The "untimely juxtaposition" method places Chaucer's texts next to modern artifacts like film, visual art, and contemporary literature to open new avenues of exploration and discussion with students. This practice intends to lead towards liberatory insights and a complex interrogation of the social issues of our present moment. Sometimes this happens through something Chaucer's text says, and sometimes it happens in spite of it. The practice is dictated much less by Chaucer's own social identity, or authorial intention, than it is by a dynamic formalism that moves across time. In Throughlines there are three demonstrations of how Seeta Chaganti employs the "untimely juxtaposition": using “Merciless Beauty” to think through the carceral system and abolitionist frameworks, and House of Fame to talk about influence, colonization, and the memorialization of the past.

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Indigenous legal scholar Robert Miller begins his chapter on the Doctrine of Discovery and Manifest Destiny with:

The United States and most of the non-European world were colonized under an international legal principle known as the Doctrine of Discovery, which was used to justify European claims over the indigenous peoples and their territories. The doctrine provides that ‘civilized’ and ‘Christian’ Euro-Americans automatically acquired property rights over the lands of Native peoples and gained governmental, political, and commercial rights over the indigenous inhabitants just by showing up. This legal principle was shaped by religious and ethnocentric ideas of European and Christian superiority over other races and religions of the world. When Euro-Americans planted their flags and religious symbols in lands they claimed to have discovered, they were undertaking well-recognized legal procedures and rituals of discovery that were designed to establish their claim to the lands and peoples.

The straight-forward language of the Doctrine of Discovery might tempt readers to accept it uncritically as an obscure legal artifact of the past. But in fact, much more is at stake here. The concept of Euro-Christian supremacy over religious, political, and property rights derives from a series of 15th-century Papal declarations and has authority only insomuch as one grants the Vatican the authority to make such universal laws. There is no actual reason the European claims of supremacy, be they religious, racial, or social should be seen as anything more than a dangerous manifestation of chauvinism.  

What should strike us as even stranger is that this doctrine, formulated by the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church regarding the relationship between Christian polities and non-Christian nations, should be presumed to apply to Protestant states after the Reformation.  

It was clear from the brutal sectarian wars fought between Catholics and Protestants across Europe for over a century that even the definition of the Christianity was not something upon which there was universal agreement. However, regardless of how they felt about the hierarchies of Christian denomination, European nations all held the equally prejudicial belief that they were the primary representatives of civilization.  

We might ask: did the absence of certain socio-political hierarchies or the lack of specific technologies mean that a society lived in a state of savagery? Students should be encouraged to critically consider and discuss these notions because they are still handed down from one generation to another. How did salient cultural differences in the realms of religion and technology help to legitimize the enslavement and dispossession of Indigenous societies around the globe that fell under European hegemony?  

By examining the formation of the legal structures that supported and continue to uphold white supremacy, like the Doctrine of Discovery, it should become clear to students how arbitrary the legacy of “legally-sanctioned” colonialism is.  

It is also important to note that the Doctrine of Discovery was used by many imperialist-minded realms and nation states, many of whom the Doctrine never directly intended to legitimize, to legally condone the conquest of indigenous lands around the world.

Spain and Portugal, in their rivalry for overseas possessions, were addressed in the Papal bulls issued by Nicholas V and Alexander VI, claiming each nation’s rights to particular lands in the Americas. One might be surprised to learn that, though English Christians were still under the authority of Rome when Henry VII sent John Cabot to explore the North American coast, the English did not cite the Doctrine in that venture. However, regardless of the outcome of Protestant Reformation and the movement away from the Vatican, the Doctrine of Discovery was referenced in United States jurisprudence in the early 19th century. This set a foundation of legal precedence in the United States, which remains with us to this day. For example, as recently as 2005 in the City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York, the Supreme Court ruled against the Oneida’s attempt to regain their traditional lands based on a number of factors, including the Doctrine of Discovery—cited in a footnote in the court’s written decision, authored surprisingly by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg.  

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Miller, Robert J. "The Doctrine of Discovery, Manifest Destiny, and American Indians." Why You Can't Teach United States History Without American Indians, 2015.

Shakespeare’s sonnets allow for generative conversations about the way perceptions of fairness and darkness inform understandings of race in the early modern world. Shakespeare’s procreation sonnets, in particular, tether whiteness not only to physical beauty but to national identity for the English. By attending to the way the sonnets deploy whiteness to consider social and gendered hierarchies, we are able to see how uses of fairness reveal emergent ideologies of white supremacy. As a result, Kim F. Hall explains, we find that the dark lady sonnets threaten the entitlement of whiteness, rendering a real danger for those with dark bodies.

For this exercise, I suggest focusing on lines 239-381 of The House of Fame, Chaucer’s retelling of Virgil’s Dido and Aeneas account. It can be done with other sections of the text as well. (Large Chaucer classes that break into sections especially benefit from graduate TA’s who are creative writers in completing this exercise, and I encourage drawing upon their expertise in discussing poetic composition with students.)

After the class reads and considers the Virgilian context, the Chaucerian retelling, the medieval approach to source adaptation, and Jordan Abel’s modern creative technique of source adaption, students create their own erasure poem using The House of Fame as their source text.  

Some questions for them to consider as they approach this task

Abel’s work ranges from preserving full sentences and phrases to preserving single isolated words and even, in some cases, only punctuation marks. What do you think the purpose and impact of these different levels of erasure might be?
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What role do you think the empty space plays in Abel’s poems? How would you relate the use of empty space here to other discussions of poetic form in the class?
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With these thoughts in mind, what do you want to do in your own poem? How might your erasures reflect your thoughts about what Chaucer is doing to Virgil’s source, about the representation of Dido through these different lenses, about Dido as powerful or powerless, about Dido as racialized, or about the intersection of these different concepts? Do you think erasure creates a means to hear Dido’s own voice? Why or why not, and how might your poem reflect your opinion?

It can be useful to set certain limits to give students something interesting to think about as they are working. I’ve noticed that students who are still a little shaky in their Middle English will do things like leave the word “grave” in their erasure poem but treat it as a noun rather than the verb that it is. While doing so looks cool, I’ve realized that I can’t quite tell if they have done that intentionally or in error. I specify that nouns should stay nouns and verbs should stay verbs in their erasure poem, and let them try out composing with that constraint. They might also append a note explaining that they have changed a part of speech for a specific reason.

Titus Andronicus is a play that demonstrates early modern English dexterity with racial constructs. This nuance is demonstrated in part through its representations of racial mixing and mixed-race identity. Engaging these representations in the classroom can introduce students to an early modern England that was more familiar with racial difference than is sometimes commonly understood. Doing so can also help students track how Shakespeare leveraged that familiarity to stage complex and competing ideas about racial difference.

The experiment of racial difference

A great moment to start with seems to confirm that racial mixing was unfamiliar to the Elizabethan English, at least initially. During the forest scene, Lavinia finds Aaron the Moor and Tamora the Goth alone. She already suspects their relationship and upon finding them tells Tamora, “’Tis thought you have a goodly gift in horning / And to be doubted that your Moor and you, / Are singled forth to try experiments.”

The word “experiments” is an unusual way to describe a relationship, interracial or otherwise. It suggests that Aaron and Tamora are engaged in something new and untested. The phrase “singled forth” redoubles this characterization, immediately describing the pair’s deviation from the rest of the group in the scene, but also characterizing their relationship as singular.

I encourage students to think of this characterization as derived from a more multifarious position—not one fully representative of early modern English beliefs. In other words, I ask students to think of this framing in terms of the complexity generally attributed to Shakespeare’s work. Aaron and Tamora’s relationship is, of course, not even singular in the world of the play. When the pair’s child is born with darker skin, indicating that Aaron, rather than Saturninus, is the father, Aaron suggests swapping the child for another mixed-race infant. This child, born to his countryman Muliteus, is, he says, “fair” as Tamora’s sons, Chiron and Demetrius. Considering Lavinia’s ascriptions alongside this revelation can help students trace the play’s various discourses concerning mixed race identity.

Racial mixing is ostensibly being mobilized through Aaron’s revelation (the stealing of another child to protect himself) to propose a frightening possibility for an early modern England that frequently trafficked in and furthered racist ideas. But the moment is also undergirded by a matter-of-fact sense of the somatic possibilities of both inter- and intraracial procreation. Aaron demonstrates as much when overheard telling his child “where the bull and cow are both milk-white / They never do beget a coal-black calf,” a statement offered almost axiomatically as he imagines the possibilities had his child been born with Tamora’s “look.” Such casual observations appear drawn from contexts in which mixed-race identity was treated as neither experimental nor as profoundly consequential.

Perceptions of mixed-race identities from Shakespeare to now

Given that Titus is one of Shakespeare’s earliest plays, examining its engagement with mixedness helps contextualize the topic’s appearance throughout the playwright’s dramatic work. Characters staged as late in Shakespeare’s career as Caliban might be placed into productive conversation with Titus’s approach to the topic. Drawing these types of connections invites students to see mixedness as having a more sustained role in the conceptual lexicon of early modern drama. Considering this lineage also includes interrogating lacunae in overt representations of mixed-race identity. Such gaps are especially notable given Titus’s proclivity for shunting mixedness into the foreground, including during the tragedy’s final scene, during which Marcus Andronicus asks those gathered to “behold” Aaron and Tamora’s child.  

When I teach Titus, I ask students to reflect through journaling exercises on how and where they see mixed race identity represented in the world around them. Students generally have a range of responses to this prompt, which not only brings into focus the various and inconsistent ways that race signals and operates today, but also offers a more immediate parallel to Titus’s own multifarious approach.

Drawing such connections can encourage students to look to the past as a way to better understand their present. It can also help students consider mixed-race identity—often treated as a late 20th- and early 21st-century formation—as having a much longer history than its inconsistent recognition and representation might otherwise suggest.

The Arts of English Poesie: Making Worlds and Making Race | Watch the full talk

Presented by Debapriya Sarkar at Poetics: A RaceB4Race Symposium in 2023

In this talk, Debapriya Sarkar explores the connections between English-language figurative speech and racecraft through an examination of George Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie (c. 1589). Situating Puttenham’s text within broader early modern conversations regarding rhetorical value in the English language, Sarkar brings out how English theories of figuration theorize language on a spectrum of mobility and fixity which in turn generate possibilities of “familiar” and “alien” meaning for specific words. This basic configuration, Sarkar argues, leads directly into racializing processes in which language is key. To demonstrate such processes, Sarkar turns to a close reading of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (c. 1607), focusing on the work being done in Shakespeare’s language to naturalize a link between the person of Cleopatra and the place of Egypt, showing us how the identification of a woman with an “alien” territory naturalizes the dehumanization of the racialized subject.

(Mis)Appropriations, Shakespeare, Race, and the Police | Watch the full video

Presented by Arthur L. Little, Jr. at Appropriations: A RaceB4Race Symposium in 2020

Arthur L. Little, Jr. addresses the ways Shakespeare and early modern studies are policed in and out of the academy. He reflects on “policing” in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and Adam P. Kennedy and Adrienne Kennedy’s Sleep Deprivation Chamber play, drawing parallels to the police brutality experienced by Rodney King on March 3, 1991, which was broadcast to the world. Little compares the policing of the Black body to the intellectual theft that often surrounds Shakespeare and early modern studies.

The 13th-century heroic narrative, El Poema de Mio Cid, was set in the culturally diverse landscape of the Iberian Peninsula. It takes place in the late 11th century, during the southward expansion of the Kingdom of Castile. When teaching The Cid, it is important to pay close attention to the differences in how Muslims are depicted in this poem, particularly in comparison to how they are represented in La Chanson de Roland. Students are asked: what work is the poem doing within its historical context? How is this text later used to develop a Spanish national identity?

How is the cliché of race developed in the early modern literary canon? The emphasis on skin and its emergence to prominence represents an important shift in the history of racial ideology that, in the premodern era, had relied on religion, geography, and language. Complaints about the injustice and unoriginality of this topsy-turvy, upside-down racial cliché have been set aside since its maintenance and durability are, in fact, the cultural goal. By asking students to interrogate the role of the cliché, they are given the opportunity to understand how race is understood as a form of cliché itself.

Race in the modern era has seen the circulation of the violent Black man stereotype that has been promoted through his criminalization in the “War on Drugs,” his overrepresentation in mass incarceration, and the deprivation of his life in extrajudicial shootings. Too often the recurrent theme and justification is that the Black man poses a threat, so criminalization, imprisonment, and death are offered as modern prevention strategies. How did we get here? Rather than try to tell a sociological story, we can examine one instance of this racial mythmaking in a widely studied, influential literary forebear: Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Course description

The application of various forms of cultural and critical theory to the study of literature has a long, varied, and robust history. In recent years, we have seen a revolution in literary criticism as critical race theory has become a dominant approach to understanding not only the works that we read, but also the world around us. This revolution puts questions of race and racial justice at the center of the subject. This class will investigate and gauge the value of critical theories and methods focused on race, racism, and racial justice. The aim of this course is to engage meaningfully with scholars, cultural productions, and criticism that draw on critical race studies within their artistic and scholarly work.

Learning outcomes

After you complete this course, you will: 1) have a better understanding of the main texts, authors, and critical field of study; 2) be able to apply techniques of critical analysis; 3) understand critical race studies approaches to literary and cultural studies.

Course readings

William Shakespeare, Othello

William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

Additional scholarly articles, essays, and chapters will be made available via PDF.  

Course requirements

Daily class participation

This is an upper division course, and you are expected to attend every class meeting. If an emergency forces you to miss class, discuss it with me upon your return. The success of the class depends on your presence and participation. Students are expected to read, and should be prepared to discuss, all assigned material. Please note that this is a reading intensive class.

Group led discussion

Early in the semester, students will work in groups to lead class discussion centered on a specific school of theory (Feminism, Marxism, New Historicism, Psychoanalysis, etc.). The group will present a short overview of the school of theory, explain its significance, and offer brief examples (2-3) of the way this theory can be applied to a literary text. The presentation/discussion should be roughly 20 minutes. I will circulate a sign-up sheet the first week of class.

Public facing essay

For this assignment, you will be asked to write a public facing essay that uses Othello or The Merchant of Venice as a vehicle to explore a contemporary social issue. Please take time to look at the short essays published in ACMRS’s online journal, The Sundial. The public facing works in that journal will give you a sense of what is possible and possibly inspire the approach you take for this assignment. Your essays should be 500-750 words in length and should be submitted via Canvas by the assigned date (see schedule below).

Final project

For your final project, you will present on a product from popular culture of your choice (YouTube video, music, visual art, poem, film, etc.) that adapts and/or appropriates Shakespeare’s work and that engages with the issue of race/racism (implicitly or explicitly). You should interpret your chosen product through the lens of one of the pieces of critical race theory/studies that you read over the semester and explain the value behind considering such a perspective. Presentations should be 10 minutes in length. In addition to the presentation, you will submit a 250-word reflection on why this product and interpretation is meaningful to you.

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To begin a classroom discussion about the myth (or curse) of Ham, undergraduates can consider what they know about stories and histories and what they understand as truth. In the case of Ham, the claim is for an explanatory truth: why it’s reasonable, even righteous, to enslave other people. A premodern critical race perspective on such a claim looks to where the idea comes from, what it has influenced, and how it has evolved. The myth of Ham can help students consider the origins of culturally determined truths.

Starting with student experience

Students are often more engaged when they start with their own experiences. As societies change so do people’s understanding about the meaning of events in the past. On an individual level, students might share ideas about a historical event that they understand differently now than what they remember learning in elementary school. Example: causes of the U.S. Civil War.

Destabilizing history

Sometimes history is used as a substitute for causality: because this happened, things are the way that they are. Students can consider how the lens of premodern critical race scholarship on the myth of Ham turns this idea around. 

• Which came first: slavery, or the idea that slavery is divinely sanctioned?
• How does tracing the origins of the myth of Ham provide evidence that stories about the past don’t just change—that they are purposefully retold in ways that suit the needs of the storyteller? 
• Do students see history(ies) as fundamentally unstable and multi-vocal? How do the variations in the stories about Ham and the curse expand student thinking about how truth, or beliefs, evolve over time?

Racialization as marking

Thinking about racialization means wondering about how the “marking” of a person (or a kind of person) would cause people to judge an individual or group. 

• What is a somatic normative? 
• Do students see modern variations in social attitudes toward eye or nose shapes?
• Is there a standard of beauty? Standards about tattoos? Or suntans? 

History as a record of idea shifting

Students can think about history as a record of people’s changing ideas, not just events that happen to groups. A discussion related to the myth of Ham could include:

• What kinds of new knowledge about the world probably caused new perspectives on food, dress, or language?
• How might changing perspectives on the world cause individuals to seek scriptural passages that would explain why some groups had more power than others? 

How do we counter historical narratives?

Because the myth of Ham has been “wielded to justify by divine decree the colonization, enslavement, and oppression of Black Africans,” what do students think they could or should do (as writers, or activists, or in other roles) to counteract this racist rationalization? Is there a Throughline to today’s influencers and the impact of social media?

On James Weldon Johnson's Milton and a Sinful Poetics of Anti-lynching (Re)form | Watch the full talk

Presented by Reginald Wilburn at Poetics: A RaceB4Race Symposium in 2023

Reginald Wilburn analyzes James Weldon Johnson’s anti-lynching poem “Brothers – American Drama” (1916) and its intertextual references to Milton. Johnson, born in 1871, was the first African American professor hired at New York University and the lyricist for “Lift Every Heart and Sing.” Wilburn highlights the Miltonic features in “Brothers” that work as intertextual bookmarks, demonstrating how the poem draws on collateral knowledge that is part of the history of Black appropriation that “chokes and engages” with Milton. Wilburn describes how Johnson’s use of unrhymed blank verse, his subtitle, and his creation of a drama not meant to be performed all reference Milton and create a stinging indictment of lynch culture.

The Iberian Peninsula is the most common location for medievalists to look toward a multicultural, multilinguistic, and multi-confessional society in the premodern period. It is where the Golden Age of Arab culture in the Ummayyad and Abbasid periods met the early European culture emerging from the Germanic migrations and invasions of southern Europe.  

The various Arab Muslim kingdoms in al-Andalus, and the Christian kingdoms in the north, such as Aragon, Castile, Leon, and Portugal, formed hybrid cultures such as Mozarabs (Spanish Christians living under Arab-Muslim rule) and Mudejars (Arab Christians and Muslims who lived under Christian rule) who produced art, architecture, and literatures that brought together many different cultural influences. The Arabs made an incalculable impact in every way on the Spanish nation that later emerged—and in a larger sense, all of Europe.  

El Poema de Mio Cid

The 13th-century heroic narrative, El Poema de Mio Cid, was set in this culturally diverse landscape. It takes place in the late 11th century, during the southward expansion of the Kingdom of Castile. The poem is often referred to as El Poema de Mio Cid, or The Song of the Cid, or sometimes just The Cid.

The titular character, Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar or “The Cid,” was a historical figure of the late 11th century. He was a retainer of Sancho II of Leon and Castile, leading military campaigns against Alfonso VI of Leon as well as against Muslim kingdoms in al-Andalus. He was appointed Alférez, “a knight,” in Alfonso’s court and remained in that position until after his exile in 1081, when he moved to work for the emir of Zaragoza, Yusuf al-Mu'taman ibn Hud.

The epic poem, El Cantar de Mio Cid, was written down more than a hundred years after his death, and is an incomplete text, starting in medias res. It recounts only the last part of his life, starting with his exile from the court at Burgos, the capital of the Kingdom of Castile. It features historical figures, like King Yucef of Zaragoza and the Count of Barcelona, Berenguer Ramon II.  

Muslims and crusading

The Song of Roland and La Cantar de Mio Cid are often taught together as exemplar medieval epics, and comparisons are often made between the two poems. It is important to show students the differences in representations of interactions between Christians and Muslims. Whereas, in The Song of Roland, Muslims are a villainized, pagan enemy, in The Cid, they have more complicated representations.

In The Cid, Muslims are represented as both enemy and friend. Like The Song of Roland, which features the character of Archbishop Turpin, the influence of crusading clergy is found in this poem as the character Bishop Jeronimo. 

A priest newly arrived from France—
Named Bishop Don Jerónimo,
Well-educated, sensible, and knowing, 
An accomplished fighter, on foot or on a horse—
Was trying to learn as much as he could
Of my Cid’s great deeds, yearning to fight with the Moors, 
Saying he’d be more than satisfied to die in such warfare, 
And no one would ever need to mourn him.

Also from France, Bishop Jeronimo desires to become a Christian martyr and represents the crusading ideology, but this desire is much more subdued than in The Song of Roland, which by contrast looks fanatical. Like Turpin, Jeronimo blesses the soldiers before a battle, but soon, he moderates and becomes one of the Cid’s retainers.  

The Cid’s men, who are Christian, are tasked with gathering men from a local Muslim ruler, which likely was the historical reality of Iberian relations in the 12th and 13th centuries. Not only are they to join with Muslim soldiers, the Cid entrusts his wife and daughters to the Muslim ruler, Abengalbón:

Then Albengalbón came, and as soon as he saw Minaya 
Embraced him, smiling broadly and,
According to his custom, kissed him on the shoulder:
“How good to see you, Minaya Alvar Fáñez!
This is a great honor for us, your bringing
Warrior Cid’s wife and his daughters,
To whom we show honor, one and all, as his fortune 
Deserves—for no one can harm him; in peace or war
He is destined for triumph, whatever we do.

This scene is indicative of what some scholars call "convivencia,” or the co-existence of Muslims, Christians, and Jews in the Iberian Peninsula before the 15th century. Without romanticizing it too much, The Song of the Cid offers a less black-and-white view of Muslim-Christian relations than texts like The Song of Roland, written more than a century earlier. Abengalbón is represented as trustworthy, generous, and hospitable to the Cid and his retinue:

And then they reached Molina, that fine, rich town, 
Where the Moor Abengalbón took very good care of them,
And everything they wanted he gave them—
Even paying for their horses’ new shoes!
As for Minaya and the ladies, God! how warmly he honored them! 
The next morning they rode on again,
But Abengalbón stayed at their side all the way
To Valencia, and whatever was spent was always by him. 
And in such joy and pledges of mutual friendship
They came within half a dozen miles of Valencia. 

In paying to shoe their horses, taking care of the women, escorting them the entire way, and the pledging of mutual friendship, Abengalbón is viewed as one of the closest comrades of the Cid. Even though this poem is still told from a European Christian perspective and bias, it provides a much more evenhanded representation of Muslims than other European texts of its time.

Fascism and Orientalism

The early 20th-century scholarship about The Song of the Cid by Ramón Menéndez Pidal, the Spanish philologist, solidified The Cid in the canon of medieval Castilian literature. Later, it was used by the fascist dictator Francisco Franco to buttress a Spanish national identity based on Catholicism, despite Pidal’s opposition to Franco. The ultra-nationalist, fascist dictatorship of Franco attempted to erase all traces of Muslim and Jewish history in the country but also attempted to subdue the non-Castilian communities (such as the Basques, Galician, and Catalan) and to impose Castilian language and cultural norms throughout Spain.

María Rosa Menocal, in her introduction to the bilingual edition of The Cid, challenges these nationalist readings of the poem, instead opting to focus on how the Arab-Muslim tradition shaped the storytelling of the text and reframing the character of the Cid as a Christian knight that shares many similarities with Muslim knights, such as being married and having children.  

Karla Mallette, in her book European Modernity and the Arab Mediterranean: Toward a New Philology and a Counter-Orientalism, and many other postcolonial studies scholars have demonstrated the ways in which Orientalist readings of the Muslim past are deployed and weaponized in Europe throughout the premodern past and into modernity.

To engage students in the performance history of Shakespeare in America, they need to be familiar with the political landscapes in which his plays were taught and staged. Further, to bring the Indigenizing Shakespeare Movement into our classrooms, it is imperative that our students are informed and knowledgeable of this history—one that most of them were never taught.

Chaucer's House of Fame is a strange poem, one that is compulsive in its use of allusions and citations. The poem is a dream vision in which a poet finds himself in a hall of images of famous people from the past, asking the reader to consider the power dynamics involved between authors who influence each other. Teaching this poem alongside contemporary poet Jordan Abel's book The Place of Scraps helps students imagine the links between influence from Chaucer to now. Abel, a Nisga'a poet from British Columbia, wrote his collection through the erasure of a 20th-century anthropological work, Totem Poles, by the white Ottowan settler Marius Barbeau. Putting Abel and Chaucer in conversation allows students to consider the issues of source, adaptation, colonization, and race in our literary lineage.

It is imperative that, while teaching about indigeneity in our classrooms, we dissect how the term came to be and how it is so often conflated with race. In my classroom, I like to bring two texts to my students' attention in thinking about the constructions of indigeneity as a racialized identity in the early modern period: Richard Hakluyt’s “Of the Permians, Samoites, and Lappes,” in The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589) and Sir Thomas Browne’s “Of the Blackness of Negroes,” Book VI, Chapter X, Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646). Excerpts of these texts, when taught together, can show students the development of language around race and indigeneity in the early modern period.  

“Indigenae, or people bredde upon that very soil”

Richard Hakluyt: “Of the Permians, Samoites, and Lappes,” in The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of the English Nation

The Samoit hath his name (as the Russe saith) of eating himselfe: as if in times past, they lived as ye Cannibals, eating one another. Which they make more probable, because at this time they eate all kind of raw flesh, whatsoever it be, even the very carion that lieth in the ditch. But as the Samoits themselves will say, they were called Samoie, that is, of themselves, as though they were Indigenae, or people bred upon that very soyle, that never changed their seate from one place to another, as most nations have done. They are subject at this time to the Emperour of Russia.

On the North side of Russia next to Corelia, lieth the countrey of Lappia, which reacheth in length from the farthest point Northward … The whole countrey in a maner is either lakes, or mountaines, which towardes the Sea side are called Tondro, because they are all of harde and craggy rocke, but the inland partes are well furnished with woods that growe on the hilles sides, the lakes lying betweene. Their diet is very bare and simple. Bread they have none, but feede onely upon fish and foule. They are subject to the Emperor of Russia, and the two kings of Sweden and Denmarke … The opinion is that they were first termed Lappes of their briefe and short speech. The Russe divideth the whole nation of the Lappes into two sortes. The one they call Nowremanskoy Lapary, that is, the Norvegian Lappes because they be of the Danish religion. For the Danes and Norvegians they account for one people. The other that have no religion at all but live as bruite and heathenish people, without God in the worlde, they cal Dikoy Lapary, or the wilde Lappes. The whole nation is utterly unlearned, having not so much as the use of any Alphabet, or letter among them. For practise of witchcraft and sorcerie they passe all nations in the worlde.  

In Hakluyt’s description of the Arctic regions of Europe, those historically controlled by Russia and the Scandinavian nations, the reader is introduced to two groups of Indigenous peoples: the Samoyed and the Sámi, called the Samoit and Lappes respectively in Hakluyt’s text. In both cases he examines the origins of the names by which they are called, and in doing so provides us with valuable insights into his notion of race and indigeneity.  

Hakluyt claims the Russian believe the name Samoit indicates that these people were once cannibals because their name indicates they are ‘eaters of themselves.’ This seem probable to Hakluyt because the Samoit are were known for eating raw flesh, thus marking them as uncivilized. But he also includes the Samoit’s own corrective to this misunderstanding of their culture: they claim their name derives from ‘Samoie’ or ‘of themselves’, which Hakluyt’s interprets to mean they are indigenous to their homelands or ‘bred on that very soile.’ This contradicts an earlier notion in Hakluyt that speculated on the Samoit being descendants of the Tartars because of their physiognomy—an early formulation of race, but by including the Samoit sense of their own indigeneity he leaves it for the reader to decide.  

We do glean from this text two interesting cultural details about this Arctic society: their supposed preference for raw flesh and their own sense of their name as indicating their indigeneity. Some may be familiar with the now disused term Eskimo to indicate Inuit and other Arctic peoples of North America. It was long thought the word Eskimo derived from a Cree word for “eaters of the raw” or “he eats it raw.” This was taken to be derogatory, and the term Eskimo was in turn rejected in favor of a peoples’ endonym, such as Inuit or Yupik.  

One might recall the French anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss’ famous study The Raw and the Cooked, in which he uses his structuralist methodology to study these states for food as larger indicators of divisions between nature and culture. Because the Samoit are said to consume meats raw, one can extrapolate their savagery and even cannibal origins. Similarly, Hakluyt notes that the Lappes, or Sámi, do eat only fish and fowl and do not have bread—an indication of their primitive status. What Hakluyt would not have known is that in arctic regions consuming fish raw is the primary source of vitamin C, which is lost with cooking. Also, the dearth of easily obtained fuels in the region made cooking difficult, let alone the fuel required to bake bread.  

Writing of the Samoit, or Samoyed, Hakluyt does note that they insist their name derives from a term meaning “of themselves,” indicating that they were original to their lands. Whereas Hakluyt never uses or shows knowledge of the Sámi name for themselves, instead he chooses Lappes, the name used for them in English until only recently. Hakluyt presumes Lappes somehow indicates their “brief and short speech,” as if they did not possess a complex and fully developed language. He goes on to define the Sámi through lack; they have no religion, no learning, and no letters. Instead, they excel most in sorcery, a sign of their dangerous alterity.  

Had Hakluyt known more about them he might have learned that they call themselves Sámi and that word derives from “of the land”—yet another people insisting on their indigeneity. This is not unlike the names of other Indigenous peoples such as the Inuit, which translates “the People,” or Lenni Lenapi meaning “true people.” Other versions of ‘the original people’ can be found among the endonyms of many Indigenous peoples.  

In this way Hakluyt stumbles upon two elements of Indigenous culture frequently noted by anthropologists of the modern era: these cultures are highly adaptive to the environments in which they live based on climate, resources, and food sources, and they frequently call themselves by names that indicate they consider themselves indigenous to a certain region or at least its original inhabitants.  

The conflation with race

Sir Thomas Browne: “Of the Blackness of Negroes,” Book VI, Chapter X, Pseudodoxia Epidemica

But this defect is more remarkable in America; which although subjected unto both the Tropicks, yet are not the Inhabitants black between, or near, or under either: neither to the Southward in Brasilia, Chili, or Peru; nor yet to the Northward in Hispaniola, Castilia del Oro, or Nicaragua. And although in many parts thereof there be at present swarms of Negroes serving under the Spaniard, yet were they all transported from Africa, since the discovery of Columbus; and are not indigenous or proper natives of America.

In these lines taken from Sir Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica, a collection of essay-like considerations of popular errors of his time, he turns his attention to debates over the difference in skin color among peoples, particularly sub-Saharan Africans. There were, of course, a number of conflicting theories ranging from the Biblical curse incurred by Noah’s son Cham and passed down to his descendants or the effects of climate on skin color or diet or any number of combination of factors. Browne looks at what he sees as the defects of each argument on its own.  

When considering the notion that climate is the root of blackness in skin color, he takes a global perspective and finds that argument wanting. If it were a valid position, then the peoples inhabiting regions in the same latitudes should also have black skin, but when considering the inhabitants of Asia and the Americas, Browne says this is not true. He argues elsewhere that because people who relocate to tropical areas do not change skin color, no more than blacks who move north or south of the tropics do some other factors must be at work.  

What is of note to scholars of the English language is that Browne’s description of the original inhabitants of the Americas as “indigenous or proper natives” is one of the earliest uses of the term indigenous in this sense. For Hakluyt the word was still Latin but by Browne’s time he deploys it as though it were English. He likewise does not miss the opportunity to note the Spanish transport of thousands of African slaves into the Americas, even while making a comparison of another issue altogether.

In a mediation on putative causes of variations in skin color we encounter a passing reference to indigeneity even as we move towards an era that will increasingly make physiognomy the basis the specious pseudo-science of race.  

When bringing the discussion of indigeneity into the classroom, we must first foreground our students with the knowledge that is so often undertaught, if not outright ignored: the conflation of indigeneity and race began in the early modern period, at the height of European global imperialism. These writings allow us a glimpse into the evolution of the concepts of indigeneity and race we are still grappling with today.

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Teaching from John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs allows students to examine different types of conversion in the same text. Teaching Jewish-to-Christian conversion helps broaden the understanding of the religious and theological conflicts that characterize the Protestant Reformation.  

Regarding Foxe’s treatment of Jews, Sharon Achinstein writes, “Contradictory and complex, Foxe's writings on Jews show how a powerful English writer conceived of the place of Jews in a newly self-conscious, Protestant English national identity amidst conflicting currents of theology, race, and politics.”

Tales of violence and cruelty as conversion rhetoric

Because it is a recurring trope in Book of Martyrs, I assign readings of stories about killing children and infants from the text. (It is important to note that both Catholics and Jews kill children in the book.)

The depictions are gruesome and should be handled with care: I alert students that we will discuss human torture and murder and remind students that Foxe is describing what happened to real people. We look at the story of Catherine Cauches and her two daughters, killed for their Protestant beliefs:  

The time then being come, when these three good seruauntes and holy Sayntes of GOD, the Innocent mother with her two daughters shoulde suffer, in the place where they should consummate theyr Martyrdome, were three stakes set vp. At the middle post was the mother, the eldest daughter on the right hande, the youngest on the other. They were first strangled, but the Rope brake before they were dead, and so the poore women fell in the fire. Perrotine, who was then great with childe, did fall on her side, where happened a ruefull sight, not onely to the eyes of all that there stood, but also to the eares of all true harted christians, that shall read this historye: For as the belly of the woman brast a sonder by vehemency of the flame, the Infant being a fayre man childe, fel into the fire, and eftsoones being taken out of the fire by one W. House, was layd vpon the grasse.

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Then was the child had to the Prouost, and from him to the Bayliffe, who gaue censure, that it should be caryed backe agayne and cast into the fire. And so the infant Ba∣ptised in his own bloud, to fill vp the number of Gods innocent Sayntes, was both borne, and dyed a Martyr, lea∣uing behinde to the world, which it neuer saw, a spectacle wherein the whole world may see the Herodian cruelty of this gracelesse generation of catholicke Tormentors.

This episode is compared with an account of Jews in medieval England. It contains well-worn antisemitic tropes, including Jews as Christ-killers and accounts of Jews sacrificing Christian children:  

About which time, the wicked Iewes at Lincolne had cruelly crucified, whipped, & tormented a certaine child named Hugo of 9. yeres of age. An. 1255. in the month of August. Ex Gualt. Gisburn. At length the childe being sought & found by ye mother, being cast in a pit. 32. of those abhominable Iewes were put to executiō. wherof Mathew Paris. reciteth a long storie. The same or like fact was also intended by ye like Iewes at Norwich 20. yeres before vpon a certaine childe, whom they had first circumcised, & deteined a whole yere in custodie, intending to crucifie him, for the which the Iewes were sent vp to the tower of Lōdon, of whom 18. were hanged, & the rest remained long in prison. … Of these Iewes moreouer king Henry the same yere 1255. exacted to be geuen vnto him 8000. markes in paine of hanging. Who being much agreued therwith, & complayning that the king went about their destruction, desired leaue to be geuen thē of the king, that they might depart the realm, neuer to returne agayne. But the king committed the doing of that matter vnto Earle Richard his brother, to enforce them to pay ye mony whether they would or no. Moreouer of the same Iewes mention is made in the story intituled Eulogiū. Of the Iewes in Northhampton, who had amōg thēselues prepared wilde fire, to burn the city of Londō. For the which diuers of thē were takē, & burned in the time of Lent, in the said city of Northhamptō, which was 2. yeres before, about the yere of our Lord. 1253. Ex Eulogio. And for so much as mention here is made of the Iewes, I cannot omit what some English storyes write of a certaine Iew: who not long after this time about the yeare of our Lord. 1257. fell into a priuy at Tuekesbury vpon a Sabboth day which for the great reuerence he had to his holy Sabboth, would not suffer himselfe to be plucked out. And so Lord Richarde Earle of Glocester, hearing thereof, would not suffer him to be drawne out on sonday for reuerence of the holy day. And thus the wretched superstitious Iew remaining there till Monday, was found dead in the dong.

For Foxe, Jews were no less a threat to Christianity in medieval England than Roman Catholics are a threat in the 16^th century.  

I ask students to identify similarities and differences between these episodes. The killing of children is an important similarity, because it is used as evidence per excellence that Jews and Catholics are inhuman. Students will also notice the essentializing rhetoric.  

Particular to the second passage, it is useful to discuss the juxtaposition of Jews as murderers with the “humorous” account of the Jew who falls into the privy, and the significance of the fact that these appear in the same paragraph. The paragraph’s conclusion enacts a kind of revenge upon the supposed long history of Jews seeking to destroy Christians. We don’t know if this particular Jew participated in any of the cruelties described earlier in the paragraph, but this single Jew is made to bear the guilt of all the other Jews in the paragraph, as well as those who the text explicitly mentions not mentioning in the paragraph.  

And yet, Foxe still believed that Jews could become Christians—in Foxe there is a tension between seeing any individual Jewish person as representative of all Jews, who are always enemies to Christianity, and seeing Jewish individuals as potential Christians. Jews can become Christians, but those are an exception to the rule—and racist systems need “exceptions” in order to deny the existence of systemic racism. In this text, we can see a rhetorical mirror to our present moment: Foxe provides us with an example of the early modern “post-racial” (on President Obama as both exception and example that was used to prove that America was post-racial, see Bonilla-Silva). Foxe is thus messy, but grappling with race, of course, requires sorting through messiness and contradictions.  

Martin Luther, antisemitism, and the inability to convert

Martin Luther’s The Jews and Their Lies is less “messy” with regards to Jewish-to-Christian conversion. In it, the refusal of Jews to convert is racialized (chapter 15):

In short, as has already been said, do not engage much in debate with Jews about the articles of our faith. From their youth, they have been so nurtured with venom and rancour against our Lord that there is no hope until they reach the point where their misery finally makes them pliable and they are forced to confess that the Messiah has come, and that he is our Jesus. Until such a time it is much too early, yes, it is useless to argue with them about how God is triune, how he became man and how Mary is the mother of God. No human reason nor any human heart will ever grant these things, much less the embittered, venomous, blind heart of the Jews. As has already been said, what God cannot reform with such cruel blows, we will be unable to change with words and works. Moses was unable to reform the Pharaoh by means of plagues, miracles, pleas or threats; he had to let him drown in the sea.  

This is one of the tamer passages from Luther—in the most famous passages, from chapter 12, Luther asserts that Jews should be denied safety, their property seized, their sacred texts destroyed, and the ability to practice usury revoked. But in the passage above, I want students to note Luther’s essentializing language and his insistence that Jews are rendered unable to convert—or at least until some far off, unspecified future, and after the further “misery finally makes them pliable.” Luther even goes so far as to suggest that God himself cannot alter them: “God cannot reform [them] with such cruel blows.” Luther believed that 1400 years of oppression should have led Jews to convert to Christianity, and that it is too late to convert them now.  

The Jew of Malta and the early modern perception of Jewish identity

Debates about religious change more broadly and the conversion of Jews more particularly are foundational to Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta. The Jewish villain, Barabas, explicitly raises the issue that if all Jews are the same any individual Jew bears a general Jewish guilt:  

Some Jews are wicked, as all Christians are:
But say the tribe that I descended of
Were all in general cast away for sin,      
Shall I be tried by their transgression?  
The man that dealeth righteously shall live:
And which of you can charge me otherwise.  

Ferneze doesn’t answer the question. He responds, “Out wretched Barbaras, / Sham’st though not thus to justify thyself.” His lack of response suggests an unwillingness to answer the question. The question seems to have struck a nerve; it exposes the same racist thinking that lies behind the discourse about Jews that we see in Foxe.  

This passage also bears on larger questions about Marlowe’s depictions of Jews in the play. Is only Barbaras guilty of his villainy, or are all Jews guilty? Does Abigail’s conversion suggest that “Jew” in not a racialized category? Does the fact that the Christians tie conversion to financial incentives undermine the early modern audience’s belief in the sincerity and supremacy of Christians? These questions can spark lively conversations in the classroom.  
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Resources

Achinstein, Sharon. “John Foxe and the Jews.” Renaissance Quarterly 54.1 (2001): 86-120.

Bonilla-Silva, Edwardo. “The Structure of Racism in Color-Blind, 'Post-Racial' America.” The American Behavioral Scientist 59.11 (2015): 1358-1376.

The following works have informed both the way I conceive of the goals of my Chaucer class and the way I present the Chaucer material itself to my students. Many students have already had exposure to this area of thought and criticism, as well as to many of these authors and their major influences. In a number of instances, they will have more background knowledge than you do as a medievalist, which is a wonderful situation for you and the students to be in. This list is highly impressionistic and not meant to be exhaustive in any sense—they are the books that were paramount for me when teaching my most recent Chaucer class.

Baldwin, Davarian L. In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering our Cities. New York: Bold Type Books, 2021.

Burton, Orisanmi. Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt. California: University of California Press, 2023.

Clover, Joshua. Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings. London: Verso Books, 2016.

Coulthard, Glen Sean. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.

Darwish, Mahmoud. Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems. California: University of California Press, 2013.

Davis, Angela Y. Are Prisons Obsolete? New York: Seven Stories Press, 2011.

Davis, Angela Y. Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016.

Di Prima, Diane. Revolutionary Letters. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1968, 2021.

Du Bois, W. E. B. Writings. New York: Library of America, 1986.

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 1963, 2004.

Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. California: University of California Press, 2007.

Hall, Stuart, et al. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order. London: Palgrave: 1978, 2013.

Kelley, Robin D. G. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. New York: Penguin Random House, 2002.

Maher, Geo. A World Without Police: How Strong Communities Make Cops Obsolete. London: Verso Books, 2021.

Melamed, Jodi. Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.

Murakawa, Naomi. The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Neocleous, Mark. The Fabrication of Social Order: A Critical Theory of Police Power. London: Verso Books, 2021.

Okihiro, Gary. Third World Studies: Theorizing Liberation. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.

Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983, 2020.

Rodríguez, Dylan. White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logics of Genocide. New York: Fordham University Press, 2020.

Course Description  

This course examines the legacies and afterlives of slavery in mass incarceration and modern-day policing. In recent years, there has been growing public awareness that mass incarceration has its roots in slavery and that racial bias infects all aspects of our criminal injustice system. However, our nation has yet to reckon with the reality that America’s systems of policing and mass criminalization have histories rooted in white fear—not merely of Black people, or even Black resistance, but of the very notion of Black freedom. Therefore, this course examines how, from the founding of the nation, Black people’s desire for freedom led fearful whites to establish a network of laws, policies and social practices that laid a durable foundation for systems of racial and social control that continue to exist in modified forms today. Creating a precedent for state policing and social control that would haunt future generations of Black people in America, state and federal authorities implemented a complex web of legal codes, patrols, and state militias that monitored and governed Black people’s lives in sickening detail, ensuring that whites were empowered to use all means—legal and extralegal—to control Black lives. This course helps us to understand how and why these systems emerged, and why policing has become such a problem in American society that it infiltrates and undermines nearly every Black family and community across the nation, even in the 21st century.  

Course Synopsis

This course begins by examining policing and incarceration in the contemporary moment. We will discuss the recent murders of Black people by police, including the tragic deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. And we will explore the rise and structure of the modern police state in the United States, particularly the role of mass incarceration in Black communities.  

Then, in an effort to locate the origins of policing in Black communities, we will analyze the historical evolution of surveillance and policing. As this course reveals, government policing of Black people in mainland North America began almost concurrently with the introduction of slavery itself. Within two decades after Africans landed in Virginia in 1619, colonial lawmakers began drafting legal codes defining slavery and limiting enslaved Africans’ rights. By the late 17th century, slave laws became increasingly draconian, particularly as panic about Black rebellion intensified. White colonists lived in deep fear of their enslaved human property—a fear that proliferated throughout all thirteen colonies, and resulted in laws granting white people “absolute power and authority” over Black people. In the years that followed, the Haitian Revolution and the subsequent rebellions it inspired prompted widespread anxiety among whites in the United States and caused white governmental authorities to enact increasingly despotic laws, targeting men, women, and children.  

Even after slavery’s legal demise, local, state, and federal authorities continued to monitor and police Black communities. Most southern states passed Black Codes, which scrutinized and governed Black people’s movements and empowered the police and the militia to monitor and punish them for any and all violations. As during enslavement, Black women were especially subject to physical and sexual violence at the hands of police. In subsequent decades, state and federal authorities persisted in their mission to monitor and sabotage Black liberatory leaders and organizations. Most famously, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)’s notorious counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) targeted Dr. Martin Luther Jr., Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) and others, seeking to “prevent the rise of a messiah who could unify” the Black community. And by the late 20th century, the devastating loophole in the 13Amendment, which banned slavery “except as a punishment for crime,” gave rise to the afterlives of slavery: racial profiling, mass incarceration, and modern-day surveillance and policing. Therefore, this course concludes with a detailed examination of contemporary policing, surveillance, and mass incarceration.  

Course content / trigger warning

Given this course’s focus on violence—physical, psychological, and sexual—there may be times that the course content could be disturbing, even traumatizing for some students. If you suspect that specific material is likely to be emotionally challenging for you, I am available to discuss any concerns you may have before the subject comes up in class. Even so, I am aware that it’s not always possible to predict one’s emotional reactions, so if you ever wish to discuss your personal responses to course material with the class, or with me individually afterwards, I welcome such discussions as an appropriate part of our classwork.

In addition, if you ever feel the need to step away during a class discussion, you may always do so without academic penalty. You will, however, be responsible for any material you miss. If you need to leave the room for a significant time, please obtain notes from another student or see me individually to discuss the situation.

Classroom philosophy  

Your instructor holds the perspective that all classes are essentially intercultural encounters—among individuals in the class, between the readers and any given author, and among the authors, the students, and the professor. We are all learning how to effectively learn from one another. Such a classroom requires particular capacities and commitments on our part. It also requires mutual effort in helping each other understand the course material and the differing interpretative positions we may bring to a more complex understanding of the material. While each of us seeks to advance our own knowledge, we are also a community in which we are each responsible to help the other members of the community learn effectively.

In an effort to enhance our learning experience, we expect that students and instructors will commit to do the following:  

• Acquire and utilize intellectual skills and capacities that will enable us to work effectively with the complexities of the course material.
• Develop increased self-knowledge and knowledge of others.
• Understand how the material we are studying relates to our own previous learning, backgrounds, and experiences, and how we can use and apply our new knowledge effectively.
• Develop the ability to critique material in a mature manner using our own previous learning and experiences as part of the critique when appropriate.
• Develop the communication skills that facilitate our learning and our ability to listen, read, reflect, and study to understand.
• Remain engaged and in communication even when the course material or discussion is confusing or upsetting, by recognizing that understanding does not imply agreement.
• Respect everyone’s ideas and values even when we disagree.

Learning outcomes

By the end of this course, students will be able to: 

1. Analyze and interpret primary source materials.

2. Speak and write critically about secondary historical sources by examining diverse interpretations of past events and ideas in their historical contexts.

3. Understand and analyze the origins and development of policing and mass incarceration in Black communities.

Example Early Paper Assignment (referred back to at the end)

The first two weeks of this term will be dedicated to exploring contemporary policing in Black communities. Students will submit a short, “think piece” reflecting on the following questions: Based on what we have discussed in class so far, what are your thoughts about contemporary policing? In what ways is policing a “problem” in Black communities and what factors, policies, and laws have created this problem? Why might it be important to consider history and America’s racial past as key factors in understanding how Black people are monitored and policed in the US?  

Example Primary Source Analysis

Throughout the term, we will read several primary sources, which are documents or images that were created during the historical time period we are studying. This assignment allows students to practice analyzing primary source materials and using them to interpret the nature of policing in Black communities. Students should select a primary source and submit a short, written analysis based on the course material.  

Papers should be approximately 3-5 pages and should consider the following:

1. When was the source created and why? Was it created in response to a particular event or series of events?

2. What does the source reveal about the nature of policing and surveillance in Black communities during the era in which it was created?  

3. What particular fears does it reveal among whites?  

4. What repercussions would it have created for the Black community?  

Example Final Reflection Paper  

Students will submit a paper reflecting on the following questions: after reviewing your first reflection paper, how has your thinking about policing in Black communities evolved during this semester? How have our readings and discussions about the historical development of policing changed or enriched your understanding of modern-day policing, surveillance, and mass incarceration? Have any of your original ideas radically changed? If so, why? What evidence from the course would you use to support or refute your original thinking?  

Course readings

The following books are required for the course

Sally Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2003).

Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2017).

Excerpts from the following books are required reading

• Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010).
• R. J. M. Blackett, The Captive’s Quest for Freedom: Fugitive Slaves, the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, and the Politics of Slavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
• Ward Churchill, The Cointelpro Papers: Documents from the FBI’s Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United States (New York: South End Press, 2001).
• Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004).
• Talitha L. LeFlouria, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016).
• Danielle McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (New York: Vintage, 2011).
• Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, [2010] 2019).

Other required readings:  

• ‍The Massachusetts “Body of Liberties,” Old South Leaflets (Boston: Directors of the Old South Work, n.d. [c. 1900]), 7: 261-280.
• An Act for the Better Ordering and Governing Negroes and Other Slaves in This Province (1740).
• The 13^th Amendment.
• Politicians’ letters about the Haitian Revolution.
• Alex Altman, “Why the Killing of George Floyd Sparked an American Uprising,” TIME, June 4, 2020.
• Say Burgin, “Rosa Parks on Police Brutality: The Speech We Never Heard,” Black Perspectives, January 23, 2020.
• Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Fear of a Black Uprising,” The New Republic, August 13, 2020.
• Kali Nicole Gross, “Policing Black Women’s and Black Girls’ Bodies in the Carceral United States,” Souls, 20:1, (2018) 1-13.
• LaShawn Harris, “Everyday Harm: Black Women and a History of Police Violence.”
• Cheryl Hicks, “Breonna Taylor, Police Brutality, and Black Women’s Historic Demands for Justice.”  
• Jill Lepore, “The Invention of the Police,” The New Yorker, July 13, 2020.
• NPR News Coverage of the 1992 Los Angeles Rebellion.
• Movement for Black Lives, “End the War on Black Trans, Queer, Gender Nonconforming, and Intersex People.”  
• Sasha Ann Panaram, “#SayHerName: Seeking Justice for Breonna Taylor,” Black Perspectives, November 2, 2020.
• Laurence Ralph, “The logic of the slave patrol: the fantasy of black predatory violence and the use of force by the police” Palgrave Communications 5, 130 (2019).
  
• LaKisha Simmons, “How the State Deploys ‘Know-Your-Place’ Violence against Black Families in their Homes.”
• Videos of police beating Rodney King and the murder of George Floyd - Trigger Warning: These videos depict extreme violence, and viewing them is NOT required for the course. They are available only for those who choose to view and analyze them, so please watch them at your own discretion.

In this assignment, Ruben Espinosa offers a creative entry point for students to engage with Shakespeare. Students produce a short film that must touch on a national or local social justice issue using dialogue from one of the plays they’ve studied in class. By focusing these adaptations on students’ interests and communities, students are given the opportunity to question who is allowed access to Shakespeare and consider how these plays are often weaponized against marginalized populations.

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Foul and Fair - an example student production

La Muerte de Ofelia - an example student production

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From the Bible to the Talmud, from The Faerie Queen to The Merchant of Venice, from Toni Morrison’s Sula to Adult Swim’s The Boondocks, the curse of Ham mythology is an undying and deeply rooted part of our contemporary consciousness, manifesting itself in literature, film, politics, and popular entertainment. But what is the “curse" of Ham and how did it take shape? How has it molded our understanding of race and why is it still with us today?

One of the barriers to teaching race in the European Middle Ages is the predominant cultural image of the period as racially, religiously, and ethnically homogenous. However, records and texts from the period offer insight into a rich and cosmopolitan period, where there were not only Black people in Europe, but they held positions of power and prestige. Cord J. Whitaker explains the vibrant landscape of the European Middle Ages. 

Given that The House of Fame is concerned with the broadcasting of speech, the meaning of what is broadcast, and the platforming of the histories that produce our political ideologies, it incorporates many of the central terms involved in any discussion of not only monuments, but also deplatforming and free expression. It is thus a useful—maybe especially useful in its unexpectedness—place for a discussion about the role of Confederate monuments and other forms of oppressive memorializations in our country.

I routinely ask my students to keep a journal. As difficult as it can sometimes be for students to discuss race in the classroom, they have also rarely been asked to take note of and reflect on their own experiences, beliefs, and questions when it comes to race and racial difference. The journal is a place where students can engage in dialogue with themselves. I find this kind of reflection essential, not only for fostering a more open classroom conversation, but also as a way for students to track how their understandings about issues of race develop over time.

In addition to take-home prompts, I dedicate class time throughout the term for students to reflect in their journals. Prompts generally ask students to work through their own experiences or understanding as a way into a particular early modern play. They can be either open-ended or more specific, depending on the week’s lesson.

Before beginning Titus Andronicus, for example, I ask students to spend ten minutes journaling about their thoughts on mixed-race identity. I give some framing questions—for example, where and how do you see mixed-race identity represented in the world around you?—but I remind students to take the initial prompt in whichever direction is most generative. As much as possible, I want students to follow, catalogue, and interrogate their own thoughts.

Even for more specific prompts, I tell students to free-write when they feel stuck. When asking students to write about how and where they see different essentializing discourses overlapping in the world around them—a prompt I generally employ later in the term, and one that helps inform analysis of a play like The Merchant of Venice—I explain that not every person will immediately have an example to work from. For those students, it might be helpful to instead reflect on why they find the prompt difficult to respond to, or, more generally, what thoughts the prompt immediately brings to mind.

I keep a journal and reflect alongside my students. This practice is about more than modeling the importance of dedicated self-reflection. I follow my own prompts, think through how a lesson plan relates to a project I’m working on, and reflect more broadly on how our classroom conversation has impacted my understanding of different issues. I also share with my students how the writing process has helped me think about a given topic. Engaging in this practice helps me track just how much my thinking benefits from teaching and from being in dialogue with my students. 

I do not collect students’ journals. I find it is important that students have a place to write and think about race without the pressure of assessment. This also encourages students to work through ideas that aren’t fully formed or are more personal. It’s not uncommon for students to see questions or issues they weren’t comfortable raising outside of their journal emerge in classroom discussion. Whether or not those students then join the conversation—and they often do—they can track the class’s dialogue relative to what they’ve been thinking through in their journal.

All Our Othellos: Shakespeare and the War on Terror | Watch the full talk

Presented by Ambereen Dadabhoy at Education: A RaceB4Race Symposium in 2021

Ambereen Dadabhoy investigates the long history of the logics of the War on Terror and how these structure narratives about Muslims across the centuries. Here, she engages the question with reference to Shakespeare’s Othello, the portraiture of Velazquez (1599-1660), Ayad Akhtar’s Disgraced (2012), and contemporary discourses of white supremacy. Dadabhoy’s talk draws upon the connective tissue between these cultural fragments to show how teaching our existing narratives of European and English encounters with Islam might affirm stereotypes of what it means to be Muslim in lieu of destabilizing them.

One of my main pedagogical priorities in teaching early literature is preventing students from falling into generalizations about courtly love, the place of women in society, the role of Christianity, etc. Students will often cling to this kind of generalization because it feels familiar to them, but obviously they do not have the expertise or (usually) the time and space to do the research to support their broad generalizations, which they would find contradicted if they did anyway. I generally try to be as focused as possible in how I ask questions and direct them to the text to keep them from having the room to make assumptions. This does not always succeed, but these prompts and questions reflect an effort in that direction.

One way I do this is by juxtaposing the poem “Merciless Beauty” with the documentary film The Prison in 12 Landscapes.

Before beginning our discussion, I ask students to write in a shared document or discussion board:

Contribute at least one comment about this film, how it might relate to the use of time in "Merciless Beauty," or anything else that occurs to you about the film and the poem. Some ideas to consider:

• How each seems to understand the idea, image, or reality of prison.
• How each asks you to think about how you are moving through time and how incarcerated persons experience time.
• What role repetition plays in each.
• Any other thoughts.

Follow-up class discussion

With these shared ideas in mind, the class could turn to different possible moments in the text for further consideration.

For example, one moment I like to discuss in class occurs at lines 14-16

So hath your beautee fro your hertechaced
Pitee, that me ne availeth not to pleyne;
For Daunger halt your mercy in his cheyne.

In translation:

Your beauty has so chased pity from your heart that it does me no good to complain, for Daunger (the class should look this up in the MED) holds your mercy in its/his chain.

These lines are useful first because of their complicated and deceptive syntax. This is a good opportunity to make students identify the subjects, objects, and verbs, and rearrange these in a straightforward s-v-o order so they understand who is doing what to whom in the passage.

Questions to ask about the poem

• How do you understand the image of Daunger holding mercy in his chain? This is a good place to look at the MED together for the definitions of Daunger. Think about the linguistic phenomena it reflects and its relation to our current sense of the word and how we might narrate that trajectory. Is the modern sense of danger a possible resonance in this line?
• How would you talk about the relationship between the linear image of Daunger holding mercy in a chain and the convoluted syntax of this sentence?
• Why do you think an image of confinement is introduced here? (Ideally, you would want students to think about how this image anticipates the prison in the next section. This could lead to further points about time in the poem, the way time itself imprisons the speaker or subject in creating this sense of inevitability around imprisonment.)
• Studying this passage could create a transition to The Prison in 12 Landscapes, or one could move to the passage that explicitly mentions the prison (lines 26-29). I think most literature teachers will know how to handle the latter in the context of the questions above, so I focus on the film. It is interesting to see the association of the prison with quantity, accounting, etc. in light of the prison industrial complex as a profit industry.

Questions to ask while juxtaposing the film

(It’s helpful to start with a more impressionistic/subjective question to open the discussion of the film since it is such a radical shift in subject matter.)

• Which vignettes did you find especially interesting and why? What questions came up for you in watching the film?
• What are different ways the film shows us the experience of time’s passage in prison through its different topics?
• How does the film help us see the role time plays in the poem? In particular, what might you realize now about the poem’s use of time and repetition that you didn’t realize before?

(Students at my university are often very well versed in the critique of carceral systems, especially their disproportionate effects on racial minorities in the US. Their preexisting knowledge helps lead to important questions about reforming the system from within vs. abolishing the whole system and starting with something different, something that frees us from the racial hierarchies and inequities in which we all suffer. At this point, it’s interesting to return to the poem and ask students to consider how it helps them to think about this question of reform vs. abolition.)

• To what extent does the poem seek to escape its own structure? Or, to what extent is it trying to change things within its overall framework—while leaving the framework through which it expresses itself intact? How does the roundel form participate in a potential conflict about reform?
• How can these ideas from the poem contribute to a contemporary discussion about seeking racial and social justice? Is it possible to have this conversation using a Middle English text? What are its limits?

Having convinced (and assigned) students to read Titus Andronicus by establishing that this is not the Bard they know from high school, I am very strategic in the discussions that follow. After all, I have assured them I will help them make sense of this crazypants play.

Defining the revenge tragedy

Before we discuss the play in earnest, it’s important to review the generic constructions of early modern drama: comedies, tragedies, histories, and romances. Many students come into my classroom already understanding the distinctions of the genres, but it is not often that they’ve dug deeper into how these narrative structures generate meaning in the play.

This is why students need to understand that a revenge tragedy like Titus is all about agency: who is able to act and who is denied. Revengers become agents of action instead of objects acted upon. For example, we’ll often discuss how Tamora’s sexuality, like her desire for revenge, transforms her from an object of the state into a subject of force. We’ll also discuss and examine how Lavinia’s rape and mutilation make literal the way she is objectified by everyone in this Roman society, including her father, as Titus sees her as his handmaiden for revenge.

Aaron the Moor and the construction of racial difference

Once we’ve discussed how the narrative structure forces the question of agency in the play, I like to ask the students why Aaron, as a character, is in the play.

First, we talk about the early modern conceptions of Moors, and why, if the play is inherently interested in the nature of action and agency, Shakespeare would have included a Moor. There was a great deal of confusion in early modern England about what a Moor was and what Blackness signified. I begin by offering students the OED definition:

A native or inhabitant of ancient Mauretania, a region of North Africa corresponding to parts of present-day Morocco and Algeria. Later usually: a member of a Muslim people of mixed Berber and Arab descent inhabiting North-Western Africa (now mainly present-day Mauritania), who in the 8th century conquered Spain. In the Middle Ages, and as late as the 17th century, the Moors were widely supposed to be mostly black or very dark-skinned, although the existence of “white Moors” was recognized. Thus, the term was often used, even into the 20th century, with the sense “Black person.”

Additionally, according to Anthony Barthelemy, “The only certainty a reader has when he sees the word is that the person referred to is not a [white] Christian.” Students need to remember, however, that the performance of Blackness in premodern England was often associated with representations of the devil. In medieval morality plays, for example, the devil was often performed in blackface.

In 1577, George Best wrote that racial differences stem from the biblical story of Noah. When Noah and his family were saved from the flood, they were told to “abstain from carnal copulation with their wives.” Noah’s son Cham (also known as Ham or Shem), however, disobeyed, and God punished him:

For the which wicked and detestable fact, as an example for contempt of Almighty God, and disobedience of parents, God would a son should be born whose name was Chus, who not only in self, but all his posterity after him should be so black and loathsome, that it might remain a spectacle of disobedience to all the world. And of this black and cursed Chus came all black Moors which are in Africa, for after the water was vanished from off the face of the earth, and that the land was dry…, Africa remained for Cham and his black son Chus… being perhaps a cursed, dry, sandy, and unfruitful ground, fit for such a generation to inhabit it.

The early modern construction of racial difference was evolving, changing, and adapting from the influence of travel narratives like Best’s. In the end, whatever version or conflation of the story, this “curse” of Ham mythology solidified the belief that Black people were, by divine decree, inferior and associated with evil.

Aaron’s silence

It’s important to remind students that Aaron the Moor is (probably) onstage for the entire first act, but he does not say anything. He is brought in as a slave with the Gothic prisoners of war.

Aaron’s silence in the first act is significant because it can be interpreted in different ways. And this is an ideal place for conversation with students. I ask them to consider how Aaron’s Blackness is present on stage, especially in comparison to the Goths, and what function his visual presence serves. Why is Aaron here?

This is also a moment where I might discuss early modern staging practices and the likelihood of Aaron being played by a white actor in racial prosthetics (probably a wig, arm and leg coverings, and blackface). This explicit and constructed racial difference has an agenda—how is it affecting our understanding of this first act?

When Aaron does speak, it is in a long soliloquy, which is a marker of interiority. We read act 2 scene 1 aloud, noting that Aaron’s language is unlike any other characters in the play: he has a linguistic dexterity that is awe-inspiring. He is able to plot schemes to control the people around him: he controls Chiron, Demetrius (and by extension Lavinia), Titus, and Tamora (and by extension Saturninus and the Roman state).

Aaron’s awareness of stereotypes

I ask my students: is Aaron, the character, aware of the stereotypes and mythologies that are thrust onto him? We read act 4 scene 2 aloud while considering this question.

Aaron does not make references to his color or race until after characters like Lavinia, Bassianus, Titus, and the Nurse keep maligning him because of his Blackness. After these repeated comments, however, Aaron attempts to turn notions of color prejudice on their heads. Aaron condemns whiteness for being inconstant. He praises Blackness for its constancy and for its proof of paternity.

Shakespeare seems to be testing the audience’s conceptions of Blackness by having Aaron be the only parent who actually protects his offspring (both Titus and Tamora are willing to kill their own children to protect their positions in the state). By the end of the play, however, Aaron’s language changes significantly, and he becomes the cursing devil instead of the punning trickster. We read act 5 scenes 1 and 3 aloud to experience the shift in Aaron’s diction. It is clear that Aaron’s fate at the end of the play is to fulfill the devil.

A will of their own?

Titus Andronicus replicates the revenge tragedy genre, but it is also bizarrely self-conscious in its use of allusions to literary devices and models for cruelty, suffering, and revenge (Ovid, Horace, Homer, etc). It is almost as if the characters feel that there is no original way to experience their own lives. They seem to express a notion that everything has been scripted for them. Examples I point out include:

• Chiron and Demetrius on rape (2.3.1ff/2.4.1ff)
• Marcus on suffering (2.3.38ff/2.4.38ff)
• Titus’s scrolls to the gods (4.2.18ff)
• Lavinia’s use of Ovid (4.1.40ff)

Titus Andronicus, then, seems to be deeply engaged with an interrogation of the force and power of societal constructions of identity. Although Aaron, Tamora, and Lavinia all begin the play with identities that are unique and original, they all succumb to the crushing pressure of the society’s expectations. “As the saying is” becomes a way to plot these figures, and ultimately it becomes a way to deny them agency also.

Marking Strangers: Muslims and Racial Profiling in Early Modern England | Watch the full talk

Presented by Hassana Moosa at Geneologies: A RaceB4Race Symposium in 2022

Hassana Moosa here draws upon the critical tools of premodern critical race studies and Shakespeare studies to investigate genealogies of early modern race-making as they pertain to Muslims. Through an in-depth study of the Prince of Morocco’s character in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice (c. 1598), Moosa demonstrates how the racialization of Muslims is keyed to a set of geographic, political, and sartorial markers which ultimately evacuate any other signifiers from the figure of the Muslim. In this way, the early modern English stage comes into view as a site where a simplified notion of Muslims—as embodied symbols of a culture of foreign violence—was transmitted to audiences. Moosa’s analysis further connects the early modern English context to today’s securitized Western settings, in which practices of border control and policing cannot be disentangled from the deeper history of staging anti-Muslim racism.

Finding Black Women in Shakespeare | Watch the full talk

Presented by Joyce Green McDonald at Politics: A RaceB4Race Symposium in 2021

Joyce Green MacDonald traces ways early modern texts and genres process the classical past, and how that construction of the past is made known in the present, through honored resources of the ancient world. In particular, she emphasizes that classical and early modern texts can become tools for excavating Black presences that have been deliberately lost. Through Richard Ligon’s eyewitness account in Barbados (1647) and Thomas Thistlewood’s eyewitness account in Jamaica (1748-1786), Black women’s innate modesty and exclusion from normal orders of civic or human status converts them to objects. Building upon Ben Jonson’s notions “exactness of study” and the “poetic imitation a modern poet creates,” Green MacDonald argues that while Black women are not often visible in Shakespeare’s plays and his contemporaries', disappearance does not mean absence.

Teaching the Travail of Writing: Authority, Empire, and Racial Formation in the (Pre)modern | Watch the full talk

Presented by Nedda Mehdizadeh at Education: A RaceB4Race Symposium in 2021

Nedda Mehdizadeh unpacks how English travel writing not only mirrors imperial adventurism but participates in the formation of empire itself. Taking as a starting point Edward Said’s comments on “fictional realities” in Orientalism (1978), Mehdizadeh models pedagogical techniques which demonstrate how cartography is not a reflection of an external world but a constructed discipline, doing so through the Hereford Mappa Mundi (c. 1300), the Mercator Projection (1569), and Muhammad al-Idrisi’s Tabula Rogeriana (1154). Mehdizadeh then turns to Richard Hakluyt’s Principall Navigations (1589), a compendium of travelogues, and Robert Thorne’s Mappe or Carde of the World (1527) to illuminate the key role played by writing in processes of conquest and early capitalism. By attending to the power of composition, Mehdizadeh also highlights the ways in which teaching composition might empower students to work against and past today’s imperial universalisms.

Those who insist on reading Spenser's The Faerie Queene as only an anti-Catholic allegory are missing a crucial truth: the epic genre had already made Muslims apt figures for his allegory, and his allegory only helps further racialize Muslims. Race and allegory work similarly—they both require that bodies become abstractions, and that bodies and their features become signifiers of virtues or vices. While the genre of epic has significantly defined what Muslims are in the white European imagination, Spenser’s allegory actually helps make racist tropes “stick” to Muslim bodies.

Students are usually unaware that in early modern Europe changing or not changing religions was often a matter of life or death. When teaching early modern texts, it is important to make it clear in the classroom that the Reformation was more than just about Catholic/Protestant conflict. Bringing conversations about religious conversion into the classroom can help students see that religion was—and still is for some—more than just about what a person thinks and believes. It’s about the transformation of fundamental aspects of identity. It is also important for students to pay attention to the fact that many early modern Christians didn’t believe that everyone had—or should have—equal access to this transformation.

Primary Works

The Song of Roland. Trans. Glyn S. Burgess. Penguin Classics, 1990. ISBN: 978-0140445329

The Song of the Cid (PenguinClassics) A Dual-Language Edition with Parallel Text. Trans. Burton Raffel. Penguin Classics, 2009. ISBN: 978-0143105657

Niane, Djibril Tamsir, and G. D. Pickett. Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali. Revised Edition, Pearson College Div, 2006.  ISBN: ‎978-1405849425

Secondary Works

Akbari, Suzanne Conklin. “From Due East to True North: Orientalism and Orientation.” ‍

The Postcolonial Middle Ages (2000): 19–34. New Middle Ages (NeMiA).

Burman, Thomas E. Reading the Qur’an in Latin Christendom, 1140-1560. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009.

Carpenter, Dwayne E. “Social Perception and Literary Portrayal: Jews and Muslims in Medieval Spanish Literature.” Convivencia: Jews, Muslims, and Christians in Medieval Spain. Ed. Vivian B. Mann, Thomas F. Glick, and Jerrilynn D. Dodds. New York: George Braziller, 1992. 61–82.

Chism, C. “Arabic in the Medieval World.” PMLA 124.2 (2009): 624–631.

Cobb, Paul M. The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. The Postcolonial Middle Ages. First Paper. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.

Constable, Olivia Remie. Medieval Iberia: Readings from Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Sources. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997.

Davis, Kathleen. Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.

Davis, Kathleen. “Time Behind the Veil: The Media, the Middle Ages, and Orientalism Now.” The Postcolonial Middle Ages. New York, NY: St. Martin’s, 2000. 105–122. New Middle Ages (NeMiA).

Davis, Kathleen, and Nadia Altschul, eds. Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World: The Idea of “the Middle Ages” Outside Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.

Ganim, John M. Medievalism and Orientalism: Three Essays on Literature, Architecture and Cultural Identity. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Khaldūn, Ibn, and Franz Rosenthal. The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958.

Kinoshita, Sharon. Medieval Boundaries: Rethinking Difference in Old French Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.

Kinoshita, S. “‘Pagans Are Wrong andChristians Are Right’: Alterity, Gender, and Nation in the Chanson De Roland.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31.1 (2001): 79–112.

Lampert-Weissig, Lisa. Medieval Literature and Postcolonial Studies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,2010.

Maalouf, Amin. The CrusadesThrough Arab Eyes. New York: Schocken, 1989.

Menocal, María Rosa, and Raymond P. Scheindlin. The Literature of Al-Andalus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Nesbitt, Nick. “Resolutely Modern: Politics and Human Rights in the Mandingue Charter.” The Savannah Review 14 (2014): 11-19.

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. 1st Vintage Books ed. New York: Vintage, 1979.

Despite the debates around the geographic location of Shakespeare’s imagined island in The Tempest, that play has always spoken to countless readers living under the legacy of European colonialism. There are clear links to the literature of exploration, encounter, and conquest whether it be the account of a shipwreck in Bermuda, the embedding of passages from Montaigne’s essay “Of Cannibals,” or passing references to European interactions with North Africa.  

The play considers alterity, the dispossession and subjugation of a Native inhabitant in his homeland, and the fear of miscegenation, even as it may also be a more abstract meditation on the power of art, the imaginary, and theater. In teaching The Tempest through this lens, I would focus on our first encounter with Caliban in act 1, scene 2. Prospero calls for his ‘slave’ Caliban and demands he come out of his dwelling; Caliban responds:

I must eat my dinner.  
This island's mine, by Sycorax my mother,  
Which thou takest from me. When thou camest first,  
Thou strokedst me and madest much of me, wouldst give me  
Water with berries in't, and teach me how  
To name the bigger light, and how the less,  
That burn by day and night: and then I loved thee  
And show'd thee all the qualities o' the isle,
The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile:  
Cursed be I that did so!  

The scene enacts in miniature a European contact narrative beginning with Prospero’s assertion of Caliban’s baseness. Caliban responds in anger to Prospero’s demands for his labor, saying that he is eating his meal, and then bursts out with an impassioned tirade against Prospero for dispossessing him of his birthright, his island home. Caliban recounts the first encounters with the shipwrecked Prospero and his small child, when they were friendly to Caliban and treated him well. They shared their foodways and knowledge with him and he in turn showed them the island’s resources. Caliban knew from experience where to find potable water and which lands were fertile. He shared that vital knowledge for surviving in his homeland with the newcomers, to his detriment. Once enslaved by Prospero’s magic, Caliban lives in a bond servitude on which his masters become dependent.

How like the various encounter narratives we find in the early modern European archive. Vulnerable European explorers were frequently dependent on the hospitality of the Indigenous peoples of the lands they visited. But if those same explorers found themselves at advantage, through superior weaponry or due to the impact of the pathogens they carried, or a combination of the two, they rarely lost the opportunity to claim hegemony over the land and suzerainty over the native population.  

In the passage above, Caliban recounts how Prospero and Miranda taught him their language, including their names for the sun and the moon, with the implication their nominative system is somehow the more correct one. While teaching The Tempest, you might consider assigning a reading of Thomas Hariot’s account of his interaction in 1585 with the Algonquian peoples of the Atlantic coast of what is now North Carolina as a comparison. After demonstrating the use of various technological instruments he brought, including telescopes, magnifying glasses, and magnets, Hariot claims the Natives considered the objects to be made by the gods, who clearly favored the English, because these tools were beyond their comprehension. Hariot’s technology is analogous to Prospero’s magic and we witness Prospero threaten to use that magic to physically torture Caliban for his insolence.

Caliban is robbed of both his freedom and his land. The relationship of Indigenous peoples to their home territories is an essential part of their identities. Many Indigenous cultures recount their autochthonous beginnings, emerging out of the land itself. Or others who come from the skyworld to the earth are the cause of it becoming a habitable place. Their relationship to the land is one defined as much by obligations to it as their rights of ownership over it. For Indigenous peoples, their duty is to determine what course is best for themselves on the land: in exercising that duty they are demonstrating their sovereignty. Thus, their self-determination of the collective wellbeing is at the center of their autonomy, rather than the wielding of power over a specific territory. Caliban loses his sovereignty when others take away his authority over his own land after he has shared the best ways to live in that environment.  

Caliban’s tragedy is redoubled in act 2, scene 2 when he mistakes the drunken castaway Stephano for a god and the man’s liquor for a divine brew. Caliban, to Stephano, says:

I’ll show thee the best springs. I’ll pluck thee berries.
I’ll fish for thee and get thee wood enough.
A plague upon the tyrant that I serve.
I’ll bear him no more sticks, but follow thee,
Thou wondrous man.   

While written for comic effect no doubt, the scene has tragic resonances when we consider how alcoholic spirits were often used as a weapon of conquest in actual negotiations between Europeans and Indigenous people who were unfamiliar with alcohol. In his inebriated state, Caliban once again offers to share the bounty of his home isle in order to gain alliance with Stephano against Prospero’s tyrannical usurpation. The bond Caliban has enjoyed with his environment and the delights of the island’s ethereal music seem doomed to be ruptured by colonial intrusions. When he loses that bond, he loses his sovereignty.

Comparing episodes from The Faerie Queene with episodes from the works that inspired Spenser, in particular excerpts from Ariosto’s and Tasso’s works, is a productive way to draw attention to how racialization travels and mutates across national traditions.

Take, for example, Duessa’s relationship to her literary predecessors, Alcina and Armida, in The Faerie Queene. Duessa, falsifying her identity under the name Fidessa, is the “faire companion” of the “Sarazin” Sans Foy, whose name means without faith. Before discussing Duessa, however, we need to examine her “Sarazin” companion. Shokoofeh Rajabzadeh has argued that the term denotes Muslims who lie about their racial lineage and claim to be descended from Abraham’s wife Sarah: “Every time the label is pronounced, Muslims are presumed guilty of fabricated genealogy, of co-opting Christian history, of misrepresenting themselves and their faith, of manipulating those around them.”

Spenser’s name for this Muslim character, Sans Foy, effectively binds faithlessness to Muslims: Islam is not a faith in the poem’s estimation. This Muslim knight, like all Muslims in the general estimation of early modern Christians, cannot be trusted because he belongs to a race that falsifies their genealogical origins. The same is also true for his brothers, Sans Joy and Sans Loy. In the Sans brothers we see many of the same racist tropes applied to Muslims to this day.

Catfishing whiteness as the ultimate evil

But back to Duessa. The story of Duessa turning Fraudubio into a tree closely imitates Alcina turning Astolfo into a tree in Orlando Furioso. In OF, Astolfo tells the knight Ruggiero (Rogero in John Harington’s translation, quoted below):

[Alcina] and Morgana were in incest gotten.

And as their first beginning was of sinne,
So is their life vngodly and defamed,
Of law or iustice passing not a pinne.

Alcina and her sister Morgana are characterized through one of the logics of race: their character is predetermined by the circumstances of their birth. But the real problem is that Alcina appears beautiful and desirable—she seems to be white!

Although Astolfo warns Ruggiero about Alcina, Ruggiero is unable to resist her beauty in canto 7. There we get a seven-stanza blazon, in which Alcina bears all the conventions of white, feminine beauty: in stanza 11 alone she is described as having long blond hair “As might with wire of beaten gold,” as having “lovely cheeks” that “With roses and with lilies painted are,” and has having a “forehead faire and full of seemely cheare, / As smooth as polish Ivoried doth appeare.”  

But both Ariosto and Spenser will make it clear that Alcina and Duessa only seem to be beautiful white women. Both poems strip the sorceress of whiteness and allow the heroes and us as readers to see who they really are.

In OF, a magic ring given by the good sorceress Melissa reveals Alcina’s true nature:

Her face was wan, a leane and writheld skin,
Her stature scant three horseloaues did exceed:
Her haire was gray of hue, and very thin,
Her teeth were gone, her gums serv'd in their steed,
No space was there between her nose and chin,
Her noisome breath contagion would breed,
In fine, of her it might have well bene said,
In Nestors youth she was a pretie maid.

Alcina is primarily revealed to be disgusting because she is old. But the reference to “painting,” cosmetics, also draws attention to the fact that here beauty and whiteness were artificial.

Spenser goes further to make Duessa an object of disgust. Una, who really is white, reveals Duessa’s true nature:

Her craftie head was altogether bald,
  And as in hate of honorable eld,
  Was ouergrowne with scurfe and filthy scald;
  Her teeth out of her rotten gummes were feld,
  And her sowre breath abhominably smeld;
  Her dried dugs, like bladders lacking wind,
  Hong downe, and filthy matter from them weld;
  Her wrizled skin as rough, as maple rind,
So scabby was, that would haue loathd all womankind.

Her neather parts, the shame of all her kind,
  My chaster Muse for shame doth blush to write;
  But at her rompe she growing had behind
  A foxes taile, with dong all fowly dight;
  And eke her feete most monstrous were in sight;
  For one of them was like an Eagles claw,
  With griping talaunts armd to greedy fight,
  The other like a Beares vneuen paw:
More vgly shape yet neuer liuing creature saw.

Duessa is described in more disgusting detail, and Spenser’s narrator draws the reader’s attention to Duessa’s “neather parts,” reveling that Duessa is a monstrous animal, not just an old woman. Like Alcina, her whiteness was only superficial. Both Ariosto and Spenser render pagan and Muslim women as incapable of being suitable sexual partners; they are old and non-human and thus unable to be bearers of white, Christian children.

It is important to also draw students’ attention to the fact that Spenser didn’t have to write the story this way. He could have followed Tasso’s example, in which the blond Muslim sorceress, Armida, is converted to Christianity (she is described at length in canto 4, stanzas 24-32). Tasso takes a different approach—in his epic, it seems that Armida becomes a Christian because she is beautiful and white—whiteness is a necessary precondition for conversion.

Nevertheless, what is true in all these epics is that white skin is almost always assigned to Christians or characters who will become Christians.

Lechery, the allegory

More episodes ripe for comparison are Ariosto’s “Ethiopian sodomite” and Spenser’s allegorical character, Lechery. In canto 43 OF, a black man offers a white Italian man, Anselmo a sumptuous palace in exchange for sex:

[Anselmo] sees a Gipsen standing at the doore,
All blab-lipt, beetle browd, and bottle nozed,
Most greasie, nastie, his apparell poore,
His other parts, as Painters are disposed,
To giue to Esop; such a Blackamore
Could not be seene elsewhere, as he supposed,
So vile avilage, and so bad a grace,
To make eu'n Paradise alothsome place.

(Note: Harington’s translation refers to this character as a “gipsen” [Egyptian] and a “Blackamore,” while Ariosto calls him “uno Etiopo.”) This Black man is a figure that is supposed to inspire the reader’s disgust, and this feeling is supposed to be intensified upon imagining Anselmo having sex with him.  

In Book 1, canto 4 of FQ, Duessa leads Redcrosse to Lucifera’s House of Pride. There, Redcross sees the seven deadly sins. Following Gluttony is Lechery:

And next to him rode lustfull Lechery,
   Upon a bearded Goat, whose rugged haire,
   And whally eyes (the signe of gelosy,)
   Was like the person selfe, whom he did beare:
   Who rough, and blacke, and filthy did appeare,
   Unseemely man to please faireLadies eye;
   Yet he of Ladies oft was loved deare,
   When fairer faces were bid standen by:
O who does know the bent of womens fantasy?

Whether or not Spenser is directly recalling this moment from Ariosto, comparing the two characters allows us to discuss further how the feeling of disgust sticks to specific bodies—pagan and Muslim women, and now to Black men. Additionally, these Black male characters are also defined in relation to sexual proclivities that are supposed to rejected by the white Christian reader.

Race and sexuality are linked in Spenser. In the production of allegory, the allegory sutures lechery to a Black man. A Black body is the most suitable body for the English reader to understand lechery.

Malignant influence

It is key for students to see the way Spenser’s influences are taken into The Faerie Queene, and how racialization is developed through this process of either intentional reimagining or cryptomnesia. By reading Spenser’s poem alongside excerpts of Orlando Furioso and Jerusalem Delivered, students can begin to trace the network of influence and the adaptation of thought in the signifying of racial difference across national and cultural divisions.  

Resources

Britton, D. "From the Knight’s Tale to The Two Noble Kinsmen: Rethinking Race, Class and Whiteness in Romance.” Postmedieval 6(2015): 56-78.

---. “Teaching Spenser’s Darkness.” In Teaching Race in the European Renaissance: A Classroom Guide, edited by Matthieu Chapman and Anna Wainwright, 67-85. Tempe, AZ: ACMRS Press, 2023.

Rajabzadeh, Shokoofeh. “The Depoliticized Saracen and Muslim Erasure.” Literature Compass 16.9-10 (2019): 1-8.

Sanchez, Melissa E. “‘To Giue Faire Colour’: Sexuality, Courtesy, and Witness in The Faerie Queene.” Spenser Studies 35(2021): 285-90.

This unessay assignment is often the final assignment in Kim F. Hall’s "Black Shakespeares" course.  

As you may know, the word “essay” means “attempt.” Usually, this is an attempt at understanding something that is complex and explaining that complexity. Similarly, the unessay is your attempt at tackling an intellectual knot outside the constraints of the usual college essay or research paper. Your unessay should deeply and critically engage with the topic of the course; while you are welcome to move between past and present, there should be some substantive engagement with the premodern. However, your texts, interpretation and analysis of premodern materials do not have to cover topics that we have discussed in class. The pedagogical purpose of the unessay is to create opportunities for you to pursue the things that arouse your intellectual curiosity and to explore them in any medium that suits you, which includes music, art, poetry, animation, sewing/stitching, drama, short film, etc. Whatever form your unessay takes you will write a paratextual statement that explains the relation of your unessay to the class and the interpretive and creative choices that you made.

You will be graded on the depth of your analysis and engagement with your choice of topic as well as the effort that you put into the unessay. The "unessay" was originally formulated by Professor Paul O'Donnell, who notes, “In an unessay you choose your own topic, present it any way you please, and are evaluated on how compelling and effective you are.” One way to think about the unessay for this class is to consider the question: How can I best convey my interest in the subject to other students and scholars?

Your unessay should include

1. A title
2. A clear focus
3. Some attention to issues raised by scholarship in the field (talk to me! use those lightning review notes!)
4. A paratextual statement that outlines your focus and goals for the project
5. NOTE: I'd like a paragraph description of what you might like to do (which can be your interests thus far, etc.) and for you to make an appointment to talk about it by [DATE]. 

In the years before independence in the United States there were over fifty documented conspiracies, rebellions, and plots by enslaved peoples in resistance to slavery. Unfortunately, this history has been largely overlooked. Many historians have dismissed incidents of slave insurrections as insignificant, or too small to qualify as acts of political resistance. This dismissal devalues the self-awareness enslaved people had for their position in colonial society.

By studying these rebellions and the unique political climate in which they took place, we can better understand the ways in which enslaved people strategically worked against and resisted slavery since its inception. We can also trace how anti-Black racism is deeply embedded into the foundations of U.S. legal code and law enforcement.

As a book artist specializing in printmaking, poetry, embroidery, and bookbinding, Suzanne Coley reimagines the words of Shakespeare through the medium of book art. Her work brings Shakespeare into the contemporary world and reshapes his texts into culturally and socially significant art objects. In the last 10 years she has made over 500 unique traditional hardback books expanding the traditional bookbinding and book arts practices. Suzanne's art combines painting, poetry, printmaking, and textile manipulation to examine the human condition and modern-day social justice issues.

What is sovereignty within a world-view that has historically never recognized a “sovereign”? In a settler-colonial state, it is imperative to recognize how even liberatory language is steeped in hierarchical epistemologies. Scott Manning Stevens dives deep into the history of sovereignty and indigeneity, defining the relationship these concepts have to the past, present, and future of Native peoples' self-determination across North America.

Barthelemy, Anthony Gerard. Black Face, Maligned Race: The Representation of Blacks in English Drama from Shakespeare to Southerne. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987.

Little, Arthur, Jr. “Is it Possible to Read Shakespeare through Critical White Studies?” In Ayanna Thompson, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2020: 268-80.

Marcus, Stephen and Sharon Best. “Surface Reading: An Introduction.” Representations 108.1 (2009): 1-21.

Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.

Schreiner, Susan E. “Appearances and Reality in Luther, Montaigne, and Shakespeare.” The Journal of Religion 83.3 (2003): 345-380.

Viewed historically as the seminal, most written about work in English literature, Hamlet enjoys a prominent place in an already elite canon of works. As such, the play has been regarded as the ultimate Shakespearean achievement that defines, at least symbolically, the canon’s interpretive bandwidth. Notably, however, Hamlet has proven especially resistant to critical race analysis. More to the point, critics have excluded or sidestepped interrogations of race since introducing a critical race reading in this representative text would implicate the entire canon and make visible its talismanic status as a centerpiece of an unstated, white humanism. To address race in Hamlet, therefore, delivers a shock to the Shakespearean system that engenders tremendous skepticism for challenging the conventional premise of this iconic text.

Shattering the impervious play

Approaching the text as evidence is requisite for forestalling skepticism when teaching race in Shakespeare, whether Gertrude’s “black and grained spots”; Hamlet’s “let the devil wear black, for I’ll have a suit of sables”; or his opening, “I am too much in the sun.” Finding accessible evidence as a point of entry comprises a crucial first step in this pedagogic process.

Rather than start at the beginning of the play, I turn to the closet scene in act 3 where Hamlet draws the harsh contrast between his deceased father, the “fair” king, and Claudius the “Moor” whom Hamlet despises for murdering his parent. The purpose of highlighting these terms is to introduce students to their historical, geographical, cultural, and religious contexts that coalesce into racial types. The instance of “Moor” serves as a cultural shorthand for real-world African and onstage, Black person.

For Hamlet, this racialized word carries such a pre-packaged set of meanings that it has become a byword for human depravity, murder, and wickedness perpetrated by a white man, Claudius. Racialized Blackness was, therefore, the baseline of criminality, and students can appreciate the troubling but commonplace assessment that criminality had a color and a race.

The violent Black man myth

As has been suggested, the closet scene does not represent an isolated, unique example but signals readers to be more sharply attuned to other similar moments. The play-within-the play has preoccupied 20th-century criticism, just as the closet scene or the grave-digger’s scene had for an earlier generation of critics. But this scholarship has carefully avoided Hamlet’s relationship to the traveling company of actors and his request for an extemporary performance from their repertory, featuring the Black Pyrrhus character who becomes Hamlet’s avatar and alter ego for vengeful, unrelenting bloodshed, and vigilante Blackness. When critics refer to the First Player’s speech, they misread badly the evidence that it is Hamlet who recites from memory the actions of a Black Pyrrhus, Shakespeare’s racially baptized, avenging son of the classical warrior Achilles.

Having broached this line of discussion, we may emphasize certain takeaways. Readers must consider whether Hamlet wishes to retain his unspotted whiteness (like his demand for his mother, Gertrude), now a sign of weak inaction, or surrender to the Moorish Blackness that he denigrates. Here, in 21st-century terms, is yet one more response to the perennial Hamlet question: Why does Hamlet delay? We should also reflect on the role theater played in circulating images and ideas of race—Blackness and whiteness—in Shakespeare’s time especially when race is not tied explicitly to an onstage Black character like Aaron, Othello, or Lucianus, the nephew poisoner representing Claudius in Hamlet’s staging of The Mousetrap.

Equally important is the circulation of the violent Black man type, a figure acquiring social currency in the centuries that followed right up to the present when such an idea paints a target on the bodies of real Black persons. A critical race studies approach to Hamlet not only demystifies the “iconic Shakespeare text” by bringing it into a recognizable universe of modern concerns, but it also asks students to think about the demands reading Shakespeare and race places on them as 21st-century thinkers.

Who Shot Romeo? And How Can We Stop the Bleeding | Watch the full talk

Presented by Eric L. De Barros at Education: A RaceB4Race Symposium in 2021

Eric L. De Barros critiques educative adaptations of Shakespeare plays that seek to create social change through art but instead are too reverential of Shakespeare, especially its poetic language. Such works are insufficiently focused on developing critical consciousness. De Barros provides as an example Romeo is Bleeding, a 2015 documentary about an after-school program that produces Te’s Harmony, a spoken word adaptation of Romeo and Juliet responding to gun violence in Richmond Virginia. While De Barros admires the dazzle and dexterity of the spoken word performances captured in the film, he is critical of how the documentary ignores the legacy of Black lyricism (jazz, hip hop, and more) in presenting spoken word as the newest and most powerful version of Black self-expression. De Barros cautions that Shakespeare’s words are treated as emblematic of poetry, because Shakespeare = poetry is an equation that obscures Black bodies and the violence white verse often does to them. De Barros further points to the white producers and teachers who surround the Black young people creating Te’s Harmony and considers this evidence of white savior mentality at work, focused on art as rescuing individuals rather than addressing systemic causes of suffering.

An excerpt of “Survey of British literature 1: From Beowulf to Shakespeare” (a second-year survey course)

Course description

This course will traverse nearly 900 years of literature written in Britain, from Old English to early modern English literature. Of course, 900 years of literature cannot be thoroughly covered in a semester. Hence, this course will introduce you to works that capture important literary developments and social concerns at various historical moments. The literary works are diverse not only in time period and genre (e.g. epic, romance, lyric, and drama), but also in their authorship and their encounters with race, gender, religion, and nationality. We will investigate how the representations of these encounters—in their various generic forms and historical contexts—work to define “Englishness.”  

Reformation unit

Day 1: Conversion, race, gender, and nation: introduction to the Reformation and Foxe’s Book of Martyrs

A brief lecture on the Reformation: Luther’s 95 theses, Henry VIII's separation from the Roman Catholic Church, Marian Counter Reformation, Elizabeth’s reestablishment of Protestantism. (There are also many good short overviews of the Reformation on YouTube that can be assigned instead of giving a lecture).  

John Foxe, “The First Examination of Anne Askew” (in John Foxe, Book of Martys, ed. John King, Oxford University Press, 2009), 22-34.

Day 2: Persecution and antisemitism: Foxe’s Book of Martyr’s continued

The Guernsey Martyrs (in John Foxe, Book of Martyrs, ed. John King, Oxford University Press, 2009), 198-203.

“the wicked Jewes at Lincoln” and “a certain Jew…fell into a privy” (I use EBBO-TCP, a good way to introduce students to this resource)

Day 3: Refusing to convert: selections from Luther’s On the Jews and their Lies and Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta

Selections from On the Jews and their Lies (Internet Medieval Sourcebook, Fordham University Center for Medieval Studies)

The Jew of Malta (act 1)

Day 4: The Jew of Malta continued

The Jew of Malta (acts 2-3)

Day 5: The Jew of Malta continued

The Jew of Malta (acts 4-5)

Shakespeare is at its best when everyone is allowed to decide what interests them and how to interpret it through their own perspectives. Many Native artists have found ways to reimagine Shakespeare, bridging communities to illustrate the importance of Indigenous language revitalization, Native art, and storytelling. Whether including Indigenous languages or adapting works to include a Native writer’s voice in English, these Shakespeare productions can only be built in Native-empowered spaces. Despite the original colonial intentions that forced Shakespeare on Native peoples, these productions say our languages are equal to or more complicated than Shakespeare’s.

An undergraduate course created by Geraldine Heng.

Course description

In medieval literature, difference from the norm is often marked by skin color: a Christian knight or lady in Western Europe is conventionally “fair,” while a Muslim or “Saracen” enemy is often described as Black, and someone of mixed parentage (European-and-African, or Christian-and-Muslim) may be depicted as piebald: Black-and-white. In romances, when a “pagan” or “heathen” person converts to Christianity, his skin may change color at baptism, turning dramatically white.

Jewish communities living in medieval Europe were required by canon law, from the Fourth Lateran Council on, to publicly identify themselves by wearing a special badge that marked them off as separate and different from Christians. In England, Jews were required by law to wear the “badge of shame” from 1218 on, until their expulsion from the country. Jewish people were said to have a special stench, a particular facial physiology, and even be marked by horns and a tail, and Jewish men were said to bleed congenitally, like menstruating women. In England Jews were tagged, herded, and imprisoned disproportionately, as well as judicially executed on trumped-up charges of murdering Christian children through torture, and ritual crucifixions, to re-enact the killing of Christ.  

Literature and history thus suggest that the European Middle Ages—like other periods before and after—were intensely interested in issues that we now today identify as race-related. It is also clear that the concept of race in the medieval period is complicated by religion, as well as various economic, political, social, military, and other factors that determine questions of race in Europe from the early modern period right to our time.

This course explores the changing patterns, meanings, and uses of racializing discourses in medieval Europe from the 10th through 15th centuries, by looking at some of European medieval culture's most prominent texts, legends, and artifacts. We will look at literary romances and travel literature, chronicles and sagas, saints' legends, statuary, maps, and whatever else may be useful to us. For purposes of comparison, we will also critically consider selected texts originating before the medieval centuries, as well as texts from non-European, non-Christian cultures, as well as theoretical materials.

Course readings

• “Airs, Waters, Places,” Hippocrates
• The Vinland Sagas: The Norse Discovery of America (Penguin classics in translation: you will need to buy this book)
• Parzival, Wolfram von Eschenbach
• The Romance of Moriaen
• The Book of the Glory of the Black Race, Al-Jahiz
• History of the Mongols, John of Plano Carpini
• Prioress's Tale and Man of Law's Tale, Geoffrey Chaucer
• Hugh of Lincoln (the Anglo-Norman Ballad)
• The King of Tars
• Richard Coer de Lyone

Biopolitics and citizenship in Euripides’ Ion

a lecture by Dan-el Padilla Peralta

I'm here today to talk with you about the value of a play written in the fifth century BCE for contemporary discussions of race, racialization, and citizenship. That play is Euripides' Ion. And what I'll do over the next few minutes is give a brief overview of the context of the play itself and what forces in 5th century classical Greek and Athenian culture shape it. From there I'll provide an assessment of how the play can be used to invigorate conversations about citizenship and belonging with an emphasis on how these intersect with formulations of race. With Euripides' Ion, we can explore a couple of features of citizenship: citizenship as security or safety for some and not for others, early definitions of who can be counted as a legitimate citizen and who cannot, and ways that classical Greek ideas about citizenship continue to inform and inflect discussions about citizenship today. Here I'll be thinking in particular about the biopolitics of citizenship and how we understand the relationship between reproduction and citizenship.

“And in the third year after this in the archonshop of Antidotos, on account of the multitude of citizens, at Pericles’ proposal they decided that no one who had not been born of two citizen parents would have a share in the city.”

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This is a description of the Athenian citizenship law of 451 BCE, as preserved for us in the constitution of the Athenians. And this is a law that operates in the background to Euripides' Ion.

But first, The Suppliants

To make our way to the Ion, we'll start by thinking with one of his predecessor playwrights in classical Athens, Aeschylus, and a production of the playwright Aeschylus that also bears on questions of citizenship: The Suppliants. Aeschylus' The Suppliants raises a question that's important for our assessment of citizenship in classical Athens: "How can a space that is open to all protect me?" This play centers the story of immigrants pleading for protection and for this reason, it's received some take-up in contemporary adaptations of Greek myth. Among the most riveting and much discussed of these adaptations was Moni Ovadia’s production on the island of Sicily some years ago, a production that was staged with deliberate emphasis on and conscious attention to the EU’s treatment of migrants and refugees.

In one of the key scenes of Aeschylus' The Suppliants, the ruler Pelasgus attempts to have the immigrant women who've attached themselves to an altar of Zeus for supplication and protection moved away from the altar to a more open public space. The Chorus Leader responds, "How can a space that is open to all protect me?" In a recent essay, the philosopher Sara Brill has mulled over this question's implications, and I'll quote her:

"But the Chorus Leader's question — 'How can a space that is open to all protect me' — lays bare the conditions of democracy in an even more profound way. We can hear in it, a deep awareness of the relation between how humans bear the weight of symbolic life and the fragility of embodied existence. Will we be safe here in this shared and open space created by human agreement?"

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The labor of creating public spaces that protect the most vulnerable is an exacting labor, and its demands aren't always, and indeed are not usually, distributed equitably. These labors and their consequences are ones that Greek tragedies are quite interested in exploring. The labor of moving towards "a shared and open space that's created by human agreement" we see from some of these tragedies is incomplete if we limit ourselves to fumbling for abstractions without thinking long and hard about how the most vulnerable are made to feel in open spaces.

Greek tragedians

The Ion, which is a tragedy by the playwright Euripides, is where I'll try to ground some of that understanding that develops in this Greek context. This is a play that emerges in the course of the 5th century BCE's ongoing negotiations of Greek identity. And in order to get a sense of the play's place in Greek life, I'll give a brief overview of what Greek tragedy looks like during this period and who the major players in the production of tragedies in Athens were.

There are three canonical tragedians. There is, first of all, Aeschylus, who lives from the 520's to 456/455 BCE, and is the author of The Suppliants. He is an author who fights in the Greco Persian wars and who enjoys a prominently visible role in public life. He scores 13 victories for his plays at the Great Dionysia, the public festival where these plays were staged. Next we have Sophocles, who was 495 to 405 BCE, who is very politically engaged, very productive. In addition to putting on plays, over 120 of which we have titles for, he is also a player on the political scene. And finally, we have Euripides, who is 40 years younger than Aeschylus, 10 to 15 years younger than Sophocles, and who, by comparison to Aeschylus and Sophocles, is not quite as successful initially, but who becomes incredibly popular in later generations. He will come to outshine the other two playwrights, 19 of his plays survive.

Racialized reproduction

The Athenian citizenship law of 451 BCE is important for understanding one of Euripides' plays, the Ion. And to clarify the relationship of that citizenship law, I'll turn to a passage from Susan Lape's recent book. In Race and Citizen Identity in the Classical Athenian Democracy, Susan Lape writes:

"By requiring that future citizens have two native parents, the law fostered the idea that the citizen body was a descent group or genos in the specific sense of an interbreeding group. In so doing, the citizenship law brought new political salience to Athenian women and their reproductive work. [...] By identifying Athenian or native women as the only women capable of producing Athenian citizens, the law tapped into both gender and ethnic national or racial categories. To put it another way, the law attached ethnic national or racial salience to Athenian women and to their reproductive work. In this way, it created a regime of racialized reproduction."

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This regime of racialized reproduction is grounded in, among other things, the production and reproduction of myths on stage. And the philosopher Arlene Saxonhouse has given a lot of thought to this in her writing in Fear of Diversity. In particular, she's drawn attention to how the diversity entailed in heterosexual creation is at the center of some of the most anguished debates about citizenship and belonging in classical Athens.

Crucial to these debates and to the myths that coalesce around them is the premise that Athenian identity is rooted in the land of Attica. This is a racial script. It is a script of autochthony, of belongingness to the soil, and it's a bedrock principle of Athenian civic identity. The givenness and the constructedness of the biological, in this context, and the relationship between the biological and the land requires examination. Euripides' Ion gives us one framework within which to conduct that evaluation. In this play, we see the interrelation of sexual violence, civic origin stories, and structures of citizenship, all of which receive concentrated but powerful treatment in the play. The Ion is a play put on in the years after the Periclean citizenship law of 451 BCE. And one way of reading this play is as an extended meditation on who gets to feel safe and who does not get to feel safe in an Athenian context.

Who was the Ion for?

But first, let's dig a little deeper into the life and context of its author, Euripides. As I noted earlier, Euripides is the third of the canonical Athenian playwrights whose productions between them account for the lion's share of our knowledge about classical Greek tragedy and Greek intellectual culture in the fifth century. It's important to recognize that these plays are spaces for thinking-out-loud-about issues of significance and salience for the Athenian community. All of these plays are put on at the Great Dionysia Festival in honor of the god Dionysus at Athens, for which three tragedians were chosen to compete. Each year, each tragedian had to stage four plays, and at the conclusion of the multi-day cycle of performances a victor was chosen. The three canonical Athenian playwrights about whom we know the most happen to have lived long and incredibly productive lives. There's much that we wish we knew about the staging of the plays themselves and their original incarnation. We're decently well-informed about their authors and about the festival context in which the performances took place, but the question of who precisely was allowed to be in the audience for these plays, plays whose roles were all acted by men, remains a point of contention.

If, as one school of thought holds, the overwhelming majority of those in the audience were men, then, as the philosopher Arlene Saxonhouse has commented, in the case of plays that have strong female roles such as Euripides' Ion, "the city of adult males saw on stage the powerful portrayal of women—women whose existence, as the playwrights reflected on the human condition, could not be denied as curtly as Pericles had chosen to do in his funeral oration." Here, Saxonhouse is referring to the funeral oration delivered by the Athenian statesman Pericles that's reserved for us in Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War. This is a funeral oration that sidelines women, not addressing them until the very end, where Pericles avails himself of a few very slighting remarks to these women after having spent much of the speech extolling the virtues of Athens.

Autochthony and Athenian civichood

We'll come back to that speech in a moment, but for now, I want to focus on how Euripides' Ion in particular brings out some of the tensions between gender roles and identities in civic space, and how these tensions in turn inform the representation of the biopolitics of citizenship and the biopolitics of race. Euripides' Ion, like many of the other Greek tragedies during the fifth century, constructs a space for the negotiation of fundamental questions concerning Athenian society's organization around sex/gender difference, precisely as this difference structures the physical and intersubjective spaces in which the plays are put on and are processed by their viewers.

The Ion foregrounds autochthony as a racial script before proceeding to more extensive comment on sexual assault and violence as charter-myths for the civic foundation story of Athens. This is a story that is of interest to many of our Athenian sources and many of our Greek sources on Athens. And in the history of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides has the Athenian statesmen, Pericles, spell out the implications of autochthony quite explicitly. "In this land of ours, they have always been the same people living from generation to generation up until now." The Ion invests this idea with some real heft by grounding Athenian roots in the soil of Attica. But here's where some of the tensions that are associated with this myth begin to come into focus. These tensions are at the heart of the conflicts in the play. 

For these tensions, it's important to have a vocabulary for thinking about race and for articulating race. And for this, we'll turn again to Susan Lape, who has argued that the idea of Athenian autochthony is a racial formation. With many definitions of race that we can bring to bear on the material in Euripides' Ion, I'm going to examine two that can provide us with a foundation for calibrating the relationship between these stories of autochthony and racial discourse in fifth century Athens.

The first is from Michael Omi and Howard Winant's classic Racial Formation In the United States: "Race is a concept," they explain, "which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies... an unstable and 'decentered' complex of social meanings constantly being transformed by political struggle.” For Omi and Winant, racial formation is a technology for constructing difference through typologies and hierarchies of the human body.

A second definition, one proposed by Barbara and Karen Fields in their 2012 book, Racecraft, has race "standing for the conception or the doctrine that nature produced humankind in distinct groups, each defined by inborn traits that its members share and that differentiate them from the members of other distinct groups of the same kind but of unequal rank."

It's the second definition that can help us get a grip on the racializing properties of autochthony as guiding the myths that are told about Athenians and that Athenians tell themselves about their origin: the collective embrace of the myth that Athenians descend from people who are literally born from the soil. This is the story that according to some of our sources begins with the god Hephaestus' effort to rape Athena, and in his failure, his ejaculation on the ground then produces Erechtheus, the first Athenian, is a story that separates Athens from other Greek communities. The story's racial underpinnings are suggestive of some of the strategies that were available to civic communities in the archaic and classical Greek world and communities that were seeking to reinvent themselves, especially in the fifth century BCE context. The myth of autochthony was important to an Athens that was on the way to claiming a kind of superpower or hegemonic status among other Greek city states, and paired that rise to hegemonic status with escalating investments in slavery and colonialism. But the myth is also important for us if we want to use Euripides' Ion as a way of thinking about citizenship's dependence on fictions. 

Citizenship as fiction

This is a story that invests the Athenian state with an abstracted coherence. It's predicated on the intersection of civic identity with biological kinship, and it relies for its reproduction as a story that people buy into on its staging by Euripides among others. The fiction operates on a number of different levels, beginning with one of the fictions that is central to the narrative arc of Euripides' Ion itself. One of the fictions subjected to scrutiny in Euripides' Ion itself is the fiction of paternity. Xuthus, the husband of Creusa, one of the protagonists of the play, is tricked into believing that he is Ion's father. Germane to the work of interrogating Athenian citizenship's interaction with kinship and with false kinship as laid out in the Ion is another point brought by the philosopher Arlene Saxonhouse.

In Fear of Diversity, she has this very powerful insight into the significance of the birth of Erechtheus from the soil of Attica. This is a coming into being that productively varies the virgin birth or parthenogenesis myths that circulate in other Mediterranean and Eastern Mediterranean contexts. "The city in its idealized and mythologized origins,” Saxonhouse writes, "is peopled from a single source: the earth, and is not dependent on the diversity entailed in heterosexual creation."

On this reading, in its canonical form, the myth of Athens' origins erases both racial and sexual difference because it postulates a unitary Athenian community that doesn't descend from the licit and consensual union of a man and a woman. But what the Ion does is to challenge this in part by demonstrating that this origin myth is encased in all kinds of fabulations about, first of all, the consent or non-consent of those individuals who are necessary to the biopolitics of the Athenian state. And second, the participation, willing or unwilling, of folks from the outside who are required to legitimate the project of Athenian civichood, even as they are denied access to its full benefits.

Reproductive labor

I'll now set out three passages in the Ion that foreground several dimensions of the fundamental paradox of Athenian civichood. Namely, that there could be no Athenian civichood without the reproductive labor of Athenian women, even though Athenian men and the intellectual productions with which they were associated sought insistently to exclude or marginalize women from the necessary biopolitics of the city.

Beginning with lines 10 and 11 of Euripides' Ion, which tee up the centrality of sexual trauma and violence to the experiences of Creusa, one of the protagonists of the play. Early in the play, we receive a very brief description of the experience that Creusa has had. "Phoebus compelled Erechtheus' daughter Creusa / to accept his violent embrace," in conjunction with Creusa's words to Ion at lines 251 to 254, "Unhappy women! What things that gods ought err! And where / shall we turn for justice when we are being destroyed / by the unjust actions of those who are much stronger?"

These verses call up the constitutive violence by which the divine and human heteropatriarchy comes into being in Athens and how it enters into conversation with debates about the meanings and limits of justice, especially as these bear on the trauma of sexual assault. This trauma is excavated for its bearing on the content and extension of justice in the Athenian polity and it's presented to us, in the second set of lines I quoted, from the perspective of a victim. At the same time though, one of the more harrowing features of Euripides' Ion is that at the very end of the play, Creusa, the victim of the sexual assault, is made effectively to forget the trauma that she has experienced after rediscovering and reconnecting with the child who was born as a consequence of this sexual assault.

Access to citizenship

Another dimension of these debates concerning citizenship is brought out in the description of another of the characters whose arc is central to the plot of Euripides' Ion. This is Xuthus, Creusa's husband, for whom we get a brief description of his background, followed by more extensive presentation of his perspective in the play.

At lines 59 and following, we receive some background information about Creusa's husband, Xuthus: "...a war rose between / Athens and Chalcodon's people in Euboea; / Xuthus as an ally helped to end the strife / and though he was not a native, but Achaean / son of Aeolus, son of Zeus, the prize / he won was marriage to Creusa. But / in all these years, no children have been born."

What's noteworthy here is Creusa's marriage out to a foreigner for whom marriage into Athenian society is a reward. The implication of the phrase, "though he was not a native," is that normally marriage to Athenian women was reserved for Athenian-born men. In other words, that Athenian society was endogamous. And this is a state of affairs that is solidified by the Periclean citizenship law and the social opprobrium against exogamy that we can detect in the exclamation of Ion himself to Creusa at line 293: "A foreigner! How could he marry an Athenian!"

Middling ideology

Later on in the play, lines 485 to 490 and again at line 625 and following, we as readers are put in the position of being able to connect the dots between the play on the one hand and the elaboration of what Ian Morris and other scholars of Greek culture have termed a "middling ideology" in Greek culture. This middling ideology seeks systematically to level distinctions between Athenian male citizens, while also presupposing in the background that these male citizens will enjoy privileges that are denied to other more vulnerable or minoritized communities.

Here's the Chorus in Euripides' Ion: "For myself," the Chorus sings, "I would choose, rather than wealth / or a palace of kings, to rear / and love my own children: shame to him who prefers / a childless life, hateful to me. / May I cling to the life of modest possessions / enriched by children."

Ion himself channels the same ideological commitment. In the play, we hear him say, at 625, "I would prefer to live / as a happy citizen than be a king / who must choose to have the evil as his friends / and must abhor the good for fear of death. / You might reply that gold outweighs all this... Let me avoid distress, seek moderation."

This is a recapitulation of middling ideology. It's an ideology that values the capacity to enjoy a moderated existence as a member of the polity that comes with some obligations—having children, being a participant in the reproductive system that defines the capacity of the Athenian state to sustain itself—but that distinguishes sharply the average Athenian citizen from people aspiring to wealth, or seeking to accumulate wealth, or seeking to differentiate themselves from other citizens via the accumulation of goods. What makes this middling ideology particularly significant for our purposes is that it is really bound up with racial principles. It's bound up with autochthony and with an understanding of the enduring significance of autochthony to the constitution of Athenian civic life.

Biopolitics

I've been making use, from time to time, of the term biopolitics. And in order to clarify how autochthony and racialization work hand-in-hand, I need to say a few more words about what biopolitics entails–what the regulation of life and reproduction at the hands of the state have to do with the capacity of Athenians to develop and inhabit a biopolitical order. Anxieties about reproduction are at the heart of the Ion and other classical Athenian sources. One of Pericles's encouragements to those who have lost their children in the early stages of the Peloponnesian War is to keep making more babies. Not only because, as Pericles says, these new children will prevent you from brooding over those who are no more, but because, Pericles continues, they will be a help to the city, both in filling the empty places and in assuring her security: "For it is impossible for a man to put forward, fair and honest views about our affairs if he has not, like everyone else, children whose lives may be at stake."

Reproduction within the family unit and its relevance to the affairs of the city state are subject to continuing interest in later decades of Greek historical writing and Greek political theory. So for instance, in Aristotle's Politics, a lot of space and time is given over to explaining how, why, and under what circumstances children should be brought into the world for the purposes of defending and shoring up the city state.

One of the things that's at stake in the interweaving of citizenship and politics, in our Athenian and Greek sources, is nothing less than the indexing of full civic identity to childbearing capacity: if one cannot have children or chooses not to have children, can one even be a good citizen? Can one even be a citizen in the first place? Does legitimate civic standing require the production of children? To what extent should the state actively intervene in the management of the family so as to promote practices it deems most beneficial or conducive to the overall good of the citizen body? To what extent should the state interfere in people's exercise of agency over their own bodies? These persist as living and explosive issues in Greek philosophy from the late fifth century, well into the fourth century BCE.

And in the case of Euripides' Ion, though, we are also faced with still another dimension of citizenship that brings out the implications of the Periclean citizenship law for not just the biopolitics, but the substantive rights held by members of the Athenian city state.

At lines 670 to 675, Ion says, "If I may do so / I pray my mother is Athenian / so that through her I may have rights of speech. / But when a foreigner comes into a city / of pure blood, though in name a citizen / his mouth's a slave: he has no right of speech."

In bringing up biopolitics earlier, I was channeling the French philosopher Michel Foucault. What I want to do in thinking about this passage from Euripides' Ion is develop one of Foucault's insights into the relationship between biopolitics and the capacity to speak in the city. And to that end, I'll read a passage from one of Foucault's lectures. In his lectures on “The Government of Self and Others”, which were originally delivered at the Collège de France, 1982 to 1983, Foucault devotes a section to a brief discussion of the Ion, in which he writes:

"We see someone in search of his birth who does not know his mother, and so who wants to know what city and community he belongs to. Why does he want to know this? He wants to know precisely so that he knows if he has the right to speak. And since he is searching for this woman, he hopes that the mother he will eventually discover will be Athenian and thus belong to his community, this dēmos, et cetera, and that by virtue of this birth, he himself will have the right to speak freely, to have parrēsia. For he says, in a town 'without stain,' that is to say, within a town which keeps its traditions, in a town in which the city state, the constitution, the politeia has not been debased by tyranny or despotism or by the abusive integration of people who are not truly citizens, so in a town which has remained without stain and in which the politeia has remained what it should be, only those who are citizens have parrēsia. Beyond this general theme which structures the search for this single personage's mother and which links the right to speak to membership of the dēmos, it's worth keeping hold of two things. The first," Foucault continues, "is that the right to speak, parrēsia, is transmitted in this case by the mother. Second, you see too that the stranger status is defined and appears in contrast with that of citizens who have the right to speak, and so far as the town is without stain, his tongue is servile. Exactly: his mouth is a slave. To ge stoma doulon. That is to say, the right to speak, the restriction on the freedom of political discourse is total. He does not possess this freedom of political discourse; he does not possess parrēsia."

Colonial citizenship and autochthony

At the conclusion of Euripides' Ion, we are left with several questions, all of which Euripides poses to the audience and invites Athenians, and possibly non-Athenians in the audience, to engage. The first concerns the extent and expansiveness of citizenship in the Athenian world. In the play’s final movements, we see a vision of the future after Ion, the future of the community that will descend from Ion as that community extends across the Aegean Sea, and in the process, anticipates by several centuries the substantive colonization that the Athenian empire will itself undertake in the fifth century BCE. So, foregrounded for Euripides' audience is the question of what it means to be a citizen of an Athenian community that has extended well beyond Athens, but that is still claiming this rootedness in the soil of Attica. How do the imperatives of autochthony, and imperialism, and settler colonialism interact with each other? But relevant to this question is another one that is more intimately embedded in the reproductive logic of this community. It is a question that arises on either end of the Athenian citizenship law of 451 BCE and that, as given shape and form by the experiences of Creusa in the play, guides the play's own intervention in these debates, and also steers the conversation that I think Euripides intended his audience to have.

What is the place of women, and what is the place of gender and gendering in the construction of the Athenian civic community?

Noted earlier that in Thucydides' account of the Periclean funeral oration, held and delivered on the occasion of the commemoration of the war dead in the early stages of the Peloponnesian War, the Athenian statesman Pericles, instrumental in the passage of the citizenship law, effectively sidelines women, addressing them directly only at the very end of his speech. At the same time, though, at various points in the speech, it is clear that without the reproductive labor of women in the Athenian community, there is no future to the Athenian community. The expectation and the burden is that for those families who have lost children in the conflict, this reproductive labor will continue to be carried out. This labor imposes demands, it triggers tensions, and some of these tensions are ones that we can read into Euripides' Ion. And that I think in some cases, especially when we see the fraught conversations between Xuthus and Creusa, on the one hand, and Creusa and Ion on the other, are ones that the playwright very intentionally frames in the course of developing the narrative momentum of the play itself.

A final question to take up concerns the formation of the Athenian civic body along racialized premises in the fifth century BCE. From the beginning of my effort to contextualize Euripides' Ion, I've drawn attention to the works of Susan Lape and others that have made a pretty compelling case for understanding the citizenship law as racializing, in that, among other things, it locks Athenian identity and Athenian citizenship into a biological and birthright paradigm. What one can do to recover more fully the dynamics of racialization in the Athenian world of the fifth century BCE and the greater Greek world beyond Athens, is to think about how the citizenship law intersects with or diverges from developments in other Greek communities.

Here, it's important to emphasize that by Euripides' time, and certainly in the generations after Euripides, his plays and other plays put on stage in Athens in the fifth century BCE are circulating to other parts of the Greek world. How are communities, Greek speaking communities in the south of Italy, for example, or in Sicily, or on the Ionian coast of Asia Minor, wrestling with the content and messaging of this play? How does this play and other plays invite them to engage questions concerning the Greekness and the definition of Greekness that was such a contested topic in Athens itself and in other communities during this period? Most importantly of all, from the perspective of thinking with and about race in the fifth century BCE and after, how are racial concepts embedded in the vocabulary and concept worlds of Greeks themselves?

We have noted that autochthony, the myth of Athenian rootedness in the soil, is one potent mechanism by which Athenians and other Greek speakers lay out a set of authoritative claims concerning the coherence, the presumed biological coherence, and ontological coherence, of a community. There are, of course, other ways of imagining the formation of communities that were available to and were trafficked heavily by Greek speakers during this period. For instance, migration narratives and the idea that some Greek communities had originated not from the soil, but directly as a result of diasporic or migration and its trajectories over the Mediterranean world in the seventh, sixth, and fifth centuries BCE create circumstances for other Greek speaking communities to assert that their identities had come into being and shape in the course of movement, not in the course of stasis or residence in one place. 

Athenians themselves are on the move, and as I noted a minute ago, one of the tensions that's bubbling to the surface in the period when this play is put on is how to reconcile the facts of Athenian mobility with the presumed facts of a kind of proto-national ethnic racial coherence. That tension and its foregrounding in Euripides' Ion makes it an exceptionally suggestive text for thinking about dilemmas of citizenship, belonging, and racialization. And its confrontation with biopolitics and the imperatives of reproduction also make it a valuable text for thinking about the overlays and intersections of racialization and gender.

Skin persists today as the most recognizable, prominent, though not reliable, social marker of race. Distinguishing among skin colors is more than denoting difference; it is a reminder of the role skin plays in the structure and organization of human hierarchies. As such, skin not only places some persons on the lowest tiers of society, but it also relegates them to the bottom rung of estimated human worth. That is, skin is a decisive factor in who counts as human; who is deserving of humane treatment, justice, and freedom; who gets to exercise the full rights of citizenship and belonging.

Much of the western politics of skin derive from histories of Black enslavement, so that skin is grafted onto the narrative of justifying human forced labor at the very moment when that Black humanity is being vigorously and brutally denied. But skin, as the literary evidence makes clear, also has a racial prevalence in Shakespeare’s time, even while religion and language were also operative racializing factors. The history of racialized skin, therefore, has a longer history, predating the Enlightenment, the high-water moment of the western, imperial, plantation economy.

Locating racialized skin in Shakespeare’s time also prompts the inquiry: whether the Ottoman imperial threats emanating from North Africa influenced the defensive rhetoric of white superiority embedded in the racialized stage character, the “Moor,” the theater’s denigrated, non-Christian, Black person mostly identified with the North African principalities.

Pedagogies of skin

This brief description lays out the importance of meeting the pedagogic challenge in introducing the early modern dimension of the history of skin. As always, making the topic accessible is critical, so drawing on existing student knowledge is helpful. In this instance, students have been encouraged from their high school education to think of literary analysis as grounded in variations on “appearance and reality,” a bifurcating epistemology that values “reality.” It is the companion to the cliché, “Don’t judge a book by its cover” that, similarly, asks us to look beyond the material surface toward human virtues within.

Reminding students of this trope, therefore, must be followed by the exploration of how and why “appearance and reality” is not typically applied to skin in literary analysis in a society where “appearance” has acquired inordinate social meaning. It is easy enough to find many examples from early modern drama that deploy the term “Moor” to highlight skin color as a way of circumscribing the being and essence of Black people. In Peele, Rowley, Shakespeare, and others, we find multiple instances of defamed Blackness to target and paint not just the individual, but Black people seen as a group of unacceptable, constitutionally different, and dangerous persons.

A distortion of the humanist tradition

We may now place this information within a larger intellectual and historical frame to expand the analysis and propose new claims from what might have appeared initially to be just a simple premise. Premodern societies inherited the Silenus as a figure that embodied the “appearance and reality” proposition but with a signal difference: if applied as consistently as inherited in the western humanist tradition, the logic of racialized skin undergoes a serious challenge.

Presented in Plato’s Symposium (215 BCE) to de-emphasize the social value of appearance, the Silenus is an unappealing statuette on the outside that when opened reveals a beautiful, even golden interior. The Silenus argues for internality—intellect, wisdom, virtue, morality—the intangible human reality that one cannot see on the surface, in a manner that intersects with Desdemona’s poignant commentary on her perception of her Black husband: “I saw Othello’s visage in his mind.” The Silenus persists over millennia, also showing up, for instance, in François Rabelais’s prologue to Gargantua.

Had western humanism remained true to its ethical course, Black skin would not be the logical endpoint of human value. It is the distortion of this humanist tradition, the surrender to the imperative of power, greed, and the capital in human flesh, that has delivered to us this corpse of our own immoral making. Facilitating student understanding of this deliberate rupture in the western humanist tradition, one in which they are still educational consumers, will require excavating and exposing the forms of whiteness that drive the cliché of race and offer students opportunities for more sharply defined social critique and self-interrogation.

Course description

The extrajudicial murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor have brought renewed and overdue attention to the fatal designs of civic inequality. These designs—and the debates over the assignment, withholding, or deprivation of citizen status and civic protections from which they emerge—have a long and violent history. In this course we will attempt to map a history of citizenship as concept and institution from the ancient Mediterranean world to the 21st century. Some of the questions to be tackled include: who/what is a citizen? What are the prerogatives and rights that come with citizenship? Who is eligible to be—or become—a citizen? (How) are racial and gendered exclusions wired into the historical legacies and present-day practice of citizenship? How is citizenship imagined and narrated? What does it mean to be a global citizen? Although we will make much fuss over the ancient Mediterranean in the first half of the course, one objective of this course is to determine whether and to what degree such an orientation makes sense. To arrive at this determination, we will experiment with a range of different historical and conceptual genealogies for modern frameworks of citizenship. Our readings will run the gamut from poetry and narrative fiction to political theory and narrative nonfiction.

Course expectations and policy

For our Zoom lectures and precepts, we do not have policies on clothing: wear whatever you want, so long as you’re comfortable (but wear something). And while we would love to see your radiant facial expressions, we also understand if you need to turn your camera off for all or a portion of a Zoom. Please feel free to use a background filter; we are happy to supply themed ones. If, at any point, the course content or discussions make you so uncomfortable that you feel the need to turn off the camera and/or disconnect from the call, please touch base with us afterwards via email. If it’s concerning a subject that you would rather not address with us directly, please consider consulting with me.

Grading

Weekly journaling

We ask that, starting in Week 2, you initiate a conversation with someone not enrolled in the course (a member of your family or your community; a friend; a mentor) about one of the readings for that week; and that you then write a short paragraph about this conversation, not to exceed one page double-spaced, in which you summarize how you explained the reading to your conversational interlocutor and what their response to that summary was. The choice of conversational medium (face-to-face, phone, Zoom/Skype, email etc.) is entirely up to you and can vary from week to week. We’ll provide you with a link to a Google Drive folder for uploading your paragraphs, which you should aim to do no later than the end of day each Friday. Your instructors will check this folder three times to track your progress: at the end of Weeks 4, 8, and 12. With your permission (which we will solicit in advance), we may quote from your paragraphs in lecture and discussion. The end-of-term grade for this unit will be a holistic assessment of your paragraphs. You’re allowed to miss two weeks out of eleven (i.e. we will evaluate only nine of your paragraphs).

Take-home midterm

This open-book exam will be administered in two parts. Part A will consist of two argumentative essays that you’ll write in response to set prompts (we’ll give you four options). Our expectation is that you take two hours on Part A. Part B will consist of two creative essays: for the first, you’ll draw up a dialogue with one of the authors you’ve read up to that point in which you criticize their position on a specific aspect of citizenship (and they respond in turn to your criticisms); for the second, you will write in the style of another of the authors you’ve read, expanding and elaborating on one of their main points. Our expectation is that you take two hours on Part B as well. 

Take-home final

This open-book exam will consist of three parts: a reflection on your journaled conversations in which you take stock of directions taken and not taken; a design project in which you draw up a constitution for a new national government; and an argumentative essay that asks you to critique an author from the course’s first half from the position of an author in the course’s second half. Our expectation is that you take three hours on this exam.

Classroom culture and expectations

In order to build and maintain a collaborative and affirmative environment, we encourage you to practice care and generosity in your interventions; always to make space for others to participate equitably in the conversation; and to be on guard against those habits of discourse that militate against inclusion. Please hold us, your instructors, to that same standard as well.

Your ability to access the course material on your own terms and engage with it to the maximum extent possible is of paramount importance to us. We’re always happy to discuss your learning needs and how best to accommodate them.

Finally, we wish to draw attention to the presence in many of our readings of practices and language that are implicated in or actively embrace colonialism, slavery, and sex- and gender-based violence and discrimination. We will need to practice special care, for ourselves and each other, when subjecting this material to critical scrutiny.

Course texts

Euripides, Complete Tragedies III (Chicago)
Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy (Penguin)
Aristotle, Politics (Hackett)
Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk (Norton)
Vitoria, Political Writings (Cambridge)
Rankine, Citizen

Questionable Bills of Sale? Legal Opinions and Race-Making in the Trans-Saharan Slave Trade | Watch the full talk

Presented by Cristi Whiskey at Region and Enmity: A RaceB4Race Symposium in 2021

Cristi Whiskey discusses Ahmad Baba’s Ladder of Ascent Towards Grasping the Law Concerning Transported Blacks (Miʿraj as-suʿud ila nayl majlub as-sudan) (c. 1615), a legal treatise composed in seventeenth-century Timbuktu, itself a response to the letter of Saʿid ibn Ibrahim al-Jirari of Tuwat (present-day Algeria). Embedding West Africa in its broader transregional map, Whiskey reviews the history of anti-Blackness in premodern Muslim societies while charting Ahmad Baba’s interventions in longstanding debates. How, Whiskey asks, were Black Africans subjected to legal and religious discursive forces that sustained transregional mercantile complexes of slavery? By looking into Ahmad Baba’s work, Whiskey highlights where distinctions imposed between Black Muslims and non-Muslims were blurred in service of rationalizing enslavement. The discussion also brings the context of early modern West Africa into conversation with work being done in Black Atlantic feminist work, Mediterranean Studies, and other fields for the sake of fostering a wider discussion on historical anti-Blackness.

Many medieval epics regale their audiences with the phenomenon of skin color change, often in the context of religious conversion. The metaphor of Blackness at play in these epics offers a way to understand how phenotypic traits were used as markers of good or evil in the literature and culture of medieval Europe. The long history of racial construction has its roots in how Blackness is leveraged as a metaphor over hundreds of years.

Blackhawk, Ned. The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2023.

Darby, Jaye T., Courtney Elkin Mohler, and Christy Stanlake. Critical Companion to Native American and First Nations Theatre and Performance: Indigenous Spaces. London: Methuen, 2020.

Grier, Miles P. "Staging the Cherokee Othello: An Imperial Economy of Indian Watching." The William and Mary Quarterly 73, no. 1 (2016): 73–106.

Hughes, Bethany. "The Indispensable Indian: Edwin Forrest, Pushmataha, and Metamora," Theatre Survey 59, no. 1 (January 2018): 23-44.

Hughes, Bethany. Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity. New York: NYU Press, 2024.

Nesteroff, Kliph. We Had a Little Real Estate Problem: The Unheralded Story of Native Americans & Comedy. Simon & Schuster, 2021.

HowlRound articles

Hayton, Allan. "Healing Stories from Naa Kahidi Theatre.” HowlRound Theatre Commons. 21 August 2018.

Hubbard, Robert. “The Ills We Do, Their Ills Instruct us So’' Indigenous Futurism and the South Dakota Shakespeare Festival." HowlRound Theatre Commons. 25 July 2022.

Hughes, Bethany. “Off the Rails: Look at Shakespeare, See a Native Play.” HowlRound Theatre Commons. 22 January 2018.

Nagle, Mary Kathryn. “Native Voices on the American Stage: A Constitutional Crisis.” HowlRound Theatre Commons. 22 February 2015.

Starbard, Vera. “Alaska Native Theatre Comes of Age.” HowlRound Theatre Commons. 18 August 2018.

Sayet, Madeline. “Interrogating the Shakespeare System.” HowlRound Theatre Commons. 21 August 2020.  

Plays and creative works that could be read with or instead of Shakespeare

Pigeon by Dillon Chitto

Pueblo Revolt by Dillon Chitto

Wings of a Night Sky/Wings of Morning Light by Joy Harjo

Hamlet: El Principe de Denmark by Tara Moses  

Othello by Tara Moses

Death of a Chief by Yvette Nolan  

Off the Rails by Randy Reinholz

Whale Song by Cathy Tagnak Rexford

Where We Belong by Madeline Sayet  

Devilfish by Vera Starbard

Coming Soon: Methuen Anthology of Native American Drama (Estimated 2026).  

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Premodern critical race studies offers a profound lens with which to approach ancient Mediterranean history and culture. As a multi-disciplinary framework and as a rigorous research methodology, PCRS offers new approaches to the field of classics. Dan-el Padilla Peralta discusses the imperative of studying race and racialization in the ancient world and the influence this lens of inquiry has on the field.

Resisting Lobotomized Shakespeare: Race in/and Appropriation | Watch the full talk

Presented by Vanessa I. Corredera at Appropriations: A RaceB4Race Symposium in 2020

Vanessa I. Corredera puts forward two premises for productively understanding racial representations in premodern critical race studies and in adaptations: first, that appropriations need PCRS; second, PCRS needs appropriation studies. She analyzes the Q Brothers’ adaptation Othello: The Remix as an example of an appropriation that does not critically engage with race and illustrates how crucially they need PCRS. Corredera reads Jordan Peele’s Get Out as an appropriation of Othello that offers a productive lens for engaging Shakespeare’s play. She concludes that taken together, appropriation studies and PCRS give students and scholars more complete interpretive tools for analyzing racial representation.

Write a paper of approximately three pages (no more than five) on a single word that appears in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest or Sir Walter Raleigh’s The Discovery of Guiana and analyze its multiple meanings/functions. (Some suggestions: labour, command, authority, profit, art, shape, wonder, marvel, subject). You should bring to bear upon your analysis of the word relevant other uses of the same word either in the same or in other plays (use concordances).  

You must use the Oxford English Dictionary and a concordance to Shakespeare (e.g. Marvin Spevack, The Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare). I would also like you to look at facsimiles of the early editions (e.g. Charlton Hinman, The First Folio of Shakespeare; Michael J. B. Allen and Kenneth Muir, Shakespeare's Plays in Quarto).

Some available resources include

• Folger Shakespeare Library's First Folio
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• Folger Digital Collections
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• Folger Shakespeare Complete Works
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• (Especially for Raleigh) Early English Books Online

If you choose to use sources beyond this list, you must be careful: some texts are typed in by enthusiasts and not vetted by scholars.

Attach at the end of your paper the relevant photocopies/print outs/PDFs of the passages on your word from the dictionary, the concordance, and the early editions.

This is a primary source/close reading assignment. Do not consult any secondary sources (i.e. criticism). There are concordances to the Bible, many poets, Montaigne, and many novels and plays. To track how other contemporary texts make use of the same word, look at the concordances to, for instance, Marlowe, Donne, Milton or the Bible. (You may also find scholarly editions like the Arden Shakespeare and the New Variorum Shakespeare useful. There are also facsimiles of some early English dictionaries in Butler [English linguistics, 1500-1800 series]).  

Purpose

The main purpose of the assignment is to introduce you to various primary scholarly resources, and to get you to bring them to bear on something as small as a single word. It should also build up your confidence in your ability to analyze language in detail. If the word appears in more than one place in the plays, you may want to pick one or two passages where the appearance seems particularly significant.

When comparing passages in modern vs. folio editions, there may not be such significant changes in the passage you're looking at, but you should be aware of even the smallest of changes—changes in speech prefixes, in punctuation etc. (Not all such changes will be particularly significant, but you should nonetheless be aware of them). Using The Oxford English Dictionary, the early texts on-line, and the concordances, you should find that you have too much material for such a short paper. This means you will have to choose what is most interesting/significant in illuminating the specific passages you are analyzing.

Please keep in mind that this, like all papers, should have an argument. Locating the word’s meanings is only the first step. Please do not simply enumerate the meanings of the word.

From Both Our Eyes: Red-Reading Medieval Texts | Watch the full talk

Presented by Brenna Duperron at Education: A RaceB4Race Symposium in 2021

Brenna Duperron invites scholars to engage with Indigenous theories and frameworks to help recognize and reduce the latent colonialist tendencies of medieval studies. She argues that applying theories like etuaptmumk, or seeing with both the European eye and the Indigenous eye, often goes against years of academic training and socialization but allows for more holistic approaches to texts. Duperron applies this methodology to her reading of The Book of Margery Kempe, a 15th-century autobiography by an English mystic.

Shakespeare is often seen as a stand in for whiteness. Crossing a border into the realm of Shakespeare, especially for people of color, is seen as stepping into a white space—one where not all students feel like they belong. It’s important to think about entry points to address this feeling of unbelonging when teaching Shakespeare. If we allow Shakespeare to remain inaccessible or inhospitable, then we reinforce the idea that he is white property.  

The Winter’s Tale is a play that is very, very white—and this is a reason why I find it to have so much potential for generative discussions in our present moment. It’s a rich, strange play. But what does it have to do with race? That, it seems, is the wrong question. The question should be, what can our students, especially our students of color, bring to a play like The Winter’s Tale?  

Teaching the epic of Sunjata Keita, also known as the Sunjata or the Sundiata, opens up all kinds of avenues to teaching against the white supremacist myths that are still prevalent in the American historical imagination.  

The Epic of Sunjata is a living, evolving text, still performed by griots and griottes, with traditional griot instruments such as the kora and the 22-key balafon. Typically, the griot performance of the poem is done in parts or episodes, and is almost never performed in its entirety at once. Because the poem was never concretized into an early textual form after centuries of oral composition, the Sunjata is a prime example of the complexity of interdisciplinary textual performance—one that engages perspectives within literature, history, musicology, and the performing arts.  

I like to teach this text, including video excerpts of performances, alongside the more traditionally taught European epics because it offers my students a wider lens with which to look at the medieval world. Not only does the Sunjata ask students to see a text as merely one point of a story’s history, but it allows students to begin an exploration of the global medieval, one that decenters Europe. The conversation across these texts reveals a world that was far more vast and complex than most students have ever been taught.  

Who is Sunjata Keita?

Sunjata Keita lived between ca. 1217-1255 CE, and was the founder of the Keita dynasty of the Mali Empire. He first came to be known outside of the Mande-speaking world in 1960 through the Guinean historian and playwright Djibril Tamsir Niane. He translated and published the story that was told to him by the Djeli (or griot) Mamoudou Kouyate, who performed the epic tale in music. Known by Manding names such as “djeli/jail,” or in Wolof “gewel,” the griot/griotte was a storyteller, musician, historian, poet, and royal advisor in Mali and throughout West Africa. The story of Sunjata, his ancestry, his childhood, his exile, and his war against Sumanguru, are now all parts of the official national epic in Mali, Senegal, Gambia, and Guinea.  

The Empire of Mali that Sunjata Keita founded became one of the wealthiest, most erudite, and intellectually advanced cultures in the hemisphere. The massive collection of Arabic manuscripts in Timbuktu, in northern Mali, began to be copied and compiled during and after the reign of Sunjata Keita in the 13^th century. West African literacy, in Arabic, Mande languages, and other West African languages like Wolof, Keren, and Tuareg, was robust in the premodern period and the manuscripts covered a wide variety of disciplines, including the human and physical sciences, philosophy, and Islamic jurisprudence.  

Sunjata’s education

There is no single authoritative source for this story, and many variations exist, numbering close to 40 different episodes. The story of Sunjata has influences from the Quran and other Arabic stories that became part of the fabric of its various iterations over the centuries. It weaves together external influences such as Islam and the indigenous beliefs and customs of the Mande peoples. For example, in the stories of Alexander the Great there is a moment in which we can see Sunjata’s education pulling from a variety of influences:

Sogolon Djata learnt to distinguish between the animals; he knew why the buffalo was his mother’s wraith and also why the lion was the protector of his father’s family. He also listened to the kings which Balla Fasséké [Sundiata’s griot] told him; enraptured by the story of Alexander the Great, the mighty king of gold and silver, whose sun shone over quite half the world.

Here Sogolon Djata (Sunjata) learns about his parents’ spiritual ancestry, with the Mandingo belief in wraiths or doubles, combined with teaching from his griot about kings and especially Alexander the Great.  

In his version, Djibril Tamsir Niane, the Guinean historian and playwright, refers to Alexander by the Mandingo name “Djoulou Kara Naini,” a form of the Arabic “Dhu’l Qarnayn.” Niane believed that many of the songs and stories of Balla Fasséké featured in his version of the Sunjata originated from the reign of Mansa Musa (1307-1332 CE) saying, “at that time, the griots knew general history much better, at least through Arabic writings and especially the Koran.”  

Ancestors, descendants, and the preservation of knowledge

The power of ancestors and descendants is especially important in the story of Sunjata, preserving relations between the various political groups that would come under the Keita rule in Mali. During Sunjata’s rise to prominence, his griot, Balla Fasséké, recounts to him his genealogy and extols the importance of griots in preserving knowledge:

I have told you what future generations will learn about your ancestors, but what will we be able to relate to our sons so that your memory will stay alive, what will we have to teach our sons about you? What unprecedented exploits, what unheard-of feats? By what distinguished actions will our sons be brought to regret not having lived in the time of Sundiata?

Griots are men of the spoken word, and by the spoken word we give life to the gestures of kings (63).

The Mande Charter: hundreds of years ahead of Europe

After the defeat of Soumaoro, the King of Sosso, which is his crowning military achievement and one that begins the dynasty of Keita in Mali, Sunjata gifts to his descendants and the rest of humanity his most important legacy: that of equal rights between all people, declared at Kouroukan Fougan.

Composed of smaller Mandinka kingdoms, Sunjata’s coalition would form the basis of the Mali Empire, codified in the so-called “Mande Charter,” the official constitution created by an assembly of nobles to establish the new empire in Mali.  

Nick Nesbitt characterizes the Mande Charter of 1222 CE as “the invention of an uncompromising, principled, universal concept of social equality, of justice as universal human dignity [. . .] that the logics of entitlement, of class, of property, of authority, of any logic that counts any single human being as less or more than one single being, is not right and is not inevitable.” The Mande Charter predates by hundreds of years all declarations of human rights in European or western modernity.

It is important to bring my students to this moment to show them what it looks like to be confronted with the white supremacist myths we are often taught in western educational settings. The Epic of Sunjata opens a conversation about the tunnel-visioned nature Eurocentrism and allows students to begin seeing a wider world in which Africa’s cultures, histories, and art are not sidelined.

Coates, Ta-Nehisi. “The Great Fire.” Vanity Fair, August 24, 2020. https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2020/08/ta-nehisi-coates-editor-letter 

Loomba, Ania. Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. 

Muhammad, Khalil Gibran. The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011.  

Parker, Patricia. “Black Hamlet: Battening on the Moor.” Shakespeare Studies 31 (2003): 127-164. 

Smith, Ian. “White Skin, Black Masks: Racial Cross-Dressing on the Early Modern Stage.” Renaissance Drama 32 (2003): 33-67.  

Cavedon, Matthew P. From the Pope’s Hand to Indigenous Lands: Alexander VI in Spanish Imperialism. Leiden: Brill, 2023.

Miller, Robert J. Jacinta Ruru, Larissa Behrendt, and Tracey Lindberg. Discovering Indigenous Lands: The Doctrine of Discovery in the English Colonies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Miller, Robert J. “The Doctrine of Discovery and Manifest Destiny,” Why You Can’t Teach United States History without American Indians, eds. Susan Sleeper-Smith, et al. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.  

Patricia Seed. Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492-1640. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995.  

Williams, Robert A., Jr. The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourse of Conquest. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Defining Race, Periodizing Race | Listen to the full talk

Presented by Geraldine Heng at Race and Periodization: A RaceB4Race Symposium in 2019

Geraldine Heng argues for thinking about race in transhistorical terms. Because the concept of race uses a vocabulary that defers to modern understanding, premodern scholars have been missing a vocabulary to analyze the breadth of racial “phenomena, institutions, and practices” that premodern critical race scholarship now uncovers. Heng describes archival evidence of racialized atrocities that PCRS reveals: stigmatized bodies blamed and punished, identified as not only not-human but also evil personified. Heng outlines the repetition of racial thinking across history, despite the differences in eras. By tracing the wide variations of the conditions and targets of enslavement over time, for instance, Heng demonstrates the persistence of racialization and its consequences for peoples perceived as essentially different. Heng closes with a description of the Cagots, European peoples labeled “monstrous” and ostracized from the 13th-17th centuries. To demonstrate the persistence of racialization, Heng illustrates how the Cagot suffered intersections of religious, class, and gender prejudice coupled with fear of disease, and were discriminated against based on changing biological markers of disability and non-normative bodies.

Read a transcript

A graduate seminar created by Geraldine Heng.

Course description

It’s an old theoretical canard that race and racisms existed in the West only from the Enlightenment onward: that premodern European culture was pre-racial, because its operative prioritizing discourse was founded on religion, and not biological-scientific taxonomic systems of bodily difference, despite the evidence, in medieval culture and history, of institutions and phenomena that we would today identify as racial, were they to recur.

This seminar will ask what is lost or gained by tracing the history of race backward in time. Beginning with a selection of texts on antiquity, we consider a range of medieval texts to ask what racial thinking, racial phenomena, racial institutions, and racial practices are, in their historically-contextualized relations to the following (not listed in order of priority or course procedures): (1) war, conquest, colonization and empire-formation; (2) theories of blood, reproduction, and genealogy; (3) religion, canon law, and church apparatuses; (4) the body and physiognomy (color, biology, etc); (5) sex and gender; (6) slavery, occupations, and economic systems; (7) nation-formation, “nationalisms,” state apparatuses; (8) disciplinary systems of knowledge-power (climatology, geography, ethnography, etc). We will end by student-led critical readings of Shakespearean plays, and a visit from a Shakespearean faculty member, who will discuss The Tempest.

Medieval materials include romances, travel literature, historical documents, manuscript drawings, saints' legends, maps, statuary, and whatever else may be useful. For critical comparison, we will also read an Arabic document in translation, in which race is featured. Our primary secondary text is my 2018 book, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, which will be supplemented by articles, book reports, and presentations. Classicists and early modern studies students in the seminar can contribute substantially to take their period out of parentheses.

Since the purpose of this course is to train graduate students to teach courses on race, and, given our 15-week semester, it’s impossible to include as many texts, in as many disciplines and parts of the world, as I’d like you to read, the book reports/seminar presentations are essential. In-depth reports on texts that you read and present to the seminar will enable your seminar mates to learn what else they should read, to follow their specific interests; your presentations thus contribute importantly to course content.

Requirements

This course runs like a research seminar; students working in any period, discipline, or culture are welcome. Typically, the 15 students around the seminar table enroll not only from English and comparative literature, but also history, classics, religious studies, art history, Spanish and Portuguese, French and Italian, Germanic studies, and Middle Eastern studies. You should expect that your seminar mates will have different knowledges, and different disciplinary assumptions from you. Most will not be medievalists; some will be from other parts of the world. Please understand that disciplinary, linguistic, ethno-racial, and gender/sexual diversity are always part of this course, and adjust expectations accordingly.    

Previous knowledge of the European Middle Ages, or languages other than English is not required, but non-medievalists are expected to thicken their understanding of the Middle Ages in a serious and aggregative way, and medievalists are expected to engage with critical and theoretical texts we read with the same degree of attentiveness and commitment they afford medieval texts. Though not required for seminar discussion, possession of other languages, European and non-European, medieval and modern, is an advantage. Those who can read our texts in their original languages (Greek, Arabic, Middle High German, Middle Dutch, Old Norse, Latin, Franco-Italian, etc.) should do so.  

Assignment requirements

Two seminar presentations/book reports and a term paper for a letter grade.

Two presentations only for credit/no credit and auditing.

Term papers should be about the length of a conference presentation (feel free to use them for double duty, as actual conference presentations as well).

Alternative projects—such as annotated bibliographies, the creation of course syllabi, digital humanities and multimodal projects, creative projects, etc.—are also possible. Please consult early if you have ideas for formats you wish to pursue.    

Course readings

(suggestive, subject to change, and open to negotiation)

• “Airs, Waters, Places,” Hippocrates
• The Vinland Sagas: The Norse Discovery of America (Penguin classics in translation: you will need to buy this book)
• Parzival, Wolfram von Eschenbach
• Roman van Moriaen
• The Book of the Glory of the Black Race, Al-Jahiz
• History of the Mongols, John of Plano Carpini
• Prioress's Tale and Man of Law's Tale, Geoffrey Chaucer
• Hugh of Lincoln (the Anglo-Norman Ballad)
• The King of Tars
• Richard Coer de Lyone  
• William of Rubruck’s Itinerarium
• Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa’s Devisement du Monde
• The Tempest, William Shakespeare
• a selection of theoretical and critical readings, as well as primary texts, that may be treated in presentations and reports

The concepts behind the terms "race" and "indigeneity" are intimately linked and can be traced back to early settler colonial projects in the 17th century. As the system of settler colonial rule was being established, Europeans began to build a theory of race based on physiognomy and skin color. Likewise, the term "indigenous" was used to denote the vast populations of people in the Americas with whom Europeans were making first contact. Understanding the relationship between race and indigeneity is imperative to understanding how Europeans leveraged these categories in order to undermine Native populations' knowledge and sovereignty. 

This short paper assignment asks you to analyze The Song of Roland and The Song of the Cid from a perspective of postcolonial theory. Choose two critical readings that we’ve read so far to use as proof-texts for your reading of the epic. You may choose from the following:

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. 1st Vintage Books ed. New York: Vintage, 1979.

Lampert-Weissig, Lisa. “Chapter 1: The Future of the Past.” Medieval Literature and Postcolonial Studies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010.

Kinoshita, S. “‘Pagans Are Wrong and Christians Are Right’: Alterity, Gender, and Nation in the Chanson De Roland.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31.1 (2001): 79–112.

Carpenter, Dwayne E. “Social Perception and Literary Portrayal: Jews and Muslims in Medieval Spanish Literature.” Convivencia: Jews, Muslims, and Christians in Medieval Spain. Ed. Vivian B. Mann, Thomas F. Glick, and Jerrilynn D. Dodds. New York: George Braziller, 1992. 61–82.

Possible list of themes identified by postcolonial critics (not exhaustive)

1. Depictions of Muslims, Jews, and Christians in the poems
2. War and religion
3. Masculinity, femininity, and gender
4. Race and racialization in The Song of Roland

Or, you may choose your own based on your own interests. ‍

Instructions

Choose a theme or a connective link between either The Song of Roland or The Song of the Cid and your critical text(s). Define it for your reader and explain how it functions in your texts. Describe how a reader, either medieval or modern, might interpret this. 

Everything in a literary text symbolizes something else—both connotatively and denotatively. Consider multiple, or even contradictory, meanings to your chosen symbol. Cite frequently, to demonstrate and prove your points, using page numbers and/or line numbers from poetry. 

This course considers the field of postcolonial theory and its relevance to medieval literature. Postcolonial theory has dramatically reshaped the fields of literary criticism, history, philosophy, and cultural studies over the past thirty years. Originally designed as a response to British and French imperial projects in Africa, Asia (including the Middle East), and the Americas, postcolonial theorists have posed challenges to the medieval and broader premodern world, asking whether this form of inquiry can be used to understand how European identity had been defined against that which was considered not European. We will consider these and other questions, including contrapuntal readings of the Crusades, constructions of race, religious and linguistic difference, and a reconsideration of categories such as Eastern/Western, Muslim/Jew/Christian, and modernity and periodization. 

Course readings

The following books are required for the course:

The Song of Roland. Trans. Glyn S. Burgess. Penguin Classics, 1990.

The Song of the Cid (Penguin Classics) A Dual-Language Edition with Parallel Text. Trans. Burton Raffel. Penguin Classics, 2009.

Smith, Zadie. The Wife of Willesden. London: Penguin, 2021. 

Heller-Roazen, Daniel, and Muhsin Mahdi, eds. The Arabian Nights. Trans. Husain Haddawy. W. W. Norton & Company, 2009.

Niane, Djibril Tamsir, and G. D. Pickett. Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali. Revised Edition, Pearson College Div, 2006.

Ghosh, Amitav. In an Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveler’s Tale. Vintage, 1994.

Boccaccio, Giovanni. The Decameron. Ed. Wayne A. Rebhorn. Critical edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2015.

Stoneman, Richard, and Pseudo-Callisthenes. The Greek Alexander Romance. Reprint edition, Penguin Classics, 1991. 

The Far Right's Byzantium | Watch the full talk

Presented by Roland Betancourt at Politics: A RaceB4Race Symposium in 2021

Roland Betancourt analyzes contemporary white supremacist invocations of Byzantium. The alt-right ideas of a New Byzantium share links with premodern narratives of defeat and reconquest, including Greek laments from the 15th century accenting the role of divine will in military affairs and prophesying the Christianization of Istanbul. Betancourt demonstrates that these genocidal prophecies are not only active in white supremacist circles today—with roots in Greek, Serbian, and Russian nationalist discourses—but have become interlinked with contemporary MAGA politics and dreams of Trump and Putin together within a conquered Istanbul. Key to these politics is the Hagia Sophia, which is imagined as a site of conquest: a reclaimed, reconsecrated church at the center of a re-Christianized Constantinople (Istanbul). Reviewing memes and postings from alt-right circles, Betancourt argues that “Byzantium” is part of a vocabulary of hatred and genocide. At the same time, he outlines the common condemnations of Byzantium on gendered, racial and religious grounds in medieval and early modern Anglophone discourses. What previously defined US imaginings of Byzantium may now play into white supremacist rhetoric, and medieval scholarship and contemporary politics are necessarily intertwined.

La Chanson de Roland, written in the 11th century, recounts the battle of Roncevaux in 778 CE. Teaching this epic functions as a baseline from which to compare and expand on the epic tradition in the medieval world. La Chanson de Roland praises the valiance of crusading and the moral superiority of Christianity, while villainizing an imagined Muslim enemy. Contextualizing the political and racializing mission of the poem offers students a perspective on how epics shaped and were shaped by the values of their historical moment.

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Ham and the rationale for colonization

European Christian nations used the Hamitic myth as a rationale for slavery and the colonial endeavors of various empires. In the 15th century the Portuguese began a regular program of slave-raids. Gomes Eannes de Azurara, a scholar in the court of Prince Henri the Navigator, references the curse of Ham in The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea, a travel narrative that glorifies the nation of Portugal and the colonization of Africa:

Black were Moors like the others, though their slaves, in accordance with ancient custom, which I believe to have been because of the curse which, after the Deluge, Noah laid upon his son Cain [sic], cursing him in this way: that his race should be subject to all the other races of the world. And from this race these blacks are descended, as wrote the Archbishop Don Rodric of Toledo and Joesphus in his book on the Antiquities of the Jews, and Wlter, with other authors who have spoken of the generations of Noah, from the time of his going out on the Ark.

George Best, a chronicler of travel narratives, also used the curse theory to define racial difference. These texts were hugely influential in early modern England, and helped create British society’s understanding of a larger world they had never seen. George Best, in A true discourse of the late voyages of discoverie. . . (1578) wrote:

Blacknesse proceedeth of some naturall infection of the first inhabitants of that Countrey, and so all the whole progenie of them descended, all still polluted with the same blot of infection. Therefore it shal not be farre from our purpose, to examine the first originall of these blacke men, and how by lineall discente, they haue hitherto continued thus blacke.

Best then goes on to recount what had become a common argument, that God cursed Ham’s son, Chus [sic], and his descendants with Blackness. He thus concludes,

And of this blacke & cursed Chus came al these blacke Moores which are in Africa... the cause of the Ethiopians blacknesse, is the curse & natural infection of bloud, & not the distemperature of the clymate.

In her 1969 article, “The Hamitic hypothesis; its origin and function in time perspective,” Edith Sanders writes, “It becomes clear then that the hypothesis is symptomatic of the nature of race relations, that it has changed its content if not its nomenclature through time, and that it has become a problem of epistemology.” This story lingers in the minds of Europeans, moving outward, adapted as needed, while the colonial occupation of most of the world continues—like a virus, it spreads.

Chouki El Hamel writes in Black Morocco:

Not until the Western European Enlightenment and the rise of empirical science did the religious account of the origins of race start to crumble, only to give rise, unfortunately, to racist pseudoscientific concepts of human classifications based on the unfortunate distortion of Darwin’s theory, namely social Darwinism. But even the conceptual revolution of the Enlightenment did not prevent the 19th century European travelers to Africa from referring to the Hamitic theory in their travel accounts. As contemporary historian William McKee Eans concluded: ‘By studying the shifting ethnic identifications of the ‘sons of Ham,’ by following their journey in myth from the land of Canaan to the land of Guinea, we can perhaps learn something about the historical pressures that shaped modern white racial attitudes.'

Just as spices travel so does the sinful idea of the Hamitic curse. The Hamitic myth and its racist connotations were used in the religious and cultural history of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Ham, chattel slavery, and the Americas

The curse of Ham mythology, a mainstay of early modern European thought around race and national identity, was a primary tool of propaganda in early America to condone and ensure the longevity of chattel slavery. Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning gives some brief examples of this transfer of thought from Europe to America and its weaponization in the infant nation:

In a 1615 address for the planters in Ireland and Virginia, the Reverend Thomas Cooper said that White Shem, one of Noah’s three sons, ‘shall be lord over’ the ‘cursed race of Cham’—meaning Noah’s son Ham—in Africa. Future Virginia politician George Sandys also conjured curse theory to degrade Blackness. In a 1620 paraphrase of Genesis, future politician Thomas Peyton wrote of Cain, or ‘the Southern man,’ a ‘black deformed elf,’ and 'the Northern white, like unto God himself.’ Five years later, Clergyman released the gargantuan four-volume Hakluytus Posthumus of travel manuscripts left to him by his mentor, Richard Hakluyt. Purchas blasted the ‘filthy sodomits, sleepers, ignorant, beast, disciples of Cham . . . to whom the blacke darknesse is reserved for ever.’ These were the ideas about African people circulating throughout England and the English colonies as African people were being hauled into Britannia on slave ships.

Frederick Douglass, in the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, published in 1849, writes of the curse of Ham’s fragility, and the unstable border between white and Black, in a specifically American context:

Every year brings with it multitudes of this class of slaves. It was doubtless in consequence of a knowledge of this fact, that one great statesman of the south predicted the downfall of slavery by the inevitable laws of population. Whether this prophecy is ever fulfilled or not, it is nevertheless plain that a very different-looking class of people are springing up at the south, and are now held in slavery, from those originally brought to this country from Africa; and if their increase will do no other good, it will do away the force of the argument, that God cursed Ham, and therefore American slavery is right. If the lineal descendants of Ham are alone to be scripturally enslaved, it is certain that slavery at the south must soon become unscriptural; for thousands are ushered into the world, annually, who, like myself, owe their existence to white fathers, and those fathers most frequently their own masters.

This passage from Douglass is significant because it showcases how the instability of race is not only a contemporary concern. These constructions have been built upon shaky ground.

During the American Civil War and Reconstruction, Benjamin Palmer, the “founding father” of the Southern Presbyterian church, a famous orator, and the founder of Rhodes College, frequently leaned on the curse of Ham mythology to persuade the public of his secessionist politics. A vehement supporter of segregation, and in particular, the enslavement of Black Africans, the mythology of Ham became his primary means of the moral and religious justification for slavery in his many sermons.

One of the many examples of these speeches is Palmer’s “National Responsibility before God,” delivered June 13, 1861. Stephen R. Haynes, in his book Noah’s Curse: The Biblical Justification of American Slavery, notes:

“In ‘National Responsibility before God,’ Palmer relied on Noah's curse to explain the historical position of the African, to confirm the dependency of the American Negro, and to provide a theological justification for slavery. He established the importance of Genesis 9 by noting that ‘if we ascend the stream of history to its source, we find in Noah's prophetic utterances to his three sons, the fortunes of mankind presented in perfect outline.’ The benediction given to Shem, Palmer writes, marks him for a ‘destiny predominantly religious,’ and the divine trust of the Hebrew Semites until the time of Christ was to ‘testify for the unity of God against the idolatry of mankind.’ Turning to the descendants of Noah's son Japheth, Palmer contends that the ‘enlargement’ promised him in Noah's blessing can be seen in ‘the hardy and aggressive families of this stock [that] have spread over the larger portion of the earth's surface, fulfilling their mission as the organ of human civilization.’ According to Palmer, the task of civilizing the world, assigned first to Greeks and Romans and later to the various nations of Europe, has been realized through Japhetic achievements in the scientific, artistic, and public realms. Finally, Palmer delineates the fortunes of Ham as indicated in Noah's prophecy:

‘Upon Ham was pronounced the doom of perpetual servitude—proclaimed with double emphasis, as it is twice repeated that he shall be the servant of Japheth and the servant of Shem. Accordingly, history records not a single example of any member of this group lifting itself, by any process of self‐development, above the savage condition. From first to last their mental and moral characteristics, together with the guidance of Providence, have marked them for servitude; while their comparative advance in civilization and their participation in the blessings of salvation, have ever been suspended upon this decreed connexion with Japhet and with Shem.’”

Ham in our contemporary culture

The curse of Ham mythology is also still a part of our artistic and cultural development, alluded to over and over again in literature, television, and art. Many Black artists, writers, and entertainment creators have used it strategically in their art-making, developing a critical frame in which viewers and readers can question the implications of racial difference, and creating counter narratives to reclaim the story as one of their own. 

Sula by Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison’s Sula alludes to the Hamitic myth from the consciousness of a white bargeman who finds Chicken Little’s drowned body. This is a moment in which Black people’s deaths are not mourned, but are merely an inconvenience to white people:

“A bargeman, poling away from the shore, found Chicken late that afternoon stuck in some rocks and weeds, his knickers ballooning about his legs. He would have left him there but noticed that it was a child, not an old black man, as it first appeared, and he prodded the body loose, netted it and hauled it aboard. He shook his head in disgust at the kind of parents who would drown their own children. When, he wondered, will those people ever be anything but animals, fit for nothing but substitutes for mules, only mules didn’t kill each other the way n—s did. He dumped Chicken Little into a burlap sack and tossed him next to some egg crates and boxes of wool cloth. Later, sitting down to smoke on an empty lard tin, still bemused by God’s curse and the terrible burden his own kind had of elevating Ham’s sons, he suddenly became alarmed by the thought that the corpse in this heat would have a terrible odor, which might get into the fabric of his woolen cloth. He dragged the sack away and hooked it over the side, so that the Chicken’s body was half in and half out of the water.”

The Malediction of Cham 

Visual and performance artist Marielle Plaisir’s series The Malediction of Cham, reimagines Blackness—the black in the paintings is created through the layering of many colors, rather than using black paint straight from the tube. Plaisir shows the multitudes that exist in Blackness and questions the history that has pushed Black people into a realm of difference. 

‍Black and holy

Nina Peton, an anthropologist who did field work in Morocco in the 1950’s, collected a narrative on the Blackness of the Harratin in the Draa valley: 

“The Harratin relate that they are the descendants of Noah’s second son, Ham, and that once upon a time they used to be white. One day, however, Ham protected his head during a heavy rain-storm by carrying the Koran on top of it. The rain was so heavy that it washed all the characters of the holy book on to Ham’s skin; these characters, being sacred, were inedible, and so they turned Ham and his offspring black forever!”

This is the power of bringing truth to the stories we are given. In this counter narrative, Blackness is no curse, it is a sacred gift.

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Works cited

Best, George. A true discourse of the late voyages of discoverie, for finding of a passage to Cathaya by the Northwest, under the conduct of Martin Forbisher Generall: Divided into three Bookes. London, England: The Argonaut Press, 1938.  

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Boston, MA: Anti-Slavery Office, 1849.  

Eannes de Azurara, Gomes. The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea. Translated by Charles Raymond Beazley and Edgar Prestage. London, England: Printed for the Hakluyt Society, 1896.  

Haynes, Stephen R. Noah’s Curse: The Biblical Justification of American Slavery. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2002.  

Kendi, Ibram X. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. New York, NY: Bold Type Books, 2016.

Morrison, Toni. Sula. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.  

Sanders, Edith R. “The Hamitic Hypothesis; Its Origin and Functions in Time Perspective.” The Journal of African History 10, no. 4 (1969): 521–32. http://www.jstor.org/stable/179896.

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La Chanson de Roland, or The Song of Roland, is a 12th-century verse narrative written in Old French. The poem recounts a version of an historical event, the Battle of Roncevaux, in the Pyrenees Mountains on August 15, 778 CE.  

The narrative centers the retainers of the Emperor Charlemagne. It depicts the divinely inspired Christian army going to battle against a monstrous “pagan” enemy, who is ambushing them in a pass through the Pyrenees mountains as Charlemagne returns from Spain to France.

Over 400 years separate the event and the earliest extant text of the poem. The text shows evidence of both oral and textual composition written in stanzas of varying lengths called laisses. La Chanson incorporates themes present in early 12th-century French culture and politics: crusades and martyrdom, Christianity and conversion, and Islamic presence.

It's important for students to compare the historical record to the political and social circumstances in which the poem was written. They need to see the poem not as a singular text, but as a result of an oral and textual history, one that is manipulated over time. I want students to ask: why is this poem being written down at this point in history? What purpose does it serve across time?

Paien unt tort e chrestiens unt dreit: The pagans are wrong and the Christians are right

The actual events of that fateful battle in the Pyrenees Mountains in 778 were much different than the poem’s depiction, according to Charlemagne’s personal biographer, Einhard. According to his biography, upon Charlemagne’s return to his capital in Aix-la-Chappelle (or Aachen), the rearguard of his army was attacked not by Muslims, but by Gascons (Basques), who were Christians.  

In Einhard’s recounting, the Basques attacked swiftly and dispersed widely, so Charlemagne could not locate them. Einhard’s contemporary account records that Hruodland, or Roland, commander of the rearguard, dies in the attack with a few others. It is neither heroic nor dramatic. The description of the battle and its aftermath lacks any details.  

Over the course of the next four centuries, this story is transformed into the text we have today. The Basques are replaced by “pagans,” assumed to be Muslims in al-Andalus, and their belief system is caricatured in almost cartoonish ways, as they worship Muhammad, Apollo, and a purely fictional deity named “Tervagant.”  

The beliefs of the so-called “pagans” in La Chanson de Roland are largely a mix of some actual knowledge and a lot of invention. From the beginning of the poem, in the very first laisse, or stanza, the city of Zaragoza (Saragossa) in northern Spain is said to be ruled by the king Marsile, “who does not love God,” and “serves Muhammad and calls upon Apollo.”

Except for Saragossa, which stands upon a mountain.
It is held by King Marsile, who does not love God;
He serves Muhammad and calls upon Apollo.

The inclusion of Apollo into the religious beliefs of the Muslims in Spain, however inaccurate, represents a blanketed sense of otherness on the part of medieval European Christians—there are Christians and then there is everyone else. Belief in the Roman or Greek gods, in the European Christian imaginary, stood for folly and ignorance and reflected the prejudices that the French audience might have held about non-Christians.

Later in the poem, we see some recognition that Muslims have a sacred text, the Quran, though it is not named. It is placed on a lectern made of ivory and containing the “law of Muhammad” and an entirely fictional deity named “Tervagant.”

A lectern stood there, made of ivory; 
Marsile has a book brought forward,
Containing the law of Muhammad and Tervagant. 

As Europeans participated in religious wars in the Mediterranean and encountered Muslims in al-Andalus, North Africa, and western Asia, knowledge of the Quran grew in Christian Europe. Another aspect of the poem that demonstrates some familiarity with the non-European world is that the lectern in laisse 47 is made of ivory, an African import. Ivory was widely traded in the medieval Mediterranean between Africans, Asians, the Byzantines, and western Europeans.

Crusades ideology

La Chanson de Roland was composed and written down almost immediately after the First Crusade. It was in this moment that the image of Christian crusader martyrdom was constructed, symbolized by the merging of religion and violence, and the solidification of proto-national and ancestral pride.

Roland is portrayed as a holy warrior for Christianity who is carried up to heaven by the Angel Gabriel upon his death in an act of crusader penitence. The character of Archbishop Turpin, who leads masses before battles and prays to kill the pagans, embodies the propagandistic rhetoric of crusader Christianity.  

The crusader ideology of holy war is evident in the representation of the Muslim armies as well-equipped, richly adorned, and organized. In laisse 79, the poet comments on the sight of the Muslim army as giving Roland and Oliver resolve in the battle to come.  

The pagans arm themselves with Saracen hauberks,
Most of which are triple linked.
They lace on their fine helmets from Saragossa
And gird themselves with swords of steel from Viana.
They have shields which are fair and spears from Valence,
And pennons which are white, blue and red.
Leaving their mules and all their palfreys
They mount their war horses and ride in close array.
The day was fine and the sun was bright;
They have no equipment which does not gleam in the light.
They sound a thousand trumpets to enhance the effect.
The noise is great and the Franks heard it.
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Oliver said: “Lord companion, I think
We may have a battle with the Saracens."
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Roland replies: “And may God grant it to us.
It is our duty to be here for our king:
For his lord a vassal must suffer hardships
And endure great heat and great cold;
And he must lose both hair and hide.
Now let each man take care to strike great blows,
So that no one can sing a shameful song about us.
The pagans are wrong and the Christians are right.
No dishonourable tale will ever be told about me.”

This passage contains the famous line “The pagans are wrong and the Christians are right,” the clearest distillation of absolute certainty in the Europeans’ moral and religious superiority.

Relationship to colonialism

Although the poem’s representation of proto-nationalistic Christian chauvinism was historically inaccurate to the battle it recounts, it gave rise to the kinds of ultra-nationalism that drove French colonialism in North Africa.  

The enmity depicted in the poem between Charlemagne and the Arab-Muslim world couldn’t have been further from the truth. According to his biography, Charlemagne had a good relationship with the Abbasid dynasty, under the Caliph Harun al-Rashid, to whom he sent gifts and delegations. Despite the historical inaccuracies, the most identifiable object in the poem is an oliphant, an ivory horn, which represents Roland’s high status. The Song of Roland, which symbolizes European and Christian identity in the modern era, has at its core an African object.  

This is significant given that the text was promoted to the level of a French national epic while colonizing Algeria and during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. During the war, France passed the Cremieux Decree, which granted French citizenship to Algerian Jews, but not Algerian Muslims. This decree helped instigate the 1871 Kabyle Revolt, where over a third of Algeria’s population rose up against the French colonial settlers. The poem, as a national epic, became a touchstone for the national identity of France, the implications of which include the inherent superiority of Christians, the celebration of religious violence, and Islamophobia.  

At the same time, during the German siege of Paris in December of 1870, the French medievalist literary scholar Gaston Paris gave a series of lectures at the Collège de France called “La chanson de Roland et la nationalité française.” The lectures align the Christian crusader ideologies with French national identity as an attempt to galvanize resistance against the Germans.  

La Chanson de Roland, and its use as a national epic, was a product of both European nationalist and colonial aspirations. It is important for students to understand how the poem and its histories, even in classrooms across the United States, can reiterate and underscore Eurocentric white supremacist values if it is not properly contextualized.

The Merchant of Venice is an ideal play to begin showing students how the early modern English attention to difference plays out in the margins. It is clear in the text that the English sensibility in the early modern era is one already attentive to identities that don’t fit neatly into discreetly constructed categories and one that sees the reinscription of those divides as important to both its domestic organization and to its colonial ambitions. In Shakespeare’s Venice, managing those categories—and how people fit into them—appears especially important for ensuring that its legal, economic, and social systems maintain and reproduce a particular hierarchy, especially in an increasingly intercultural context.

Henry V can be an incredibly compelling play to bring students into conversations about immigration and nationalism. The play’s concern with crafting an English national identity, especially in comparison to that of the Welsh or French, offers students a way into a discussion about language, belonging, and national identity. Given the urgency of anti-immigrant sentiments and legislation in the US, the idea of who is deemed a legitimate insider is a significant entry point for American students to discussions about national citizenship and race. Notions of legitimacy in the US are often tethered to linguistic identity, so the play’s attention to language is critical for these conversations.

Titus Andronicus is the perfect gateway drug for a lifelong addiction to Shakespeare. Starting Shakespeare courses with a unit on Titus destabilizes students’ preconceived ideas about Shakespeare. Some students come with a hatred of Shakespeare because of the ways they encountered his works in high school. Some students come worshipping “The Bard” because of the ways they encountered his works in high school. Either stance (disdain or worship), though, precludes close readings and original analysis. The students believe they know what Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet or Macbeth mean, but rarely do those “meanings” stem from the students’ close engagements with the texts. By beginning any Shakespeare class with Titus Andronicus, students are forced to see Shakespeare anew.

Frequently in our culture, the only times we talk about race are in moments of crisis. Ayanna Thompson offers a guide on how to approach race in the classroom, reminding teachers, “You don’t have to be the expert on race. You just have to be the person who can raise the issues.”

Whiteness is not an empty or invisible signifier, and it is something we should be discussing when we talk about race in our classrooms. When we consider the role of Christianity in constructing views of whiteness as pure and good, we can see how racial hierarchies begin to take shape in the early modern period. This plays out in the portraiture of early modern England, and attending to this in our teaching allows us to broach important conversations about race, and whiteness in particular, in literary works like The Tragedy of Mariam, Othello, and Oroonoko.  

Kim F. Hall explores the value and importance of discussing the role of whiteness not only within early modern literature and culture, but within her classroom as well.  

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The myth of Ham was an important and convenient tool for colonial regimes across the world. From Prince Henry the Navigator to Napoleon, the myth provided a moral and divine justification for the colonial oppression and enslavement of Black peoples around the world. As a founding myth of racial hierarchies, it is imperative that the history and iterations of the myth of Ham are understood by our students.

Teaching Titus Andronicus can open up conversations about early modern English familiarity with race and racial difference, as well as to help students consider the inconsistent ways that race operates in the world around them. In particular, Titus’s tendency to play up the significance of mixed identity helps students think through how mixedness often registers differently today depending on the context, sometimes being framed as meaningful and other times not registering at all. Especially in a moment like our present, when mixed-race identity is sometimes framed as a late 20th- and early 21st-century phenomenon, seeing it represented in an Elizabethan play can encourage students to investigate the past as a way to better understand the present.

This assignment comes out of my course, "Epic Tradition," which investigates uses, misuses, and reenvisionings of that most esteemed literary genre: epic. Scholars have characterized epic as the genre of nation building and imperialism: the genre defines the essential characteristics of a race of people and attempts to legitimize one race of people conquering another. We begin with two classical epics—The Odyssey and The Aeneid—and analyze how their formal and thematic elements contribute to the definition of what it means to be Greek and Roman, respectively. We explore the following topics: anxieties caused by love and erotic desire, the cost of military conquest and territorial expansion, the relationship between individual and collective identities, and other topics that emerge from class discussion. We then turn to William Shakespeare (Henry V and Antony and Cleopatra) and Edmund Spenser (The Faerie Queene, Book 1 and canto 12 of Book 2). We examine how and to what purposes these two authors replicate, revise, and/or reject the conventions, tropes, and ideological positions of the epics that influenced them, including those by Italian Renaissance authors. Our task when reading Shakespeare and Spenser is to figure out how they characterize the English as a race. We end the class by collaboratively writing an epic, considering as we do so both the possibilities and limitations of the epic genre for defining who we are—or want to be—in our present moment. 

Epic Assignment

In this course, students will write an epic poem. This assignment provides us with another opportunity to reflect on the goals and operations of the epic genre, but this time from the perspective of the author.  

Does the epic provide us with what we need to define who “we” are?   

This assignment first requires a small group of volunteers (3-4) to produce the epic’s argument, outline the plot, and divide the plot by the number of students in the class. Each student will then write approximately 20 lines of verse in a form of their choice (e.g., ottavarima, Spenserian stanza, blank verse) that cover their portion of the plot. I will put all of the lines/stanzas together, and on the last day of class we will read and discuss our epic. 

For the group constructing the argument and plot

1. If you are interested in being a part of this group, please email me no later than [Date].  If there are more volunteers than people needed, members of the group will be chosen by lottery.  
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2. It will not be possible for the class epic to include as many episodes as we have seen in the ancient and Renaissance epics. So, this is really a mini epic, or perhaps a canto of a longer epic.  
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3. Be thoughtful about what can be done in the total number of lines (number of classmates x ~20). 
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4. Remember our class discussions of imitatio.   
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5. Please send me the argument and plot divisions no later than [Date].   

For those writing lines/stanzas 

1. I will use a randomizer to assign the portions of the plot. You will find your portion of the plot posted to Canvas no later than [Date].  
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2. Choose a verse form. 
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3. Remember our class discussions of imitatio, and this includes thinking about rhetorical devices and figures of speech. Your lines/stanzas should include a variety of literary and rhetorical devices.  
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4. Please send your lines/stanzas to me no later than [Date]. 

The medieval epic tradition contains deep wells of insight into the culture, traditions, and political values of the period. Teaching the epic contrapuntally and including texts outside of the European tradition gives students the opportunity to expand their understanding of the premodern world. Adam Miyashiro recommends teaching The Epic of Sunjata alongside European epics, like La Chanson de Roland and La Poema de Mio Cid, to offer students greater insight into a rich, multicultural, and multilinguistic medieval past.

The Merchant of Venice is a key text for demonstrating that race was inextricable from early modern considerations of societal organization. Shakespeare stages his Venice with complex and interconnected economic, legal, and social systems, each of which take difference into account. The play considers these systems in both local and global terms, particularly given Venice’s position as a center for trade in an expanding mercantile and colonial economy. The play is also attentive to the intercultural, interreligious, and interracial entanglements inherent to such a space.

Social organization and the other

Merchant includes a number of moments that bring these dynamics into light. I often draw students’ attention to Antonio’s rationale for why Shylock’s bond will likely be upheld. As Antonio explains,

The Duke cannot deny the course of law;
For the commodity that strangers have
With us in Venice, if it be denied,
Will much impeach the justice of the state,
Since that the trade and profit of the city
Consisteth of all nations.

 
Antonio describes a Venice that takes its treatment of “strangers” into careful consideration to serve particular priorities. The moment allows students to see that the play weighs the affordances and limitations of extending rights to those it otherwise marginalizes. In tracing how Shylock is ultimately denied legal recourse on the basis of his Jewish identity in the subsequent court scene, students can also see how rapidly such priorities shift, with the maintenance and reinforcement of hierarchical power structures taking precedence.

Racialization at the margins

Even and sometimes especially when positioned at the margins, discussions of race in the play carry particular significance to broader societal issues. A key example is the exchange between Jessica, Lancelot, and Lorenzo, in which Lancelot disparages Lorenzo’s marriage to Shylock’s daughter and Lorenzo in turn reveals that Lancelot has been engaged in a relationship with a Moor.

The moment can be an uncomfortable one, especially for a modern-day reader. It trades on racism, antisemitism, and misogyny for an attempt at humor. Lorenzo, for example, is characterized by Lancelot as being "no good member of the commonwealth, for in converting Jews to Christians [he]raise[s] the price of pork.” Lorenzo’s reply, that he “shall answer that better to the commonwealth than [Lancelot]” because “the Moor is with child by [Lancelot]” prompts the clown to attack the woman’s character by mobilizing her difference.

When teaching this moment, I ask students to hold its flippant tone in tension with its evocation of the “commonwealth.” Interracial and interreligious relationships are both the subject of ridicule and a formation deemed of interest to broader Venetian society. Considering the exchange’s equivocal tenor can help students recognize that early modern English culture, and Shakespeare, are familiar with concepts of race and racial mixing. It shows students that there was historical attention paid to concerns about social organization and race—how are hierarchies disrupted when received racial boundaries are blurred?

Separating citizens from strangers

Shakespeare’s Venice groups its characters into a limited set of racial and religious categories, despite a range of ongoing and potential intermixture in the play. These intermixture possibilities include Morocco’s courting of Portia as well as the recurring suggestion that Shylock is not Jessica’s father.

Lancelot and Lorenzo’s discussion might be understood as representative of ongoing procedures that reconcile mixed identity to Venice’s overarching racial schema. In that sense, this brief exchange highlights a key site through which Venice separates its citizens from “strangers,” creating the kinds of divides its economic and legal systems pivot around. Even as Lancelot and Lorenzo engage in the only explicit discussion of “commonwealth” in the play, their partners in the intermixture that occasions that discussion appear to be excluded from that grouping.

Engaging these moments in Merchant can help students get a sense of why and how discrete racial categories arise and are reinforced, particularly in contexts where such boundaries otherwise routinely collapse.

Doing so can also encourage students to trace the histories that engender the categories our own 21st-century societies tend to recognize and operate around. When teaching Merchant, I ask students to reflect through journaling exercises on the recurring inability of such categories to account for the complexity of many peoples’ actual heritage. Thinking through these questions with The Merchant of Venice can help demonstrate that these categories have a long history of being constructed, and, maybe more importantly, their constructions have historically been grounded in maintaining and reproducing particular structures of power.

In 2019 at Race and Periodization: A RaceB4Race Symposium, Margo Hendricks offered her insights on what exactly premodern critical race studies is (especially in comparison to premodern race studies), and what it means to be a practitioner within this field. Her working definition is a guide to the methodological and theoretical background of PCRS, as well as a rallying call to continue to expand understandings of the past.

Read the complete transcript and listen to her talk, archived by the Folger Shakespeare Library.

The epic tradition and form is also an oral tradition. The Epic of Sunjata, detailing the life of Sunjata Keita, founder of the Keita dynasty in 11th century Mali, has been passed down through generations of Mande-speaking djeli, or griots. The Sunjata is the founding narrative of the Mali Empire in medieval Western Africa. Reading The Sunjata comparatively with La Chanson de Roland and La Poema de Mio Cid asks students to challenge Eurocentric and Orientalist narratives by thinking about the Western Atlantic as a wider region—one that provincializes Europe. When studying The Sunjata, students are asked to consider how these narratives of the African continent, and specifically the West African coast, challenge the white supremacist myths that continue to serve in the foundation of the US educational system.

Goal

It’s often difficult for students to understand the realities of enslaved Africans. Students may make assumptions about how they would have responded to enslavement. This classroom exercise challenges students to consider all the costs and consequences that enslaved people faced when responding to their enslavement. It forces students to think about the harsh realities of slavery and the practical issues that enslaved people grappled with when responding to their circumstances. Students consider all the challenges and issues that enslaved people faced when responding to their enslavement. Should they resist? Runaway? Rebel? Or simply survive?  

Prep

Students should be knowledgeable of the material realities of enslavement. This exercise should occur at a point in the class when the students have learned about the rise, development and basic structure of slavery as an economic, social, and political system. They also should also be familiar with cultural resistance, fugitive slaves, and rebellions. They should have some familiarity with the different ways that enslaved people responded to enslavement.

Format

Randomly break the class up into 4 or 5 groups. Each group is assigned a form of resistance, and they're asked to make a short presentation in which they deliver a compelling argument in favor of the resistance strategy they've been assigned. One group will argue that the enslaved community should use daily resistance (described), another supports the notion of running away, the third group advocates for armed rebellion. The final group are judges—they are the ones who listen to each argument, ask supplementary questions, and then vote on which form of resistance to employ. 

The exercise is usually a debate in which each group presents their argument to the entire class. They should consider commenting on both the strengths of their strategy and the weaknesses of the competing strategies. At the end, one group wins the debate by convincing the judges to endorse their strategy. 

Depending on the size of the class, you can also add a fifth group, which would argue simply to accommodate to slavery and survive, in order to ensure that future generations live and perhaps live free. 

Or, conversely, you could have all four groups (daily resisters, runaways, armed rebels, and accommodationists) and then have the entire class vote rather than have a separate group of judges. 

Outcomes

This exercise changes how students think about resistance against slavery when they have to consider tough questions about resources, strategies, and the punishments they might face, or even worse, the punishments their family members and loved ones might face. Make sure that each group is pushed to ask themselves hard questions about the strengths and weaknesses of their strategy and what hindrances or consequences they might face, not only if they fail, but also if they succeed.  

Instructions for student groups

Daily Resistance

Includes all of the following

Social resistance—building family and community

Cultural Resistance—developing “liberation theology”

Work Avoidance—working slowly, breaking tools, faking illness, etc…

Arson and Poisoning

Questions to consider

• Do you plan to use one of these strategies, or a combination of all of them?  
• What exactly is your plan going to be, and how will you implement it? What is your goal, and will you be successful?  How would you define “success” with daily resistance?
• If you choose something risky, such as arson or poisoning, how many people would you involve in the execution of your plan?  Would the conspirators include domestic slaves, field slaves, or both?
• What are the benefits of using the particular strategy you have chosen?  Why do you think that it is the most effective attack against slavery?
• What are the drawbacks or consequences of your strategy?  

Flight/Running Away

Questions to consider

• What exactly will your plan be? Are you planning to escape permanently or just temporarily run to the woods? How and when do you run? Do you know where you’re going and how to get there? Are you planning to run to the North, or to a maroon society?
• Do you have money, tools, or supplies to help you?  
• If you are successful, what are the benefits of running away?
• What risks are involved with this strategy? What are the potential consequences of your actions?

Armed Rebellion

Questions to consider

• What exactly is your plan going to be? What method or strategy are you going to use? 
• Do you have weapons? How many people are you going to include in the plan?  Are you going to include domestic slaves, field slaves, or both? 
• What is your long-term strategy? Do you plan to just attack your own plantation, or is this a larger movement?
• What is your plan for after the rebellion begins? Are you going to try to escape? Seek refuge in a maroon society, sail for Haiti, or return to Africa?
• What do you believe are the benefits to your strategy?
• What are the potential risks? What are the consequences of your actions?

Accommodation/Survival

Questions to consider

• What does it mean to “accommodate” to the system of slavery? What would your daily life look like? 
• What does “survival” mean during slavery and why is it important? 
• Do you feel like you are “selling out,” or is there something inherently valuable about surviving under these circumstances? 
• What are the potential benefits for you and your community if you choose to accommodate? What potentially negative consequences does your choice have?  ‍

Judges

Questions to consider

• What do you think would be the most effective response to slavery?  
• What is the goal?  Do you want to help people cope with slavery?  Escape it?  Destroy it?
• What are the potential problems with each of these strategies?  What are the potential drawbacks or consequences for each strategy?
• What specific flaws do you see for each strategy, that you would want to ask questions about?

Questions of citizenship, belonging, and ­national identity shape contemporary life. Who is and who is not a citizen, and how this is determined across national and racial lines, has a deeply rooted history. In ancient Greece, tragedians like Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides responded to their particular political moment with plays that demanded audiences to consider the nature of citizenship and nationality within their society. Dan-el Padilla Peralta expounds on how Euripides’ Ion deals with the question of citizenship and how it resonates across the long history of racialization.

Fear and Loathing in New Spain: Anti-Blackness in Colonial Mexico | Watch the full talk

Presented by Miguel A Valerio at Region and Enmity: A RaceB4Race Symposium in 2021

Miguel A. Valerio discusses anti-Black matters and events in Colonial Mexico City and the racialization of slavery more broadly in connection to the people of African descent in colonial Mexico and the Atlantic at large. He traces how New Spain’s anti-Black ethos stems from the racialization of African slavery and how it led to the maligning of Afro-Mexicans’ clamor for justice and their festive traditions. Valerio looks at the Spanish Empire as a locus to study the development of biopower in the early modern world. Through Alonso de Sandoval’s 1627 treatise on slavery manual titled De Instauranda Aethiopum Salute, or “On bringing salvation to Africans,” he highlights Sandoval’s concluding thoughts on why slavery is just for Africans.

An annotated syllabus created by Ruben Espinosa

I recognize that it isn’t always possible to offer a special topics course on Shakespeare and race, and as such, this syllabus offers a way to engage critical race studies within a Shakespeare Survey course. What I offer below are entry points to broaching conversations about race and racism within a course that isn’t necessarily devoted to Shakespeare and critical race studies.

Course description

This course is an introduction to Shakespeare’s plays and poetry. This semester, we will critically read, analyze, and interpret the works of Shakespeare to develop a greater understanding of his dramatic works and poetry. We will study plays from the genres of history, comedy, tragedy, and romance. In the process, we will examine the cultural forces in Shakespeare’s England, and scrutinize how his works register attitudes and apprehensions surrounding religion, race, gender, immigration, xenophobia, imperialism, and national identity. More importantly, we will consider how Shakespeare’s attention to these issues bears significance in our present moment, and we will explore how our own views of these issues influence the ongoing making of Shakespeare in our time.

Primary Readings

• Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Selections: Although my intent is not to be prescriptive, as I recognize people will be drawn to particular sonnets when teaching, these are the sonnets I typically assign – 1-5; 18-21; 55; 73; 106; 127; 129-131; 138; 152)
• As You Like It
• The Merchant of Venice
• Henry V
• Hamlet
• Othello
• The Tempest

Rationale for selections

While there is quite a bit from which to choose, I select these works to trace across them sustained attention to issues of race and racism. While I note in my course description that we will consider a host of issues, ALL of those issues can point back to structures of power and racism, and as such I search for that thread. As opposed to focusing the course on understood “race plays”—that is, plays that feature non-white characters—I try to show how whiteness, and structures of white supremacy, are taking shape in these works.

I begin with the sonnets because the first line of the first sonnet in the sequence is telling: “From fairest creatures we desire increase.” I let students explore what “fair’ means here, and after expected ideas about beauty and virtue, I draw on Kim F. Hall’s work to show students how fairness equates to whiteness. As such, we establish early on in the class that the literary work, something as simple as a sonnet, is advancing notions of white supremacy.

Establishing how the text identifies the value of any given person (and the devaluation of those who diverge from that standard) is key for me. In this way, my class can explore how notions of belonging depend on who is deemed valuable, and who gets to establish such worth. In the sonnets, the young, noble, white man is the epitome of beauty and is invaluable. The dark lady, not so much. The sonnets are a starting point for us to begin having these conversations. As we move into Shakespeare’s plays, then, we can see this paradigm at work more fully.

As You Like It commits itself to thinking about gendered hierarchies, tyranny, and immigration. The Merchant of Venice is deeply invested in considering insider/outsider status, and while it is clearly a play focused on antisemitism, it is also makes clear the role of racism through the character of Portia. Henry V is a play that expounds a sense of English nationalism, but it undermines this through the questionable actions of Henry and through the cultural confidence of Fluellen. In Hamlet, I find value in tracing how patriarchal structures of oppression dominate the play (from Hamlet’s Ghost to Polonius to Claudius). Beyond the play, though, I like to trace how Hamlet exists, to the present moment, as a play focused on the struggles of a privileged white man. When we take some lines out of the mouth of a white Hamlet and imagine them through the voices of people of color, Hamlet’s deep sense of isolation and unbelonging offer rich possibilities.

When I arrive at Othello, I like to play an excerpt of Ayanna Thompson’s interview, “All that Glisters is not Gold,” on NPR’s Code Switch where she discusses why staging Othello is so problematic. Up front, I want students to recognize the racist structures both within and beyond the play. This allows students to see how Shakespeare was engaging with racism, and how Shakespeare is used (still, to this day) to promote racist perspectives. I finally arrive at The Tempest, and here I can consider all the salient topics of discussion that I outline in my course description and demonstrate how Shakespeare’s work are in fact thinking about the awful realities of imperialism. That imperialism defines us today, but it does not have to define the way we understand and find value in Shakespeare.

Secondary readings and sources

For Shakespeare’s Sonnets

• Kim F. Hall, “These Bastard Signs of Fair: Literary Whiteness in Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” in Postcolonial Shakespeares (ed. Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin)
• James Baldwin, “Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare”

For As You Like It

• Ruben Espinosa, “Chapter 6: The Dangers of Indifference,” in Shakespeare on the Shades of Racism. [Note: I don’t assign my own work, but I do draw on it in class discussion]
• Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera (Chapter 5 and/or Chapter 7)

The Merchant of Venice

• Qualities of Mercy Project, Texas A&M San Antonio video (on YouTube)
• Katherine Gillen, “Language, Race, and Shakespeare Appropriation on San Antonio’s South Side: A Qualities of Mercy Dispatch,” in The Sundial
• Kim F. Hall, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner: Colonization and Miscegenation in The Merchant of Venice”

For Henry V

• Scott Newstok, “‘Step aside, I’ll show thee a president’: George W as Henry V?”
• Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The First White President,” in The Atlantic

For Hamlet

• Richard Dyer, White (Introduction and Chapter 1)
• Peter Erickson, “Can We Talk About Race in Hamlet?”
• New York Public Theater video, #ToBeBlack (available on YouTube)

For Othello

• Ian Smith, “Othello’s Black Handkerchief”
• Ayanna Thompson, “All that Glisters is not Gold” NPR Code Switch interview
• Toni Morrison, Desdemona (Acts 1, 2, 8, and 9)
• Keith Hamilton Cobb, American Moor (pp. 14-22)

For The Tempest

• Indira Karemcheti, “Caliban in the Classroom”
• Ruben Espinosa, “Beyond The Tempest: Language, Legitimacy, and La Frontera” [Note: I don’t assign my own work, but I do draw on it in class discussion]

I realize that it might not be feasible to assign all of these readings, especially for an undergraduate class. Some of these readings (like Karemcheti) are short and digestible, while others are not as short. What I often do is offer particularly poignant excerpts from the secondary readings and allow students to discuss these in small groups before asking them to share their thoughts on these excerpts. Often, if I assign the full readings, many students are underprepared. When I have students read excerpts together in class, in real time, they engage more meaningfully with the ideas because we are all on the same playing field. Fortunately, the readings offer quite a bit in the way of provocative arguments. The idea is to use these sources as a starting point for class discussions.

Possible Assignments

Public Facing Project (in lieu of a traditional essay and often much, much cooler)

For this assignment, you will be asked to craft a public facing essay that uses any work of early modern literature as a vehicle to explore a contemporary social issue. Please take time to look at the short essays published in ACMRS’s online journal, The Sundial. These public facing works will give you a sense of what is possible and possibly inspire the approach you take to this assignment. Your essays should be 750-1000.  

iMovie Project

Students will collaborate to perform and film a rendition of a scene from any of the Shakespeare plays we cover during the semester. These films should not be more than five minutes in length, should employ at least some of Shakespeare’s original dialogue, and should find a way to speak to contemporary/regional social issues. Beyond these guidelines, you have absolute creative license for the production of these films. Students will submit a 1-page written “reflection” about the cultural significance of their production, and the groups will present their film near the end of the semester.

‘A Song of Willow’: Barbary’s Blues and Theft of Happiness in Early Modern England | Watch the full talk

Presented by Justin P. Shaw at Appropriations: A RaceB4Race Symposium in 2020

Justin P. Shaw is interested in how appropriation can mean theft as well as “making something new.” He discusses multiple layers of appropriation in his talk, from Shakespeare’s use of an older play (Giovanni Battista Giraldi Cinthio’s “Un Capitano Moro” written in 1565) as the basis of the plot of Othello, to Desdemona’s “consumption” of Barbary’s song for her own comfort. Using a framework of Black music and the history of appropriation of the Blues to shed light on Desdemona’s memory of Barbary’s song, Shaw asks the question: where is the line between tribute and theft?

Byrd, Jodi A. “Mind the Gap: Indigenous Sovereignty and the Antinomes of Empire,” The Anomie of the Earth: Philosophy, Politics, and Autonomy in Europe and the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. 

Engelking, Wojciech. “Caliban as Legal Subject: The Tempest and Renaissance Juridical Thought,” Law and Humanities, 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/17521483.2023.2298001.

Greenblatt, Stephen J. “Learning to Curse: Aspects of Linguistic Colonialism in the Sixteenth Century,” Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture. New York: Routledge Press, 1990.

Seed, Patricia. “‘This island’s mine’: Caliban and Native Sovereignty,” The Tempest and Its Travels, ed. Peter Hulme. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000.

Stevens, Scott Manning. “Monstrous Indigeneity and the Discourse of Race in Shakespeare’s England,” The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Race, ed. Patricia Akhimie. New York: Oxford University Press, 2024.

What do we mean when we talk about classics or the classical? Dan-el Padilla Peralta deconstructs the history of the field of classics and its investment in hegemony, and how it carries with it an assignment of value. How do we, in the 21st century, relinquish ourselves from this long history of aesthetic sleight-of-hand?

Sins of the Father: Academic Complicity in Racist Medievalisms | Watch the full talk

Presented by Eduardo Ramos at Appropriations: A RaceB4Race Symposium in 2020

Eduardo Ramos examines whiteness in medievalism and its connection to medieval studies. He discusses how academia’s early nationalistic, and at times overtly imperial, interests suppressed evidence of diversity during the Middle Ages to construct a homogenous white Europe that informs popular medievalism like The Lord of the Rings (1954-55). Furthermore, by presenting texts like Beowulf (pre-11th century) and Vǫlsunga saga (13th century) as some sort of white heritage, early scholars and translators facilitated the appropriation of medieval Germanic symbols by white nationalist movements. Scholars in the field today have a responsibility to address these “sins” of their academic forefathers.

Antiracism or Appropriation?: Performing Diversity Work in Medieval Studies | Watch the full talk

Presented by Sierra Lomuto at Appropriations: A RaceB4Race Symposium in 2020

Sierra Lomuto examines the field of medieval studies and how it privileges whiteness in knowledge production. She argues that whiteness is a structure that informs the engagement of nationalist hate groups and liberal academia with the Middle Ages despite the differences and opposition between the two. However, Lomuto contends that the Global Medieval/Early Globalities as a methodology can open up current structures and create a spacetime beyond Europe and beyond traditional periodization that can challenge the ontology of whiteness.

Why do you need to know the history of federal Indian policy to fully understand Shakespeare’s role within communities and on this land?

Americans have long assumed Shakespeare is a prevalent literary voice because he is the best—but, when one voice is loudest, it is hard to hear the others. After a while, it becomes difficult to recognize that there could be alternatives, that those quieter voices might have something to say that is equally, if not more, significant. Shakespeare’s prevalence and power in America persists by upholding the tastes and the social and political paradigms of settler colonial cultures.  

It is important when teaching Shakespeare in America to acknowledge the colonial legacy that brought his texts to this land. Because American history is usually taught solely from the settler perspective, with a false narrative of progress, very few non-Native Americans are familiar with the history of Indian policy. Without the knowledge of this history, it is easy to view Shakespeare as a purely artistic or cultural pedestal, rather than as a political tool within the settler colonial project. Federal Indian policy represents centuries of (unconstitutional) legislation that led to the destruction, assimilation, removal, and erasure of Native peoples.  

Without the power systems that seized Native land, languages, arts, and culture, Shakespeare would not hold this position in the American literary canon.  

To engage students in the performance history of Shakespeare in America, they need to be familiar with the political landscapes in which his plays were taught and staged. Further, to bring the Indigenizing Shakespeare Movement into our classrooms, it is imperative that our students are informed and knowledgeable of this history—one that most of them were never taught.

What the Indigenizing Shakespeare Movement teaches us about Native theater and 21st-century Shakespearean performance

Each Shakespearean performance is an opportunity to see choices that are unique to the culture, community, moment in time, and artists inhabiting each production. The specificity of each Native nation’s culture and sovereignty is incredibly important, and one of the key expressions of that sovereignty is language. The Indigenizing Shakespeare movement centers language first and foremost, but not through reverence to Shakespeare’s texts. Instead, the Movement centers Indigenous languages in conversation with Shakespeare’s, exposing more people to hearing and speaking the hundreds of Native languages indigenous to these lands. Audiences understand the power that such language holds as equal to Shakespeare’s language.  

The use of Indigenous languages onstage is common in Native theater, but in an Indigenizing Shakespeare production, who is speaking what language wields additional power and intention. Philosophy and poetry already loved by Shakespeareans are more deeply engaged when more languages are considered. Shakespeare’s poetry can be reinterpreted through the lenses of the cultures of this place, just as has been done internationally for centuries. The Indigenizing Shakespeare Movement is a place-based sovereign continuation of the way all peoples who have received these texts are finding new ways to interpret them through their own cultural frameworks and empower their own communities today.  

Native theater has existed in different forms since before the colonists came to America. There has always been storytelling on this land, manifesting in different practices across Native nations. Before the Contemporary Native Theater Movement arose in the 1960-70s, performances or plays written by Native peoples manifested in unique ways in each era and community.

The Native Theater Movement began in urban Indian communities alongside a series of Indigenous rights protests, and shifts in policy toward the return of Native rights and freedoms during the civil rights era. Native theater has never lost its sense of deep political engagement because Native people are still being affected by Indian policy, every day.  

In the last decade mainstream theaters have begun welcoming Native plays on their stages. However, most mainstream theater practice remains embedded with the tropes of centuries of non-Native representation of Native peoples onstage.  

​​​Before American theaters were ready to produce Native plays, or understood anything about Native peoples or cultures, Shakespeare often acted as a bridge for representation to include Native peoples in theater productions. Shakespeare in the hands of Native theater makers was and is a powerful tool for asking more of contemporary theater at large.  

The biblical origins

The “curse” of Ham mythology begins with the Old Testament. The story goes: Ham sees Noah sleeping naked and tells his brothers, Shem and Japheth. His brothers then cover up Noah’s nakedness with a cloth. When Noah wakes, he blesses Shem and Japheth for covering him, but curses Ham’s son Canaan, and thus his whole lineage, to be servants of his brothers.  

King James version - Genesis 9:22-26  
22 And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without.
23 And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father's nakedness.
24 And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him.
25 And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.
26 And he said, Blessed be the Lord God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.

Canaan’s associations with Blackness, with Africa, with nations and racial categories do not exist in the Bible’s telling of the story. The initial connections with race and the categorization of people by race comes from retellings and manipulations of this story in the Talmud, medieval Islamic scholarship, and early history texts.  

The myth rears its ugly head

In the Babylonian Talmud, a collection of rabbinic writings that date back to the 6th century, racial distinctions are clearly evident with respect to the sons of Noah. In the rabbinic debates of the 2nd-5th centuries, early scholars were trying to develop an understanding of the peoples of the Earth and of the world around them. They used the only framework they had and knew: the Bible. Attempting to classify people who didn’t fit the somatic image of themselves—in particular, Black people—they rationalized this difference as being a result of the curse.  

Yaakov ven Yitzchak Ashkenazi (1550-1628), an expert in rabbinic literature, wrote (as translated by Paul Isaac Hershon), “Noah said to Ham, ‘Thy children shall be dark and black.’ These are the Ethiopians and the Negroes, which have descended from Ham, on account of the curse.”

In some translations of the Babylonian Talmud, there is an assumption or conflation that Ham was blamed for castrating his father Noah—not just seeing him naked. There are many different versions of the myth, with many different implications about what Ham “did” to Noah upon seeing him naked, from castration and mockery to rape and incest. Regardless of the interpretation, the ends are the same: Ham is no bystander, he is an active agent of sin. Compared to the biblical version, this is a radical revision.  

In a 20th century translation in Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis by Robert Graves and Raphael Patai, Noah said:

“‘Now I cannot beget the fourth son whose children I would have ordered to serve you and your brothers! Therefore it must be Canaan, your first born, whom they enslave. And since you have disabled me from doing ugly things in blackness of night, Canaan’s children shall be born ugly and black! Moreover, because you twisted your head around to see my nakedness, your grandchildren’s hair shall be twisted into kinks, and their eyes red; again because your lips jested at my misfortune, theirs shall swell; and because you neglected my nakedness, they shall go naked, and their male members shall be shamefully elongated!’ Men of this race are called Negroes, their forefather Canaan commanded them to love theft and fornication, to be banded together in hatred of their master and never to tell the truth.”

This is the seed of the story as we now know it. Ham’s curse of servitude was racialized.  

The tendrils of this implication are wildly pervasive: Blackness, as a result of this story, is a curse, meaning it is associated with sin, with evil. And to widen that scope, the connection between Blackness, sin, and nations—“These are the Ethiopians and the Negroes, which have descended from Ham, on account of the curse”—means that entire nations and communities of Black people are condemned to servitude, and to the assumption that they are, by Godly decree, inferior.    

Ham, race, and the early Islamic world

Evidence of the acceptance of the Hamitic story can be found in the work of early Muslim scholars. In Arabia in the 9th and 10th centuries, the majority of enslaved people were Black Ethiopians whose subjugation was justified because of their Blackness and the negative cultural perceptions that being Black had in Arab culture.  

The racial aspect of the Hamitic curse was adopted in Arabic literature in a manner that allowed race to become associated with slavery and lesser peoples. The so-called “Hamitic curse” was interwoven with social status and pre-existing racial prejudices to justify racial discrimination at odds with the principles of Islam.  

Various scholars such as al-Yaqʿubi and al-Tabari mention the curse of Ham in their histories and incorporate a racialized worldview, wherein the sons of Noah make up distinct racial categories or nations. In Tarikh al-Tabari, the Hamitic myth is used to classify people into good and bad races, Semites and Hamites, reinforcing not only a racial division, but a national one.  

“Nuh awoke from his sleep and learnt what had happened he cursed Kan‘an b. Ham but did not curse Ham. Of his posterity are the qibt, the Habasha, and the Hind. Kan‘an was the first of the sons of Nuh to revert to the ways of the sons of Qabil (Cain) and indulged in distractions and singing and made flutes, drums, guitars and cymbals and obeyed Satan in vain amusements. Nuh divided the earth between his sons, assigning Sam the middle of the earth…and to Ham the land of the west and the coasts (sawahil) [...]. After they had crossed the Nile of Egypt the descendants of Kush son of Ham, namely the Habasha and the Sudan, split in two groups. These were the Zaghawa, HBSH, Qaqu, Marawiyyun, Maranda, Kawkaw and Ghana”
- al-Yaʿqubi

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“Ham begat all those who are black and curly haired, while Japheth begat all those who are full-faced with small eyes, and Shem begat everyone who is handsome of face with beautiful hair. Noah prayed that the hair of Ham’s descendants would not grow beyond their ears, and wherever his descendants met the children of Shem, the latter would enslave them…. Shem begat the Arabs, Persians, and Byzantines, in all of whom there is good. Japheth begat the Turks, Slavs, Gog, and Magog, in none of whom there is good. Ham begat the Copts, Sudanese, and Berbers.”
- al-Tabari

As people of the Middle Ages were sorting out the concepts of nations and continents, arranging them by their peoples and their religions, the concerns of national division became a larger part of the ever-evolving mythology. These decisions are inconsistent among texts and authors, and frequently texts contradict themselves, evidence that this was a changing, chimera of a story.  

By defining “good” nations and “bad” nations, medieval scholars were developing religiously based rationales for racial, ethnic, and religious differences—many rooted anti-Blackness.

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al-Tabari, Abu Jaʿfar Muhammad b. Jarir. The History of Al-Tabari: Prophets and Patriarchs, vol. 2. Translated by William M. Brinner. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1986.  

al-Yaʿqubi, Abu l-ʿAbbas Ahmad b. Abi Yaʿqub. Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History. Edited by J. F. P. Hopkins and Nehemia Levtzion. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1981.  

El Hamel, Chouki. Black Morocco: A History of Slavery, Race, and Islam. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2013.  

Graves, Robert, and Raphael Patai. Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964.  

Yitzchak Ashkenazi, Yaakov ben. Tzeénah Ureénah: “Go Ye and See”: A Rabbinical Commentary on Genesis. Translated by Paul Isaac Hershon. London, England: Hodder and Stoughton, 1885.

This assignment asks you to investigate online databases in search of BIPOC who lived in England between 1500-1700. Imtiaz Habib notes in Black Lives in the English Archives that some of the difficulties he encountered when looking for Black lives were beginning to be somewhat alleviated by increased digitization of catalogs and archives themselves. With the celebrations of the abolition of the British slave trade in 2007 and the later interest in what is known as the Windrush generation, UK scholars and activists have been working for decades to make Black history more accessible online. You will be able to take advantage of their labors to help us think in concrete terms what it meant to live as a person of color in early modern England. The most centralized database is British History Online, but you might come across other local databases or databases devoted to slave trading.

This is an exploratory assignment, which means you will be assessed on the thoughtfulness of your approach and the clarity of your write-up rather than on the specific outcome. Your paper should include answers to the questions marked with an asterisk. Given that some of the questions are about process, I advise you to take notes during or immediately after your search sessions.

Who is the person you found? What can you tell about this person from the document you discovered? What did you want to know that you couldn’t find out/What context did you need for greater understanding? What in the archive or in your search caught your attention? How did the document connect to other things you read or experienced this semester?

What search term/s did you try? What archive did you use? Did you look at other sources besides your original document (for example, a map of early modern London, a scholarly book on the Black presence)?

What problem or challenges did you encounter in your search? (For example, when I was looking for examples of Black history digital archives, the most promising sites had broken or inactive links and it was a big letdown.) Was there a challenge you felt you didn’t overcome? How did that make you feel? Was there an obstacle that surprised you? Why?

Where can the "document" (or record of the document) be found? Is the original archival document available for download? Is there a transcription?

What did you learn from your search? (This might be covered in earlier questions.) What perspective did this exercise give you on Habib's book?

The Doctrine of Discovery is one of the oldest and continuously cited legal precedents in the Western Hemisphere. First issued as a series of papal bulls to settle disputes between two Iberian Catholic colonial powers, Spain and Portugal, the doctrine rippled across colonial law for centuries. This doctrine offered the patina of legal legitimacy from the Catholic Church to all colonial projects across both Africa and the Americas. Colonial conquest became inextricably linked to the expansion of Christianity across the world. Equating Christianity with civilization meant that peoples indigenous to a place that did not practice Christianity were not recognized as civilized and had no right to title over their lands. 

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“Merciless Beauty” is a poem written in a late 14th-century English that may or may not be Chaucer’s but is highly comparable to Chaucer’s usage. Several of its features make it an excellent poem to begin a Chaucer class that is reading the texts in Middle English. By asking students to translate the poem, they develop their skills for reading Middle English and become intimate with the formal structure of the rondel. Once they've gained an intimacy with the poem and feel comfortable with its language, the untimely juxtaposition is introduced: the film The Prison in 12 Landscapes. In this moment, students are asked to make connections between the poem and the film and their formal examinations of time, incarceration, and repetition.

Why Henry V?

Henry V is a great play to teach when asking students to think about nationalism, ethnocentrism, xenophobia, and immigration. On the surface, the play extols a sense of English identity and community—that is, it is looking to England’s history and inviting Shakespeare’s audience to partake in the organizing of such a community.

Despite all the jingoism, though, the play is giving this sense of nationalism quite a bit of side-eye and ultimately allows us to look at the English themselves through the perspective of the stranger.

Legitimacy and linguistic identity

Given the urgency of anti-immigrant sentiments and legislation in the U.S., the idea of who is deemed a legitimate insider is a significant entry point for American students to discussions about national identity, race, and belonging. Notions of legitimacy in the U.S. are often tethered to linguistic identity, so the play’s attention to language is critical for these conversations.

While the sentiment behind Henry’s “band of brothers” (4.3.60) speech espouses kinship for all men fighting for England, all men are clearly not alike. The Scot Jamy, the Irish MacMorris, and the Welsh Fluellen (who all fight for the English) represent cultural otherness. We can home in on the importance of this representation of otherness when we encourage students to interrogate how the language and cultural identity of the stranger impacts the construction of Henry and of English identity.

When Henry famously historicizes the English victory at Agincourt by connecting it to Saint Crispin’s Day, for example, Fluellen reminds him of Edward the Black Prince’s victory in France and the role of the Welsh in that victory. Fluellen explains how this victory was and continues to be commemorated:

"If your majesties is remembered of it, the Welshmen did good service in a garden where leeks did grow, wearing leeks in their Monmouth caps, which your majesty know to this hour is an honorable badge of service. And I do believe your majesty takes no scorn to wear the leeks upon Saint Tavy’s day" (4.7.89-94).

Fluellen is referring to the practice of commemorating the feast of Saint David (the patron saint of Wales), and it was observed not only by the character Henry V in the play but also by Shakespeare’s own Queen Elizabeth I. It is important because Fluellen infuses Henry’s historicizing moment with alternative, equally significant, and much older cultural tradition. In short, the cultural identity of the foreigner here precedes and supersedes Henry’s historicizing moment.

Fluellen then takes it a step further in connecting Henry with the Welsh tradition. Responding to the leek-wearing custom, Henry says, “I wear it for a memorable honour, / For I am Welsh, you know, good countryman” (4.7.95-96). Henry’s Welsh connection is tenuous (he was the Prince of Wales), but Fluellen responds in kind: “All the water in the Wye cannot wash your majesty’s Welsh plood out of your pody” (4.7.97-98). There is no desire to assimilate with the English here, but instead a clear desire on the part of Fluellen to honor Wales.

Leeks against ethnocentrism

To attend to this understanding of the dominant culture’s identity in Henry V is to encourage our students to scrutinize structures that govern notions of national identity and legitimacy. The play deploys Fluellen’s confidence in his cultural identity to speak to England’s own emerging self-perception, and it questions that ethnocentrism. When, in an offstage moment the knavish Englishman Pistol ridicules Fluellen and his cultural practices and foreignness in a public sphere, for example, Fluellen demands to be treated with dignity. He confronts Pistol, force-feeds him a leek, beats him, and says, “If you can mock a leek, you can eat a leek” (5.1.34). The bloody scene is so striking that the English Gower says to Fluellen, “Enough, captain, you have astonished him” (5.1.35).

While the violence is sobering, Gower sides with the foreigner standing up for himself by saying to Pistol after Fluellen departs:

Will you mock at an ancient tradition, begun upon an honourable valour, and worn as a memorable trophy of predeceased valour, and dare not avouch in your deeds any of your words? I have seen you gleeking and galling at this gentleman twice or thrice. You thought because he could not speak English in the native garb he could not therefore handle an English cudgel. You find it otherwise, and henceforth let a Welsh correction teach you a good English condition (5.1.70-80).

To be certain, Fluellen has been teaching his English audience all along—reminding Henry that history is larger than the moment, and demonstrating that respect breeds respect, and indignity engenders violence. Gower calls for respect of the stranger’s cultural traditions and personhood and also for dignified behavior on the part of the host society. The critical moment allows our students to see how language discrepancies—as Fluellen employs a broken English—and cultural identity, issues vividly relevant in our present moment, infuse a play that imagines an inclusive brotherhood while demonstrating how that inclusion is always just out of reach for the stranger.

A neighbor worthy of respect

The many markers of identity in this play—patron saints, religious affinities, language, customs, and cultural traditions—are all facets of nation building and concurrent markers of divisiveness. However, when one looks past difference, when one listens beyond the broken English, when one sees Fluellen not as an object shedding light on Henry’s identity, but rather as someone distinctly valuable and decisively self-possessed, one will recognize in him the many foreigners, and the many immigrants, who demand to be, and who should be, treated with dignity.

To treat others with dignity, it seems, renders one a neighbor worthy of respect. In the U.S., and in our present moment, we have yet to accomplish this.

The Global Turn in Medieval Exhibitions: Diversifying Medieval Studies through Curatorial Practice and Critical Race Art History | Watch the full talk

Presented by Andrea Myers Achi at Education: A RaceB4Race Symposium in 2021

Andrea Myers Achi discusses the role of museum exhibitions in introducing audiences to a global medieval world. She argues that exhibitions often offer people their first encounter with the premodern and that multifaceted perspectives on West and North Africa and Western Asia should expand the geographic boundaries of medieval and Byzantine art. Exhibition curation can function as a pipeline to diversify the field, introducing prospective students to medieval materials and helping them build their CVs, but there needs to be cross-institutional collaboration. Within an analysis of two late Roman artifacts depicting Black people exhibited in Western-focused galleries, she discusses the challenges of rethinking museum labels that assume a normative white race.