Medieval Race and the Modern Scholar: Fear, Theory, and the Way Forward (A Roundtable)
Sponsoring Organization(s)
Special Session
Organizer Name
Sierra Lomuto, Shokoofeh Rajabzadeh, Cord Whitaker
Organizer Affiliation
Univ. of Pennsylvania, Univ. of California-Berkeley, Wellesley College
Presider Name
Cord Whitaker
Paper Title 1
Fear of an Anti-Black Planet, or, Medieval Studies' Post Racial/Pre-Racial Problem
Presenter 1 Name
Jared Rodríguez
Presenter 1 Affiliation
Northwestern Univ.
Paper Title 2
Acts of Imagination: The Anatomy of Race and Racial Thinking
Presenter 2 Name
Thomas Franke
Presenter 2 Affiliation
Univ. of California-Santa Barbara
Paper Title 3
Race and Conversion in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament
Presenter 3 Name
Susan Nakley
Presenter 3 Affiliation
St. Joseph's College, New York
Paper Title 4
"Being" Anglo-Saxonist: Signifier, Profession, Ontology
Presenter 4 Name
Donna Beth Ellard
Presenter 4 Affiliation
Univ. of Denver
Paper Title 5
ISAS Should Probably Change Its Name
Presenter 5 Name
Daniel Remein
Presenter 5 Affiliation
Univ. of Massachusetts-Boston
Start Date
11-5-2017 10:00 AM
Session Location
Bernhard 209
Description
Thomas Hahn’s 2001 JMEMS special edition, Race and Ethnicity in the Middle Ages, spearheaded a critical discussion on race in the medieval period; one that Cord Whitaker continues in the 2015 postmedieval edition, Making Race Matter in the Middle Ages. While the articles included in Hahn’s edition explore the question he poses in his introduction— “What, if anything, does medieval studies have to do with racial discourses?” — Whitaker’s edition takes as its starting point “not whether” the Middle Ages was raced, but “how” it is raced. Making Race Matter pushes the conversation on medieval race into a definitive space significantly evolved from its nascence in 2001. Yet there remains in the larger field of medieval studies a lingering hesitancy to employ the term race when discussing the categorization of difference or the management of alterity within medieval contexts. It often appears in quotations, or is preceded by “pseudo-” or “quasi-.” This panel asks whether and to what extent the discomfort with the concept is a result of the stark binary that has been the cornerstone of race discourse in studies of the Middle Ages: On the one hand, there are scholars even among those who recognize race as a valuable theoretical lens in medieval studies, that still do not consider race integral to the social fabric of the Middle Ages. Rather, they take it as compartmentalized and sequestered, ancillary, a concept that medieval authors and artists could “choose” to “tap into.” Race, for these scholars, is only marginal to a medieval European world view. On the other hand, some scholars have read race as a crucial and rich concept whose categories include various forms of alterity. The notion of the “monstrous races,” for instance, includes Saracens, Muslims, Jews, monsters, and demons. These categories are often discussed together against a usually white, usually male racially homogeneous social norm. In the past few years— in Whitaker’s edition and elsewhere— scholars have complicated this binary in formidable ways. They have identified the extremity of these two viewpoints and opened up a space between them rich for exploration. This panel aims to continue the work performed in Making Race Matter by rigorously theorizing race as a concept in the Middle Ages while at the same time querying the persistent resistance to the terminology and concept of medieval race in modern scholarship.
Sierra Lomuto
Medieval Race and the Modern Scholar: Fear, Theory, and the Way Forward (A Roundtable)
Bernhard 209
Thomas Hahn’s 2001 JMEMS special edition, Race and Ethnicity in the Middle Ages, spearheaded a critical discussion on race in the medieval period; one that Cord Whitaker continues in the 2015 postmedieval edition, Making Race Matter in the Middle Ages. While the articles included in Hahn’s edition explore the question he poses in his introduction— “What, if anything, does medieval studies have to do with racial discourses?” — Whitaker’s edition takes as its starting point “not whether” the Middle Ages was raced, but “how” it is raced. Making Race Matter pushes the conversation on medieval race into a definitive space significantly evolved from its nascence in 2001. Yet there remains in the larger field of medieval studies a lingering hesitancy to employ the term race when discussing the categorization of difference or the management of alterity within medieval contexts. It often appears in quotations, or is preceded by “pseudo-” or “quasi-.” This panel asks whether and to what extent the discomfort with the concept is a result of the stark binary that has been the cornerstone of race discourse in studies of the Middle Ages: On the one hand, there are scholars even among those who recognize race as a valuable theoretical lens in medieval studies, that still do not consider race integral to the social fabric of the Middle Ages. Rather, they take it as compartmentalized and sequestered, ancillary, a concept that medieval authors and artists could “choose” to “tap into.” Race, for these scholars, is only marginal to a medieval European world view. On the other hand, some scholars have read race as a crucial and rich concept whose categories include various forms of alterity. The notion of the “monstrous races,” for instance, includes Saracens, Muslims, Jews, monsters, and demons. These categories are often discussed together against a usually white, usually male racially homogeneous social norm. In the past few years— in Whitaker’s edition and elsewhere— scholars have complicated this binary in formidable ways. They have identified the extremity of these two viewpoints and opened up a space between them rich for exploration. This panel aims to continue the work performed in Making Race Matter by rigorously theorizing race as a concept in the Middle Ages while at the same time querying the persistent resistance to the terminology and concept of medieval race in modern scholarship.
Sierra Lomuto