be just as wicked after the deluge as ever it was. Perhaps too this stowaway tale conveys a desire not to leave one of the most interesting characters in Christian biblical storytelling to drown. Their eyes forever gazing heavenward, Noah and his dove are oblivious to what unfolds in the waters. The devil, the carrion, and the swimming figures are all part of the raven’s world, a space which once noticed disturbs perspective and trajectory, replete with suffering but also thrumming with life. Denouement gets postponed in the process, the repeopling of the world traded for an embrace of being at sea. For a while.

The ages long trajectory of Noah’s ark, rudder forcibly set in the direction of Ararat and rainbow, has been constantly disrupted by the raven and his kin.

Game of Thrones’ Peasants are a Problem of White Supremacy—and Its Victims, too

Peasants are the Real Victims of Game of Thrones’ final episodes, and in the real world, so are we.

By Cord J. Whitaker

In Game of Thrones, as the Mother of Dragons soars above and burns everything in sight, the huddled, pleading peasantry sets the scene for a showdown between Jon Snow’s ethics and Daenerys’ desire for vengeance. But the battle is really between a convenient plot device and historical reality. The peasants are that battle’s victims. 

Courtesy of HBO

Combustible as they are, they are also fuel for white supremacy.

Season 8, Episode 5 begins with Cersei enacting a plan we knew was coming. The peasants who live outside King’s Landing are racing to get inside the city walls. Even a casual viewer who has only started watching in this, the show’s final season, would know that Cersei is planning to use the people as a human shield. She, as Daenerys flatly puts it, considers her rival’s mercy a weakness. Dany has learned a few lessons about weakness, though, since she nearly lost the Slaver’s Bay city of Mereen because she freed the slaves but did not kill the masters. She was too merciful. She will not let that happen again. Cersei, of course, considers Dany’s signature act, the act of freeing slaves—let alone sparing their defeated masters—already too merciful. Too weak.

Soon the camera pans in from the racing crowd to focus on a mother and her young daughter—six or seven years old perhaps. As the mother drags her daughter along, attempting to keep her from being trampled in the fray, the girl clutches a wooden horse figurine. We know these characters will be minor but significant. The viewer already wants them to survive.

The feeling is only amplified when the same mother-daughter duo helps Arya Stark. Our trained assassin Night King-killing heroine is apparently no match for a stampeding crowd of Kings Landingers when she is nearly trampled to death. Until the mother reappears in the crowd and offers her hand and pulls her up. Arya is soon separated from the duo again. A significant time passes before Arya encounters them once more. Now, Dany and Drogon, her nearly eponymously named dragon, have almost completed their task. The city is in ruins, death is all around, the killing is no longer discriminate. Dany and her forces—even the usually quite moral Unsullied general Greyworm—are burning, stabbing, and beating unarmed men, women, and children. When Arya, careening through the ash-strewn streets, stumbles into an entryway, she finds a mass of huddled women and children. Ever the hero, she commands, “You can’t stay here. You have to keep moving.” “We can’t go out there,” one woman responds. “You have to,” says Arya. “Everyone out there is dead,” the woman retorts. “If you stay here, you’ll die!” Arya exclaims. She grabs the only two people willing to trust her—the peasant mother and daughter. The three flee down the street together, until the mother is injured by a passing horse ridden by what appears to be a Dothraki warrior—i.e., a member of Team Daenerys. Arya and the daughter help her up, but she is too injured. They can’t move quickly enough. She begs Arya, “Take her!” Arya pulls the girl along, but she resists and runs back to her mother who is now collapsed in the street. Dany and Drogon approach from the air. Fire engulfs everything. When Arya awakes at the end of the episode, she and the viewer are treated to a view of the mother and daughter’s bodies, charred black and in a death embrace. The girl still clutches her horse figurine, also charred black. 

If Arya is dismayed by the indiscriminate killing, Jon Snow is all the more disturbed. The episode features more than a few scenes of Jon staring at one atrocity, and then another, in horror. It is as if he has never participated in the violence of war. But he has. In one case, Jon catches a member of Team Daenerys preparing to rape a pleading woman. Jon stops him, and then kills him. 

The near rape scene, along with Arya’s mother-daughter duo, draws an ethical comparison between Jon, and with him Starks in general, and Daenerys, who burns and pillages from the air. We get the sense that Dany and Jon’s romantic relationship probably won’t survive. The viewer would do well to remember that Dany, a victim of assault herself, certainly would not approve of any of her retinue committing rape. But she is busy burning everything and everyone in sight and is not on the ground to witness war crimes or punish warriors for them. Jon is left to avenge the peasant where he can and to wrestle with his girlfriend-aunt’s willingness to treat them as collateral damage. By the end of the episode, Jon looks like the good guy.    

Cersei is defeated and, presumably, dead. (The Sopranos-style fade-to-black leaves one to wonder.) In Episode 6, the throne of the Seven Kingdoms will fall to its Targaryen heir, and whether that will be Jon or Dany is playing out on the backs of Kings Landing’s peasants. In Season 8, the peasants are but pawns in a queen’s, and king’s, game. 

The peasants are not only Dany’s victims. They are Jon’s, too. Even more importantly, they are also the victims of Song of Ice and Fire writer George R.R. Martin and HBO showrunners D.B. Weiss and David Benioff.

Martin, Weiss, and Benioff have claimed that they want to combine “the realism of historical fiction with some of the appeal of fantasy,” and that they seek to present something like the ‘real’ Middle Ages. But the huddled masses of peasantry we encounter in Episode 5 are a simplistic and unrealistic representation of medieval tenant farmers. The so-called ‘peasants’ revolts’ that rocked England and Europe in 1380 and 1381 are a prime example of peasant power. In response to what they considered unfair taxation, farmers in England rose up against their lords, the members of the burgeoning merchant class, and Church and secular officials. In England, they streamed into London, murdered well-to-do merchants, brutally beheaded the Archbishop of Canterbury, and negotiated with the king from the banks of the Thames. He floated on a barge in the middle of the river from what he hoped was a safe distance. The peasants had identified and threatened his mother and her retinue as they returned to London at the end of a journey. These peasants were not people who feared royal power. 

Nor were they afraid to use institutions to challenge their superiors. We have records of litigation in which farmers challenged lords who behaved too oppressively, and local manor courts made up of peasants had the right to fine the lord. As medieval historian Christopher Dyer points out, medieval peasants lived in “substantial houses” and preeminent British historian of the Middle Ages Terry Jones points out that “the amount of work required to pay rent and taxes was probably pretty similar to that needed now.” While the show has had some moments in which stereotypical power dynamics were inverted—such as Cersei’s walk of shame when, not yet on the throne, she was paraded naked through the city and pelted with rotten food and excrement as an act of forced contrition for her sins—for the most part, the common people have been presented as hapless and in awe of, or grateful for, the power of their lords, ladies, kings, and queens. This is not the real Middle Ages.

Unfortunately, Martin, Weiss, and Benioff are not the only people who believe that the peasant cowering before a nobility with unchecked power represents the real Middle Ages. I tip my hat to Helen Young of Deakin University in Australia; she has spent countless hours examining white supremacist websites for their medievalism. One telling comment on the well known site Stormfront reads:

The belief that everyone was a slave during the Middle Ages is a liberal lie. Serfs were serfs, and happy that way. Lords were happy as Lords, and Kings likewise. Society was nearly flawless and prosperous in Europe and Asia under a Feudal economy and government. 

If serfs were happy as serfs, it is because they were not the weaklings bowed before the power of lords and kings that Game of Thrones presents. On the contrary, the Stormfront writer longs for strict and simple hierarchy. Martin has claimed that “the class structures in places like [medieval Europe] had teeth. They had consequences. And people were brought up from their childhood to know their place and to know that [sic] duties of their class and the privileges of their class.” The Stormfront writer wants us to return to this Middle Ages. 

Martin’s interpretation and the Stormfront commenter’s ideal of the Middle Ages is not one in which power is shared. Perhaps this is why, despite many speculations that Dany and Jon could marry and many viewers’ hopes that they would, the idea is quickly dashed by Dany’s longtime advisor Lord Varys in Season 8, Episode 4 when Tyrion suggests it. Dany, Varys opines, would never share power. Why would she? After all, Game of Thrones’is not a medieval world in which a court made up of peasants can decide to fine their lord on behalf of other peasants.   

Game of Thrones comes to its end in an age when the Middle Ages have become a rallying point for white nationalism and supremacy. When white nationalists marched on Charlottesville in August 2017, they bore medieval-style shields; the insignia of the Holy Roman Empire, founded in the Middle Ages; and banners emblazoned with medieval runes. On March 15, 2019, an Australian man stormed into two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand and killed 51 people. He injured another 49. His arsenal and battle gear were covered with references to the Middle Ages, from the black sun inspired by the designs on early medieval Merovingian discs—Heinrich Himmler made it into a symbol for Nazi Germany’s SS in the 1930s—to the name of Charles Martel, the Frankish leader who in 732 defeated a Muslim army that was advancing on the French city of Tours. Martel was grandfather to Charlemagne, the first emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. How we interpret the history of the Middle Ages is a life and death matter. 

And so is how we interpret its peasantry. Much white supremacist medievalism draws its power from two ideas: first, that medieval Europe was homogeneously white (and the peasant masses in Episode 5 were, from what I could tell, all white); and second, that a young white man can and should can claim spiritual nobility, a spiritual knightliness, and the entitlements that come with it. In fact, the Italian philosopher and self-appointed medievalist who inspired Benito Mussolini’s fascist racism has been connected with Steve Bannon and is cited outright by alt-right leader Richard Spencer. According to him, the “exoteric tradition represented by devotional Christianity” was of an “inferior character” to the “higher forms of spirituality” practiced by the likes of the Knights Templar. A peasant could attain knighthood if he only tapped into his superlative spiritual worth. It is known that economic disadvantage plays a role in the development of alt-right and other white supremacist attitudes. As long as peasants are portrayed as downtrodden masses, then young white men in America, Europe, and the West more broadly who feel economically disadvantaged due to geographical location, educational level, or multi-generational poverty are encouraged to fashion themselves the peasants who will rise to become knights. The narrative is seductive. To a certain extent, it is the narrative animating Jon Snow’s character, and even King Arthur’s. But it is faulty and, when pushed to its extremes, deadly.   

Game of Thrones has made for exceptional TV precisely because it has shied away from facile conclusions and instead has focused on the uncertainty—between justice and injustice, between lies and truth—that characterizes the real world. The depiction of a completely powerless peasantry readily herded into the killing fields is not in keeping with the more complicated spirit of a story of political intrigue. You can never really know whose side someone like Varys—or Tyrion—is on, so why should you know that the peasants will fall for Cersei’s tricks or suffer at the hands of any king or queen? Worse yet, the depiction fuels the fire for white supremacists who wish to see the world in black and white. They can easily imagine themselves peasant victims, and they can delightfully imagine themselves hero knights who rise up to defend their people. That fantasy is what was behind carrying faux medieval shields at Charlottesville, but it shouldn’t be what’s behind an interest in watching Game of Thrones. 

If the showrunners can right the ship for a final episode in which Dany doesn’t have to viciously kill Jon to retain the throne, or in which Jon doesn’t have to save humanity from the Mad King Redux by killing Dany, Game of Thrones has the chance to do a new thing by showing its viewers that power in our world doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game. If there can be room for more than one person—representing various genders, races, creeds, and class backgrounds—sharing power at a round table à la King Arthur’s, then racist ideologies become a whole lot less attractive. 

If, on the other hand, Game of Thrones concludes while doing TV business as usual, then racism and the Cersei-style manipulation of class that feeds it will continue uninterrupted. The peasants will remain victims even when they think they’ve become knights, whether in the show’s world or ours.

Cord J. Whitaker researches and teaches late medieval English literature and studies medieval religious conflict and the history of race at Wellesley College. He is one of the bloggers at In the Middle. His book entitled “Black Metaphors: How Modern Racism Emerged from Medieval Race-Thinking” will be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in September 2019.

Race and Periodization: a #RaceB4Race Symposium

For your calendar, an event sponsored by the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Following upon the inaugural Race Before Race [#RaceB4Race] event, a collaboration of medievalists and early modernists held at Arizona State University in January 2019, this conference will foreground the relationship between race and historical periodization. Medievalists and early modernists have long grappled with the meaning and use of their own historical period designations as well as the strictures of periodization itself. This event seeks to explore how critical race theory can enable new insights about, approaches to, and critiques of periodization. Critical race theory situated in both historical and contemporary disciplines necessarily challenges assumptions about historical knowledge, theoretical borders, and scholarly dissemination and impact. This theoretical complex thus holds exciting potential to revolutionize the very terms of academic periodization in medieval and early modern studies. Setting this conference at the Folger Institute and building upon its recent focus on early modern race studies, the conference invites scholars of history, literature, and other disciplines to consider the intersection of critical race studies and historical periodization in terms of the theoretical, methodological, archival, activist, pedagogical, professional, temporal, and spatial implications.

Invited Speakers
Geraldine Heng (University of Texas) and Francesca Royster (DePaul University) will open the conference on Thursday evening at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

On Friday and Saturday at Arizona State University’s Barrett & O’Connor Washington Center, eight speakers will deliver presentations and lead sessions on the topics outlined above:

Dennis Britton (University of New Hampshire)
Ruben Espinosa, (University of Texas at El Paso)
Michael Gomez (New York University)
Wan-Chuan Kao (Washington & Lee University)
Carol Mejia LaPerle (Wright State University)
Su Fang Ng (Virginia Tech)
Mary Rambaran-Olm (Independent Scholar)
Michelle M. Sauer (University of North Dakota)
Haruko Momma (New York University) and Elisa Oh (Howard University) will serve as the conference’s respondents.

Schedule
Thursday evening through Saturday, 5 – 7 September 2019

REGISTER HERE

Information on travel aid HERE

Public Medievalism and the Rigor of Anti-Racist Critique

a guest post by Sierra Lomuto

Along with mainstream white America, Medieval Studies has undergone a racial awakening over the last few years, as the Trump presidency has emboldened and even sanctioned a rise in openly avowed white nationalism. The recent massacre against a Muslim community in Christchurch, New Zealand—Ōtautahi, Aotearoa—is the latest devastating example of white terrorism, where the shooter praised the U.S. president and was nearly condoned by an Australian senator. And as we have seen the racist medievalism in the terrorist’s manifesto, those of us who work in Medieval Studies have once again found ourselves confronted with the sinister links between our work and white supremacy. As a scholar of medieval literature, I know it is my responsibility to think about these connections, something I have urged my colleagues to do as well. And as we do, we can’t ultimately look past how whiteness inheres within the very construct of the medieval, and how Medieval Studies as a thing in itself poses a problem for all of us who believe in social and racial justice. 

“Medieval” refers specifically to the historical period between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance, a temporal construct that is inextricably tied to the spatial construct of Western Europe. And just as Western Europe has been constructed through (what bell hooks has so incisively named) the imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy, so too does the “medieval” carry this valence of power. It comes as no surprise, then, that for white supremacists, the “medieval” furnishes a heritage site for whiteness. Within their ideology, medieval imagery such as the Othala Rune, Tyr Rune, and Celtic Crosses serve as symbols that aim to transform that whiteness from an oppressive power structure into a cultural and ethnic heritage. They then assert this whiteness as a vulnerable identity under attack, one that needs protection from what they see as the genocidal threat of multiculturalism. For example, at the deadly Unite the Right rally in August 2017, where white supremacists converged in the name of protecting “white heritage” (specifically, to keep the Robert E. Lee statue from being taken down), the Othala Rune appeared prominently on many banners. This pan-Germanic runic letter means heritage and inheritance, particularly in relation to homeland. It has been appropriated as a white supremacist symbol since the 1930s, and it became the official symbol of the Prinz Eugen wing of the Nazi party in Croatia. Today, it is featured heavily within white supremacist circles. Not only did we see it at Charlottesville, but it is also a common tattoo and has even been commercialized.

One company sells numerous products branded with various white supremacist symbols, including medieval ones, such as shirts and buttons with the Othala rune, a Thor hammer with runes on it, and a shirt with a Celtic cross overlaid on the Confederate flag. The company’s tagline, “It’s not illegal to be white…yet,” reflects the myth of white genocide. At the same time, the accompanying logo is a white hand holding a noose, explicitly referencing the socially sanctioned extrajudicial killings of black people. We can see clearly how they present white violence as a justified necessity. These same ideologies motivated the Christchurch terrorist attack and informed the Australian senator’s tirade that seemed to endorse it.

This connection between the medieval and white supremacy is not new, and in fact the Christchurch terrorist cites inspiration from another white terrorist with racist medievalist fantasies. The events in Charlottesville, however, struck the loudest wake-up call for most academic medievalists. After Charlottesville, in what felt like an overnight turn, a field that had previously shunned discussions of race and racism became hungry for them. Over the last year and a half, we have seen an immense proliferation of conference sessions, symposia, think pieces, new dissertations, and new courses on both the whiteness of Medieval Studies and the racist appropriation of the “medieval” beyond academia. In a powerful essay about Anglo-Saxon Studies, in particular, Mary Rambaran-Olm describes the racism that has pushed many scholars of color out of the field, and academia in general.

There has also emerged a particular form of public medievalist discourse that focuses primarily on correcting racist misconceptions about the Middle Ages. While certainly useful, as it provides the public with an important education and demonstrates why studying the distant past still matters in the present, this work has largely been missing the rigor of anti-racist critique. Unfortunately, in one of the only published critiques of this work I’ve seen, a bravado of white masculinity prevented any chance of raising this issue for a productive public conversation. In fact, in the social media debate that followed Sam Fallon’s harsh Chronicle of Higher Ed article, it was difficult to see past all the mansplaining whiteness on both sides until Jenny Tan cut right through it in a brilliant twitter thread that named the problem for what it is: “white progressive self-importance that is really more about self-promotion than social or political principle.” Tan trenchantly elaborates on this point in another thread, where she describes precisely the kind of white ally-ship dominating public medievalist discourse.

The most popular example of this kind of work is The Public Medievalist’s series “Race, Racism, and the Middle Ages.” The series seems to approach the racist appropriation of the medieval as an external problem out there that threatens an innocent love for the medieval past. In other words, the series aims to reclaim the medieval past from white supremacists—placing it back in the hands of academic medievalists and cosplayers who hold a non-racist love for the medieval. There’s nothing particularly wrong with this aim, and it is certainly understandable, as no decent person wants to be associated with the same things as white supremacists. But this approach can inadvertently lead to a protection of white innocence rather than an anti-racist intervention. Of course, not all of the essays in the series reflect this type of scaffolding: for example, essays by Helen Young, Matthew Vernon, and Eric Weiskott (and certainly others) clearly frame their analyses of racist medievalisms through a framework informed by critical race studies. On the whole, however, the series is too invested in the innocence of good white people to see its own limitations for productive anti-racist critique.

In one particular essay about how we can hold onto medieval symbols that have been misappropriated, the author (likely unwittingly) defends racism—at least, the accidental kind. He suggests that these symbols can be saved by both signaling their non-racist meaning and learning to identify when they are wielded with racist intent or not; or, in cases where you can’t tell, to offer the benefit of the doubt to the bearer of the symbol. This argument necessarily centers white viewers who have the luxury—the privilege—of caring about intent when it comes to racism. In a series explicitly about opposing racism, it seems astounding that we would find an essay so irresponsibly protecting accidental racists. But it becomes less surprising when we glimpse the contributor list and see that it is nearly all white, or when we view the poster that captures the overall tenor of the series. The poster is clearly not informed by critical race studies, and it even praises “melting pot” societies—a problematic concept that is not about inclusion, but rather the assimilation of non-white cultures into white dominance. I called out the problem with this language on Facebook, and they subsequently revised it to “multicultural societies” for the version they now sell on their website (without signaling the rationale for the change, and thus profiting off the constructive feedback of people of color without acknowledging our labor), and I do wonder about their critical awareness of multiculturalism as well. The “melting pot” is about erasure; so in a twisted sense, the poster captures precisely how this series can erase people of color—both our bodies and our intellectual output—from its discourse on race and racism, while congratulating itself for doing good anti-racist work.

Even though the series editors are not race scholars or activists, or even scholars of color with experiential knowledge about racism, many medievalists turn to them as expert sources on how to teach race in their classrooms. Why does Medieval Studies accept non-experts as its leaders in this work? As race and racism have become trendy topics among medievalists, white (and predominantly male) medievalists have jumped on the bandwagon, claiming expertise they have not earned, and too many in the field sanction them—but why? It seems too simplistic to point to the patriarchal whiteness of Medieval Studies itself for an answer, but that is where we can find it: white men have always held the most authority in our field; and so, it seems, the field turns to them for leadership even in conversations about race and racism. How different would this series have been if its editors recognized their own lack of expertise on the topic they sought to promote? Perhaps they would have built a platform where black feminist theories, queer of color critiques, and other methodologies generally absent in Medieval Studies could begin to inform our analyses of racist uses of the Middle Ages. Instead, The Public Medievalist and our field gives us more whiteness, more white feelings, and more white supremacy even as we are told these are the things they are fighting against.

Institutional Change

Racism is about the structural ways in which people of color, and particularly black and indigenous peoples, have been disenfranchised by various forms of violence and oppression. Anti-racist strategies for correcting racist appropriations must necessarily address structural change within the institutions that have facilitated not only racist appropriations, but also the conditions that produce white terrorism in the first place. Andrew Elliott has argued that “as medievalists we ought to refocus our attention away from the direct referent of a given medievalism, and onto the context in which it is used as well as the mechanism by which that medievalism is disseminated” (3). The historical accuracy of the referent isn’t what matters: what matters are the conditions and contexts surrounding the referent in our own time. Disrupting the narrative of a white Middle Ages protects Medieval Studies from accusations of racism, but it does little to address racism itself. In other words, as we assert that medievalists don’t only study and promote the histories of white people, we also overlook how we do promote whiteness through the disciplinary construct of the “medieval.”

Seeta Chaganti’s essays for Public Books about both the Trump administration and the Confederate monuments, Jonathan Hsy’s essay about antiracist medievalism and the Chinese Exclusion Act, as well as Peter Baker’s reflections post-Charlottesville on the Medievalists of Color blog, give us excellent examples of public medievalist scholarship that does serve anti-racism. These pieces not only center people of color in their discussions (a bare minimum expectation), but also recognize the complexity of our experiences with race and racism, as well as accurately identify white supremacy as a power structure that doesn’t merely reside within the hearts and minds of individuals, but within oppressive institutions that thrive on everyday, insidious racial violence.

Significant strides have been made toward institutional equity over the past few years, notably in the Medieval Academy of America, which instituted a Diversity & Inclusivity Committee last year. Their recent annual conference took the theme “The Global Turn,” deliberately breaking away from its more traditional program, which has been known for its emphasis on Western European and Christian history. Yet, strikingly absent from their line-up of keynote speakers, new fellow inductions, and prestigious award winners were scholars of color. A name most glaringly absent from these lists was Geraldine Heng, an early founder of Global Medieval Studies whose voice in the field has also provided necessary critiques regarding its political implications. But of course progress takes time and we can’t expect overnight change. The field has shown a genuine concern about its link to white nationalist movements, and even a central institution like the MAA is mobilizing toward solutions.

Medieval Studies is investing energy and resources into inclusivity initiatives, and it is certainly about time. But we must not confuse the institutionalization of diversity work with anti-racist or decolonizing work. The former protects the institution—in this case, Medieval Studies—whereas the latter would tear it down.

The overwhelming whiteness of the field and the public appropriation of the medieval by white supremacists are undoubtedly related to how the field has been formulated. Sometimes too much focus is put on distinguishing ourselves from them out there so that we can allow white supremacy to be seen as something existing outside of ourselves, as if white supremacy were not something we uphold in the institutions we serve. Describing this dynamic, Sara Ahmed has written, “The reduction of racism to the figure of ‘the racist’ allows structural or institutional forms of racism to recede from view, by projecting racism onto a figure that is easily discarded (not only as someone who is ‘not me’ but also as someone who is ‘not us,’ who does not represent a cultural or institutional norm)” (150). It may be that a field like Medieval Studies as such needs to be dismantled and something else in its stead built up from the ground. Geraldine Heng, as a founder of the concept and someone who has thought about the “global medieval” for decades, has suggested we move toward “early globalities” as an alternative, thereby shedding a restrictive Eurocentric term when studying an interconnected past. And, as Adam Miyashiro has explained—it really is about time that scholars stop using the blatantly white supremacist settler colonial terms "Anglo-Saxon" and "Anglo-Saxonist" to describe themselves and their work.   

If we want to be anti-racist, we need to start thinking more radically about how we can reformulate our field in our teaching, graduate training, and public outreach. These priorities will necessarily require institutional change, and may even mean leaving behind this thing we currently call Medieval Studies.

Thanks to Leila K. Norako, the other editors and co-bloggers of In the Middle, Mary Rambaran-Olm, and Adam Miyashiro for their excellent feedback on this essay.

Sierra Lomuto is an Assistant Professor of English at Macalester College, where she also currently holds a Consortium for Faculty Diversity Postdoctoral Fellowship. She earned her PhD in 2018 from the University of Pennsylvania.

statement of values

by the ITM bloggers

Today seems a good day to remind our readers of the In the Middle statement of values, which we re-publish in various forms as the times demand.


ITM is a feminist, anti-racist, queer affirmative, refuge making space. We repudiate white supremacist dreams of both the Middle Ages and contemporary nations. We foster visions of the past and future that privilege diversity, community and welcome over intolerance, segregation, violence and willed forgetting. We reject fear of difference. We reject misogyny. We reject homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia.

We turn to the past to imagine better futures.

We stand with all those who on this day and every day feel excluded, endangered, in despair, especially when the past is weaponized against them. We renew our offer to build community with you, now and always, in as many venues as possible -- from the classroom to the internet to the pages of books to the streets.

We stand against walls. We reject hate. We affirm a better way forward that builds upon the best of what communities can build in order to live justly together.


17 March 2019

#WhanThatAprilleDay19

by LeVostre GC

Goode Friendes and Readers of Yn The Middel and readeres and scolers and teacheres and studentes arounde the globe of the Erthe, this is Galfridus ‘Le Vostre GC’ Chaucer of twytter (@LeVostreGC): 

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

On the first daye of Aprille, 2019, lat us make tyme to take joye yn alle langages that are callid ‘old,’ or ‘middel,’ or ‘auncient,’ or ‘archaic,’ or, alas, even ‘dead.’ 

Thys feest hath the name ‘Whan That Aprille Day.’ For thys yeare yt ys: 'Whan That Aprille Day 19.' Forget nat the -le yn Aprille. #WhanThatAprilleDay19

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. Al thogh thys holidaye dyd start wyth blogges and twyterres about Middel Englisshe, yet let that nat limit yn no waye the reache and capaciousnesse of thys growinge holidaye. Everye olde language, everye poeme, everye place, everye voyce. All are welcome that come wyth love and understandinge to all. All are welcome that looke to the studye of the past nat to proppe up dustye tradiciouns but ynstead to builde a bettir and more ynclusive and peaceful and lovinge future. We shal make merrye yn the magical dreamscape of 'social media,' and eke, yf we 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 2019, ye koude do eny of the followinge. Be sure to use the hasshe-tagge #WhanThatAprilleDay19 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 eaten of the icinge yn the hours of derkenesse bifor the celebracioun.) 

•  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. (Policy for cattes at eventes?)

•  And for maximum Aprillenesse, marke all tweetes and poostes wyth the hashtagge #WhanThatAprilleDay19 – 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 thys ys for the mulitpicitye of wordes, of manye tonges, and no tonge ys bettir than eny othir and everich tonge ys belovid of all othirs. 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 thinges, the past wolde have no wordes for us and we wolde be left mirtheless. 

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 prettye awesome 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 fyrste for readinge and celebratinge and foolinge. Lat us maken melodye on #WhanThatAprilleDay19

Wyth muchel love and admiracioun

Le VostreGC