Discover — Throughlines

Discover Throughlines

Throughlines offers a variety of freely accessible teaching materials to help you incorporate premodern critical race studies into your teaching. Specifically designed for use in higher education, the materials on Throughlines include lectures, pedagogical approaches, exemplar syllabi, classroom discussion models, an annotated bibliography and more.

Throughlines will continue to grow over time. So be sure to check back regularly or join our mailing list to stay in the loop on content related to your research and teaching.

How to use Throughlines

Video

Seeta Chaganti

Chaucer, Virgil, and erasure poetry

Teaching Chaucer's House of Fame alongside contemporary Nisga'a poet Jordan Abel's The Place of Scraps allows students to consider the issues of source, adaptation, colonization, and race in our literary lineage.

The House of Fame’s strangeness is largely explained by the density and even compulsivity of its allusions and citational practices. This poem, a dream vision in which a poet finds himself in a hall of images of famous people from the past, asks the reader to think about the power dynamics involved between authors who influence each other. While it is clear that Chaucer is dealing with his own anxiety of influence, my approach to teaching this text is to focus on community and solidarity as part of the analysis of power dynamics in this question of “influence.” In one portion of the poem, there is a retelling of the Dido and Aeneas story from Virgil’s Aeneid. Before working on this section of House of Fame, I assign students to read a prose translation of the sections of Book IV of the Aeneid that correspond to Chaucer’s retelling. This comparative reading helps students see where and how Chaucer is changing the story. What’s really interesting about this, though, is that as the figure who initiates that crucial theme, Dido is both a racialized character, from Lebanon, and a settler herself, in Carthage. Many complex questions emerge in this specific narrative phenomenon that combines adaptation of source with what we might call an adaptation of race. One dilemma that students tend to bring up in this comparative exercise is the question of what the representation of Chaucer’s Dido does to the sense of power we might associate with her in Virgil’s tale. The register of Virgil’s Dido, angry and imperious, contrasts with the domestic and intimate language of Chaucer’s Dido, and her plaintive use of “swete herte.” Does this mean that Chaucer is defusing Dido of a strength that Virgil recognized in her? Or are we simply looking at two different kinds of distortions? To turn this discussion toward something that advances a project of liberatory politics, I create another untimely juxtaposition. I set this section of the House of Fame alongside the erasure poetry of Jordan Abel, a Canadian Indigenous poet. Jordan Abel is a contemporary Nisga’a poet from British Columbia. His first book, The Place of Scraps employs the technique of erasure to adapt a 20th century anthropological work, Totem Poles, by the white Ottowan settler Marius Barbeau. This is a very complicated shift, with a lot of potentially misaligning compass points – Chaucer and Abel’s positionality vastly differs. Abel’s poems speak to the issues of source, adaptation, colonization, race, specifically by needing to erase what are essentially the colonizing erasures of Barbeau. Chaucer does not need to concern himself with erasure in the same way – he is trying to enter a lineage he feels comfortable with and wants to be a part of. I assign my students a project in which they redact Chaucer’s House of Fame to create their own poetry. Making this exercise a creative one allows for some space to mark the complexity between the two texts. This exercise helps students think through adaptation, influence, erasure, and distortion.

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.

Medieval

Literature

Video

Seeta Chaganti

"Merciless Beauty" and carceral justice

“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. Reading the poem alongside the film The Prison in 12 Landscapes, students are asked to make connections between the poem and the film and their formal examinations of time, incarceration, and repetition.

“Merciless Beauty” is a poem written in a late-fourteenth-century English that may or may not be Chaucer’s but is highly comparable to Chaucer’s usage. So several of its features make it an excellent poem to begin a Chaucer class that is reading the texts in Middle English. I usually begin the class by discussing Chaucerian English through a short history of the language presentation, asking students to consider the number of seemingly redundant terms we have with Germanic and Romance roots, how they have or have not diverged from each other, and what this means for someone who is writing in the fourteenth century as this language actively and visibly changes and exhibits new loanwords and forms. Because of the rondel form, many lines repeat, so that once students have translated a line or couplet once, they don’t have to do it again. This kind of in-depth translation exercise gives students the sense that we are learning the material in an incredibly grounded way, so that when I introduce them to my “untimely juxtaposition” method, they don’t feel disoriented. I ask students to note the poem’s use of a metaphoric prison and that this metaphor is repeated because of the rondel’s form. This conversation is then where I introduce the film “The Prison in 12 Landscapes” as an untimely juxtaposition. This exercise has meaning and context for me because I have been studying and practicing abolitionist aims for several years. It is the central way I engage in what we tend to call anti-racism. For medievalists new to this topic, there is a lot of ground to cover to educate yourself and it can feel daunting. However, it’s worth keeping in mind that many of your students might already be well-versed in prison and police abolition and the militant strategies connected to it. For example, my students will often bring up texts like Angela Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete? that they’ve studied in other courses as we begin this juxtapositional dialogue. “The Prison in 12 Landscapes” consists of short vignettes all showing, in extremely different ways, the social and economic impact of the carceral system on individuals, families, and communities—particularly upon Black, brown, and Indigenous people. Like “Merciless Beauty,” it is consciously and tightly formal, and its form foregrounds a meditation on the passage of time and the different ways that this is experienced. Both artifacts will often lead students toward thinking about the apparent inescapability of their forms. I have some priorities in our discussions that I bring up in the classroom. The first is how the formalist examination of time and repetition across the two works can help students think through the condition of being trapped within an institution or an ideology, and what would have to happen to escape it. The other is the meaning or ethics of using prison as a metaphor for something else. To what extent is the film creating metaphors to describe prison, vs. Using the prison itself as a metaphor for other things? How does that complicate using the prison as a metaphor for love, as in “Merciless Beauty”? This untimely juxtaposition, like all of them, leads teachers and students toward an important confrontation with the possibilities of talking about things vs. doing things, language and action.

“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.

Medieval

Literature

Video

Seeta Chaganti

Juxtaposing Chaucer

Seeta Chaganti offers an introduction to her "untimely juxtaposition" method, which 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.

Most medievalists teaching and researching now were trained in a scholarly environment of new historicism, which means that we generally try to set Chaucer in his immediate historical context to understand his work. It's been a little less common over the last couple of decades to invite students to read Chaucer's poetry in terms of the 21st century’s most pressing issues. The texts I teach in my Chaucer classes work really well with this other kind of contextualization in the now. They thus offer students the opportunity to encounter Chaucer in some unexpected ways, while also naturalizing an approach that might at first seem uncomfortably counterintuitive, especially relative to the historicist or psychological methods with which students have often been trained to approach literature. In the nearly 25 years I've been teaching, I’ve noticed a population shift in my Chaucer classes from a mostly white classroom to an extremely diverse classroom. In responding to this shift, I take seriously what students of color say about being safe and welcome in my Chaucer class. Black students, Indigenous students, undocumented students, Palestinian students, and many others, face not only discursive, but actual racial violence on the daily. Classrooms that can forestall at least that violence in academic discourse are crucial. These students have motivated me to introduce curricular changes while remaining true to my longstanding convictions as a teacher. One of these convictions is acknowledging the limits of representational and identity politics as a means of studying Chaucer. In other words, I don't think you have to teach an entirely identity-politics-based class to show respect and care for your students’ identities. Indeed, I would often reject approaches that try to parse the Wife of Bath as a feminist character, or not a feminist character—or approaches that construe medieval women characters in general as marginalized voices, whether or not through the filter of a male author, or approaches that render their identities as "relatable" to students. Because in reality, many of the women who write or are written about in this period often overwhelmingly benefited from enormous resources and did enormous hierarchical violence in their societies, intentionally or not. So, I often question pedagogical approaches that see medieval women, medieval white women, as marginalized or intersectional. Or in other words, readings that stop with the consideration of their identities for their own sake, as traditional psychological and historicist readings can sometimes corner us into doing. Instead, it’s critical for me as a scholar and a teacher to underscore the importance of solidarity, and collective rather than individual struggle. My method for teaching Chaucer involves what I call untimely juxtaposition, placing Chaucer’s texts next to modern artifacts like film, visual art, and contemporary literature to consider how that juxtaposition can lead us toward liberatory insight. 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. I want to share with you three examples of how I employ the untimely juxtaposition method in my Chaucer class, using “Merciless Beauty” to think through the carceral system and abolitionist frameworks and using The House of Fame to talk about free expression, colonization, and the memorialization of the past.

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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Medieval

Literature

Video

Adam Miyashiro

Comparative epics: Teaching The Epic of Sunjata

The Sunjata is just one of many cultural touchstones from a highly sophisticated and capacious literary and arts culture that remains understudied in most medieval literature classrooms.

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The usual pairing of The Song of Roland and The Poem of the Cid is so commonplace in the study of medieval European literature that the introduction of another foundational narrative might seem superfluous. However, reading the West African “epic” of Sunjata Keita alongside these two European narratives provides a truly comparative understanding of foundational literary narratives. Only recently begun to be read in the context of European medieval literature, The Epic of Sunjata has mainly been studied in African studies disciplines and the discipline of comparative literature. The Epic of Sunjata is an epic narrative told by Griots, Mande-speaking oral poets who carried the long tradition of oral storytelling in West Africa. The story of Sunjata Keita, 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. However, there is no single authoritative source for this story, and many variations exist, numbering close to 40 different episodes. In most versions, however, Sunjata conquers Sumanguru, often associated with Soumaoro Kante, the historical ruler of the Sosso people in the 13th century. He was the ruler over the remnants of the Ghana Empire, and likely conquered the surrounding areas before being defeated by Sunjata at the Battle of Kirina in 1235. Composed of a number of smaller Mandinka kingdoms, Sunjata’s coalition would form the basis of the Mali Empire, codified in the so-called “Mande Charter,” or the Kouroukan Fouga, the official constitution created by an assembly of nobles to establish the new empire in Mali. The Mande Charter predates—by hundreds of years—all declarations of human rights in European or western modernity. As a foundational epic for many of the Mande-speaking cultures in West Africa, passed down through griots/griottes, the text of The Epic of Sunjata is a living, breathing story. Unlike the European epics like Roland and The Cid, The Epic of Sunjata was never concretized into an early textual form after centuries of oral composition. Rather The Sunjata resembles the earlier Alexander Romance, whose fictionalized story was translated into many different traditions, and adapted to whatever culture was telling the story. Reading this text is one of the most rewarding for my students, many of whom come from African-American or Afro-Caribbean communities in Southern New Jersey. It opens up all kinds of avenues to teaching against the white supremacist myths that are still so prevalent in the American historical imagination. By bringing together the study of the story of Sunjata, with the material history of the premodern Mali Empire’s rich intellectual, literary, and artistic cultures, my students are stunned and thrilled to learn about this culture that had such a profound influence in the world that was largely overlooked and ignored in the educational system of the United States. The Empire of Mali that Sunjata Keita founded became one of the wealthiest, most erudite, and intellectually advanced cultures of 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 13th century, in Arabic but also in local languages like Soninke, Bambara, Songhay, and Fula. In 1807, the Fula Muslim imam and scholar Omar ibn Said was enslaved in North Carolina, and his Arabic language manuscripts, written in secret, are still preserved at the Library of Congress. West African literacy—in Arabic, in Mande languages, and other West African languages like Wolof, Keren, and Tuareg languages—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, many of which were brought from al-Andalus beginning in the 13th century. The Epic of Sunjata teaches the basic tenets of Comparative Literature: broadening out the “literary” to encompass orality, performance, material culture, as well as writing, to think about literature beyond linguistic boundaries—between Mande languages and French (and English translation)—and national boundaries, across Mali, Guinea, Senegal, and others. In this way, I challenge the Eurocentricity of medieval studies and literary studies, by bringing to the forefront the historical legacies and influences of West African peoples, who are continually ignored. I hope this helps other medievalists broaden their view of “the Atlantic world” to encompass West Africa, and see the African continent as integral to the development of literature and culture in Europe.

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 El 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.

Medieval

Literature

Video

Adam Miyashiro

Comparative epics: Teaching El Cantar de Mio Cid

A mainstay of medieval literature classrooms, El Cantar de Mio Cid expands upon crusades rhetoric in the multicultural and multilingual Iberian Peninsula.

La Cantar de Mio Cid is often taught alongside La Chanson de Roland as a study in Crusades epics. However, when I teach La Cantar de Mio Cid, I want my students to see the connections between the poems and their Arab influences. Medieval Iberia is the most common location for medievalists to look toward a multicultural, multilinguistic, and multi-confessional society in the premodern period. From the invasion of Visigothic Hispania by the Arab armies in the years 711 to 1492, the Arabs made an incalculable impact in every way on the Spanish nation that later emerged, but also through all of Europe. The Iberian Peninsula 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. It was also a time when Arab-Muslim cultures were firmly placed and had an indelible influence on the intellectual development of western Europe. Greek philosophy, preserved in Arabic translations, along with the development of poetic forms, such as the muwashahat and zajal, profoundly changed European thinking and the literary arts. Papermaking, silk spinning, and other Asian innovations such as the Hindu-Arabic numeral system, were first encountered in Iberia among the Arab intellectuals and their European counterparts. The 13th-century heroic narrative, La Poema de Mio Cid, was set in this culturally diverse landscape in the late 11th century. The titular character, Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, or “The Cid,” from the Arabic honorific al-Sayyid, was a historical figure of the late 11th century, 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 until after his exile in 1081, when he moved to work for the emir of Zaragoza, Yusuf al-Mu'taman ibn Hud, who ruled between 1081-1085. In this kingdom, The Cid Rodrigo Diaz commanded both Muslim and Christian soldiers, some of whom were from the Kingdom of Mali and Morocco. In 1094, The Cid conquered the coastal city of Valencia, whose Muslim ruler, Yahya al-Qadir, was his tributary. As ruler of Valencia, which would revert to Almoravid rule after his death in 1099, The Cid continued to carry out attacks against the Almoravid Berbers outside of Valencia. The epic poem, La Cantar de Mio Cid, or La Poema de Mio Cid, was written down more than a hundred years after his death, and is an incomplete text, starting in media res. Unlike The Song of Roland, The Cid’s exploits have a distinctly picaresque quality to the storytelling style. One early episode has The Cid swindling two figures assumed to be Jewish moneylenders, Raquel and Vidas, with a trunk full of sand he convinces them is a tribute payment for safekeeping, while they lend him money. Despite the comparisons with The Song of Roland of a medieval knight fighting Muslims, there is little in common between the two texts’ renderings of Arab Muslim identity. First, The Cid is married with two daughters, entrusting them to his Arab Muslim friend and ally, Abengalbon, a fictional character who may represent a number of The Cid’s Muslim allies. Secondly, money is an important feature in this story: The Cid constantly worries about paying his soldiers, and the poet evaluates the worth of goods in monetary units. This may be because the Iberian Peninsula in the middle of the 13th century was part of the large and vibrant western Mediterranean maritime trade routes. Spanish participation in Mediterranean trade—with North Africa, Southern Europe, and the Byzantine East—reached its peak in the middle of the 13th century, with many Iberian Christian rulers establishing diplomatic ties with the Sultan of Egypt and various polities in the Maghreb. Students reading this text would be able to see The Poem of the Cid in a wider context of the medieval Mediterranean and see how, for example, realpolitik may function between the Middle Ages and now. Looking at how The Cid’s motivations are not necessarily religious or ideological, but rather practical and economic, shows how medieval Iberian cultural and religious interactions differed from those presented in The Song of Roland, where any relationship with Muslims is considered traitorous. The early 20th-century scholarship by Ramón Menéndez Pidal about The Song of the Cid solidified The Cid into the canon of medieval Castilian literature and 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. Understanding the reception history of La Poema de Mio Cid in the 20th and 21st centuries can teach students how a literary text from the 13th century can play a role in shaping and developing national imaginaries and identities—many times skewing the text towards exclusionary goals, which would be anachronistic and erroneous. Medieval Iberian cultures, in their plurality, give us vibrant stories about historical figures which help liberate the text from parochial and narrow perspectives.

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?

Medieval

Literature

Video

Adam Miyashiro

Comparative epics: Teaching La Chanson de Roland

Contextualizing the political and racializing mission of La Chanson de Roland offers students a perspective on how epics shaped
—and were shaped by—the values of their historical moment.

Comparative epics: Teaching La Chanson de Roland Adam Miyashiro When I teach La Chanson de Roland—The Song of Roland—I need my students to understand the historical context surrounding the poem and its many iterations. La Chanson de Roland is a 12th-century verse narrative written in Old French that recounts a version of a historical event, the Battle of Roncevaux on August 15, 778. The poem 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. The actual events of that fateful day in 778 were much different, according to Charlemagne’s personal biographer, Einhard. Upon Charlemagne’s return to his capital in Aix-la-Chappelle, the rearguard of his army is attacked, not by Muslims, but by Gascons, who were Christian. In Einhard’s recounting, the Basques attack swiftly and disperse widely, so Charlemagne could not locate them. Einhard’s contemporary account records that Roland dies in the attack with a few others. It is neither heroic nor dramatic, and the description of the battle and its aftermath lacks any details. Despite this, the story is transformed over the course of the next four centuries 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.” Characters like Olivier and Roland’s traitorous uncle, Ganelon, are added, and the king Marsile and his queen are mirrored by Charlemagne as his court. What I want my students to ask is: why was this poem so radically revised from its history? Beginning in 1095, the pope Urban II issued a call for a Crusade at the Council of Clermont, upon meeting a delegation sent by the Byzantine emperor Alexios I Comnenus His call to crusade invoked Muslim atrocities of various sorts, proto-national and ancestral pride and supremacy, and the merger of religion and violence with Christian crusader martyrdom. The Song of Roland was composed and written down almost immediately after the First Crusade. In the poem, Roland is portrayed as a holy warrior for Christianity who is carried up 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 crusader Christianity that imbued the propagandistic rhetoric of crusading. Likewise, Ganelon, who privately liaises between Charlemagne and Marsile, is portrayed as a traitor, who faces a trial by battle and loses, resulting in the execution of his entire family. In addition, the captured pagan queen, Bramimonde, is forced to convert to Christianity by the end of the poem. The literary enmity between Charlemagne and the Arab-Muslim world couldn’t have been more historically inaccurate. Charlemagne, in fact, had a good relationship with the Abbasid dynasty, under the caliph Harun al-Rashid, to whom he sent gifts and delegations, which were reciprocated. In the year 801, an Asian elephant was sent to Charlemagne and this is maybe why the most identifiable object that symbolizes Roland’s status is in fact an oliphant, a horn made from elephant ivory. This object is inherently African and has close ties to the Arab-Muslim and Byzantine world. The Song of Roland, which symbolizes so closely a European and Christian identity in the modern era, has at its core an African object. Further, the text was promoted to the level of a national epic during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, while simultaneously colonizing Algeria. In 1870, France passed the Cremieux Decree, which granted French citizenship to Algerian Jews, but not Algerian Muslims. This decree helped to instigate the 1871 Kabyle Revolt, where over a third of Algeria’s population rose up against the French colonial settlers. It was at this time, during the German siege of Paris in December 1870, that 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.” At its core, The Song of Roland was a product of both European nationalist and colonial aspirations.

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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Medieval

Literature

Video

Adam Miyashiro

Teaching the medieval epic

Teaching The Epic of Sunjata alongside La Chanson de Roland and El Poema de Mio Cid helps students decenter Euorpe and gain a deeper understanding of the complexities of the medieval world.

Often, when the epic poem is taught, the discussion around transmission from oral to textual sources creates a hard line between the two, as though the act of writing preserves these stories in amber. However, especially in the case of the medieval epic, many of these narratives were produced and reproduced, told and written again and again. La Chanson de Roland, La Poema de Mio Cid, and The Epic of Sunjata are three narratives that were rewritten and retold in this way, morphing and adapting throughout the 12th and 13th centuries. I teach these three poems together because they can help us rethink and reimagine the literary and cultural relationship between Africa and Europe. Whereas many medievalists have studied The Song of Roland and The Poem of the Cid as somewhat complementary texts along traditional lines of Crusades and the so-called “Reconquista,” the inclusion of The Sunjata recasts these two European texts, troubling the oral/textual split, the idea of colonialism and nationalism, and the genealogies of narrative restructuring. Rather than simply adding The Sunjata alongside a French and Castilian Spanish text, reading these texts together challenges Eurocentric and Orientalist narratives by thinking about the Western Atlantic as a wider region—one that provincializes Europe. By reading these texts against the Eurocentric grain, I ask students 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. These epics, side-by-side, showcase the shifting and politically charged changes in representations of Africans, Muslims, and Arabs in the European consciousness, the consequences of which live with us still to this day. For example, the Mande peoples are represented in The Sunjata as a sophisticated early political organized empire, challenging modern American stereotypes of West African peoples as “tribal,” “primitive,” “illiterate,” or otherwise “uncivilized.” In this comparative reading, students are confronted with evolving and conflicting depictions of Muslims and Arabs. In The Song of Roland, Muslims are depicted as Black as well as being viewed as heretical and monstrous. Whereas in The Cid, a Muslim character becomes an ally to the Cid and is entrusted with the safety of his wife and daughters. These texts collectively interrogate unquestioned assumptions in my own students that have been internalized through popular media and educational messaging. Reading and thinking through these texts together can help explain how race-making and colonialism shape not just our literary canon, but our world today.

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 El Poema de Mio Cid, to offer students greater insight into a rich, multicultural, and multilinguistic medieval past.

Medieval

Literature

Essay

Adam Miyashiro

Contextualizing The Epic of Sunjata

The Epic of Sunjata is a living, evolving text, still performed by griots and griottes. Taught alongside more traditional European epics, The Sunjata offers students a wider lens with which to look at the medieval world.

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 epics 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 Qur’an 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.

Medieval

Literature

Essay

Adam Miyashiro

La Chanson de Roland and white supremacist medievalisms

La Chanson de Roland as a national epic was a product of both European nationalist and colonial aspirations. It's important for students to understand how the poem and its histories can reiterate Eurocentric white supremacist values if not properly contextualized.

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.

Medieval

Literature

Essay

Adam Miyashiro

Representations of Muslims in El Poema de Mio Cid

El Poema de Mio Cid, when taught contrapuntally with La Chanson de Roland and The Epic of Sunjata, reveals complex and layered representations of Muslims in the medieval Iberian Peninsula.

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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 El 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.

Medieval

Literature

Video

Scott Manning Stevens

The Doctrine of Discovery

A brief history of how the Doctrine of Discovery became legal precedent for the seizure of Native lands across the world.

Ask the average educated person what the Doctrine of Discovery is or how it applies to life in the United States, and you will likely get a baffled reply. But this early modern doctrine, emanating from a series of papal pronouncements at the dawn of the European Age of Exploration, stands behind many colonial establishments and retains a disturbing legal legacy in the United States. The doctrine came about because of competition between the two Iberian leaders in maritime navigation: Spain and Portugal. As the two kingdoms sent ships out into the Atlantic during the 15th century, new claims and conquests were made by each kingdom. Spain would invade and conquer the Canary Islands, while Portugal took both Madeira and the Azores. Eventually, both countries would begin to look south toward the African Atlantic coast, and this would set the stage for possible colonial conflicts regarding access to, and hegemony over, coastal regions of Africa. In 1452 and 1455 Pope Nicholas V issued Papal Bulls granting Portugal the right to claim lands along the West African coast and to enslave non-Christian Africans. Such rulings by the pope gave legitimacy to Portugal’s early colonial ventures and were duly noted by officials in Spain. When Spanish ships reached the Western Hemisphere in 1492, vast new regions seemed open to colonialism, but with lands being claimed on behalf of the two Iberian powers, conflict was inevitable. It was with this in mind that court diplomats turned to the Vatican to arbitrate on the issue of potential colonial footholds and the right to foreign riches. The result was Pope Alexander VI’s Papal Bull, which established the infamous Line of Demarcation, dividing the globe on an east/west axis between Spain and Portugal. A year later the Treaty of Tordesillas would adjust that line in favor of the Portuguese which allowed for their claims over the region that would become Brazil. As a result of these rulings and treaties, countless millions of humans, and their respective societies and nations, were said to be rightfully under the control of two Christian kingdoms on the Iberian Peninsula. The Church’s rationale for such a grand gesture was that these declarations would ultimately thwart paganism and extend the sway of Christendom in the West, amidst the rise of the Ottoman Empire in the East. Collectively the rights granted by these Papal Bulls to Christian monarchs became known as the Doctrine of Discovery. The doctrine offered the patina of legality to European conquests in the Americas and elsewhere and allowed for the forced conversion of whole populations of non-Christians or, should they resist, their conquest and enslavement. Before the Papal Bulls articulating the Doctrine Discovery as a justification for the Christian colonization of foreign lands, the de facto right of conquest was all that was needed to justify the forceful acquisition of territory or even whole realms by a stronger power. The Norman Conquest was the result of a dynastic dispute between aristocratic houses over competing claims on the English throne—as such, the Norman victors required no elaborate justification. Successive Norman rulers attempted further conquests of the British Isles by invading the neighboring realms of Wales, Ireland, and Scotland—all with mixed success. The Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland began roughly one hundred years after the Norman Conquest in 1169, but now reputedly armed with a papal justification known as the Laudabiliter, a bull issued by Pope Adrian IV, the only English pope. English church leaders in Rome at the time had described the Irish as a “barbaric and impious people” thus in need of English oversight and reform. With the blessing of an English pope, thus began the long and painful struggle of the Irish for self-rule. English hegemony over Ireland was piecemeal at best throughout most of the Medieval period, but the region known as the Pale, surrounding Dublin provided England with a land base from which they would attempt to expand. Other portions of Ireland were under the control of Anglo-Irish lords loyal to the English king, though frequently the sites of uprisings and rebellions. It was in this atmosphere that the Tudors launched their invasion of Ireland in 1536. The island was to remain in a state of conflict on and off until 1603, and it was in this period that we see English notions of settler colonial policy come into being. Rather than simply defeating their Irish enemies, the English pursued a policy of ‘planting’ English and Scottish émigrés on Irish lands. During the Desmond Rebellions of Elizabeth I’s reign, the English practiced a scorched-earth policy all in the name of pacifying and civilizing the native Irish. One English participant in the colonization of Ireland was the poet Edmund Spenser, who was also in Ireland during the rebellions. His 1596 political pamphlet, A View of the Present State of Ireland, has become infamous for its advocacy of colonial brutality in the suppression of Irish sovereignty. The pamphlet, in the form of a humanist dialog, describes the supposed barbarity of the Irish and the need to extinguish their laws, customs, religion, and language. Spenser sets out to portray the Irish as a brutish people in need of civilizing colonial rule, even as he advocates starving them to death to lessen their numbers, forcing them to learn English in order to assimilate them to their conquerors’ culture, and converting them to the Protestant faith. The dual projects of civilizing and salvation would become numbingly familiar justifications for most European colonial ventures. In 1496 an English expedition under the authority of King Henry VII sent Giovanni Cabota (a.k.a. John Cabot) to explore the northeast coast of North America and claim it on behalf of England, so long as it did not interfere with Spanish or Portuguese claims. The letters of patent issued by the crown follow the precedent set by the Doctrine of Discovery and allowed England to establish its claims to Newfoundland and the fishing banks of what is now Atlantic Canada. Once established, this means of justifying the seizure of lands and the enslavement of peoples in distant territories was deployed by various European nations whether or not they had a Papal Bull specifically giving them permission to do so. To be Christian and to be civilized were taken to be the same thing, and so all societies that lacked one quality were seen as lacking both—thus justifying the imposition of colonial rule. Even after the Protestant Reformation, when many kingdoms denied papal authority outright, the guiding principles underpinning the Doctrine of Discovery continued to be invoked by Protestant powers in their own colonial ventures. Thus, the English, the Dutch, and the Swedes, though all thoroughly Protestant by the 17th century, still invoked their status as Christian and civilized as having preemptive authority over the polities they would encounter in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. This authority, claimed by European powers, meant that peoples indigenous to a place that did not practice Christianity, and thus were not recognized as civilized, had no right to title over their lands. It was simply acknowledged that they occupied them, but in the face of ‘true religion’ and the civilization of which it was a part, Native nations had no inherent rights. Thus, complex societies, such as the Aztecs or Incas, could be utterly destroyed in the name of Christian civilization. Likewise, because Christianity was co-opted as a solely European faith, it became enmeshed with the roots of white supremacy. Once racialized, the Doctrine of Discovery was even more toxic to those deemed racial others. In fact, by 1726 the Anglo-Irish author, Jonathan Swift, satirized the template of European colonialism in the conclusion of Gulliver’s Travels, writing: Here commences a new dominion acquired with a title by divine right. Ships are sent with the first opportunity; the natives driven out or destroyed; their princes tortured to discover their gold; a free license given to all acts of inhumanity and lust, the earth reeking with the blood of its inhabitants: and this execrable crew of butchers, employed in so pious an expedition, is a modern colony, sent to convert and civilize an idolatrous and barbarous people! The legacy of the Doctrine lies in the fact that many people have internalized its presumptions without any knowledge of the Doctrine’s existence. American school children are not asked to consider whether Europeans had the right to take the lands of others; it is presumed, perhaps passively, that Europe’s civilizing mission was its justification. The Doctrine of Discovery also found its way into American law at the highest levels. In “Johnson v. McIntosh,” a landmark case that came before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1823, the court was asked to adjudicate a case where both parties claimed ownership of the same piece of land. Johnson’s party claimed to have purchased it directly from the Piankeshaw Nation, while the McIntosh party claimed to have received it from a government land patent. The court in essence had to resolve who had rightful title to the land and therefore could sell it. Chief Justice John Marshall’s ruling was unprecedented in U.S. law because he drew on the Doctrine of Discovery to deny aboriginal title to lands in the United States. By Marshall’s peculiar logic, the various colonial powers inherited the authority of the Doctrine and could enforce it when they made a ‘discovery.’ He reasoned that the English were the true discoverers of what became the United States, and therefore when the United States became independent it inherited this right from England. This piece of juridical legerdemain has remained one of the cornerstones of Federal Indian Law ever since. 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. What many people might presume is an obscure piece of Renaissance era religious doctrine—the Doctrine of Discovery—infiltrated the United States’ legal system and exercises judicial authority to this day.

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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Early Modern

Literature

Video

Scott Manning Stevens

Indigenous sovereignty

Scott Manning Stevens dives 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.

The topic of Indigenous peoples' sovereignty can be challenging for people unaware of the political status of the first inhabitants of the United States, let alone Indigenous peoples in other settler colonial nations. It is especially worth pointing out that sovereignty, as the term comes to us in English from the Western tradition, is neither the term nor the concept used by most Native peoples. What Native peoples demand is the right to self-determination and the right to govern their own lands. This gets conflated with sovereignty but is not quite the same thing. And so, while Shakespeare's The Tempest is not primarily a play about the early stages of British imperialism, no one can hear Caliban's impassioned complaint about his dispossession from his home and not think of all those Indigenous persons who felt similar outrage at losing sovereignty over their homelands and themselves: “This island's mine by Sycorax, my mother, which thou takest from me.” That line rings in the ears of Indigenous people around the world, particularly the world of the former British Empire upon which the sun was said never to set. Contemporary productions have relocated the place-setting from an unknown island in the Mediterranean to Haida Gwaii on the Pacific coast of Canada, the Caribbean, Huron-Wendake in Quebec, Mohegan territory in Connecticut, and the Torres Straits Islands of Australia—all of which speaks to how the play resonates among colonized and/or formally enslaved peoples. That does not mean Indigenous sovereignty is always the focus of reinterpretations. Both Aimé Césaire and George Lamming reworked the play from a Black Caribbean perspective that focused on Caliban’s enslaved subaltern status. But for Indigenous peoples, it is more the loss of control over our own lands and freedom than it is about forced labor, and that brings us to the issue of land. Prospero presumes to have peremptory rights over the island because of his belief in his own superiority, both in learning and actual power. The island is not the ancient homeland of Caliban. His mother was banished there, but he knows it as his birthplace and has an intimate knowledge of his environment. He also deeply regrets having shared that knowledge with Prospero. “[I] showed thee all the qualities o’ th’ isle, / The fresh springs, brine pits, barren place and fertile. / Cursed be I that did so!” Indigenous sovereignty is inexorably associated with land. Our societies flourish when we recognize that our relationship to the land is as much determined by responsibilities as it is by rights. We maintain our collective right to protect the land and all that's on it, and we do so with our custodial duties toward the environment in mind. Many Indigenous people see Caliban as a figure with intimate knowledge of his homeland: “I’ll show thee every fertile inch o’ th’ island” who has been dispossessed of it by an outsider, who takes that knowledge freely offered, and then labels Caliban “monstrous.” The Tempest is often listed as a romance, but from Caliban's perspective, it's a tragedy. For a large portion of the early modern period, the term sovereign was most often applied to the preeminent leader or ruler of a realm. It often referred to a king or a prince. When European explorers first encountered the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, following Columbus's 1492 landfall, they often projected on Native societies leadership systems based on their own experiences in Europe. That meant sachems/sanskwas or headmen/headwomen of Native societies were frequently labeled kings/queens or princes. Paramount leaders might likewise be called emperors or empresses, but in general, Europeans recognized that Native societies were organized as polities with layers of territorial leadership and social organization. Such a recognition of political organization had its limits, given the goals of European imperialism. In absence of large urban centers in most of North America, there was a presumption that Indigenous polities were a primitive version of European aristocratic realms. By the 1590s in England, Native American nations were being described as "tribes" rather than nations, which placed them below nations in the political hierarchy of the day. If a tribe was a polity among so-called barbarous races, then what was the nature of a tribe's sovereignty? We should think of sovereignty here as the authority and right to govern oneself as a people. By the early 18th century, sovereignty was a quality necessary for an independent state to be recognized. It also followed, in the course of the 18th century, that the leaders of tribes were more frequently referred to as chiefs. One might reasonably posit that when European power sought alliances with Native nations, they recognized the sovereignty of those nations and referred to their leaders as kings. Conversely, when a colonial power wished to downplay the sovereign independence of an Indigenous polity, they referred to them as tribes, and their leaders as chiefs. For Indigenous peoples of the continental US, the history of their nations' sovereignty evolved with the shifting power dynamics of the expansion of the United States after its independence from Great Britain. Treaties made between colonial British authorities, representing the Crown, could obviously be abrogated by the new nation, but the US continued to pursue a policy of treaty making with Indigenous nations well into the 19th century. A US treaty carries the weight of a nation-to-nation agreement in which the sovereignty of both parties is recognized. Thus, the 1794 Canandaigua Treaty between the United States and the Six Nations or Haudenosaunee Confederacy represents a recognition of Haudenosaunee sovereignty. This treaty is still recognized by both parties and is in effect to this day. However, the United States does not recognize the Haudenosaunee Confederacy as an independent state. The complexity of Indigenous sovereignty within the continental United States goes back to a landmark US Supreme Court decision in 1831. In the case of Cherokee Nation versus the State of Georgia, adjudicated by the Marshall Court, a precedent-setting decision was made on the nature of Native American sovereignty. Justice Marshall's opinion made clear that he believed that Native nations are neither foreign states in relation to the United States, nor independent of it. Rather, he infamously designated them “domestic dependent nations.” By retaining the term nations, he left open the possibility for a prescribed type of sovereignty at best, but he did not preclude Indigenous sovereignty altogether. Instead, he placed it under the hegemony of the federal government, but outside of the state governments' authority. As dependent nations, Native governments retain a nation-to-nation relationship with the federal government, but are not held to be independent states. Marshall portrayed the United States as having the duties of a guardian to its ward. But such paternalism would seem a de facto denial of a Native nation's ability to exercise sovereignty in any real way. Advocates of Native sovereignty have argued that it must be practiced as a means of retaining the power to self-govern. Just as Americans accept that cities govern themselves within self-governing states that in turn exist within the United States, they must accept that Native sovereignty exists within, but separate from, other forms of sovereignty. The limitations of that sovereignty are constantly being tested by Native nations, pushing back against state and federal policies that would interfere with their self-rule. The situation in the continental United States is the result of government policies and judicial rulings such as Marshall's 1831 decision, but each settler colonial nation state that resulted from European settler colonialism will reflect the unique colonial history of that place. For instance, in Australia, Britain did not make treaties with any of the aboriginal nations, but rather pursued a policy of conquest and occupation, which ignored their existence as a people with inherent rights. By claiming the land fell under the category of terra nullius (nobody’s land), Britain in effect held that there was no such thing as Native title, and that, as a civilized nation, the United Kingdom had the right to claim and colonize Australia. Whereas in Aotearoa (a.k.a. New Zealand), the settlers engaged in diplomacy with the Maori (as well as warfare), and together produced the Treaty of Waitangi / Te Tiriti (1848), a still deeply contested bi-lingual agreement which remains a cornerstone of the respective notions of sovereignty between settlers and Maori citizens to this day. If we see Prospero as a stand-in for a proto-imperial colonial authority, it is in the paternalism, which he uses to justify his rule over Caliban and over the island. He cannot see Caliban's bond with the land from anything but an instrumentalist perspective. He wants Caliban's knowledge to better exploit the environment, not to adapt and care for it. Indigenous sovereignty over oneself and one's homeland is very different from the sovereignty understood by Prospero and later colonists. There's no standard way that so-called Indigenous sovereignty has been configured among settler colonial nations. Native nations continue to hold on to deep historical notions of self-governance and self-determination, even as they evolved to meet the global privileging of Westphalian international “sovereignty” definitions.

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.

Early Modern

Literature

Video

Scott Manning Stevens

Race and indigeneity

When teaching about indigeneity and the rise of that term in the early modern period, we must aim for a level of disambiguation concerning the term "race."

At times it feels like we are living through a crisis of terminology. Contemporary society is deeply divided by labels, names, and categories—all as they relate to identity. In the United States the terms denoting race, ethnicity, and indigeneity remain simultaneously foundational to our identities and yet often in flux. In order to understand how these terms are conflated, we must first recognize that the concept of “race” has a long and complex history of its own, with its meaning shifting over the centuries. Likewise, the category of indigeneity has evolved alongside it and come into prominence over the latter part of the 20th century in larger discussions of Native identity, primarily in relation to those regions also colonized by Europeans in the early modern period and beyond. When teaching about indigeneity and the rise of that term in the early modern period, we must aim for a level of disambiguation concerning the term “race.” Scholars such as Margo Hendricks, Ivan Hannaford, and Kim F. Hall have contributed much to our understanding of how the concept of race developed within Western culture from the late medieval period, into early modernity, and beyond to the present. The etymological roots of the term are based in the Old French and Italian words race and razza, respectively, which indicated groups of people connected by common descent. Notions of kinship prevailed over attention to outward appearance or phenotype. As contacts with distant geographical locales became more frequent in the 15th and 16th centuries with increased European trans-oceanic navigation and trade, hitherto unknown populations encountered one another more frequently. Eventually the term race was more often attached to differences of physiognomy and skin color than mere ethnicity, which was associated with a region, language, and religion more so than physical attributes. Race took on a pseudoscientific valence during the 19th century, which drew on the hierarchized taxonomies of the 18th century and added biological components to them. It was also during the early modern period that the term “indigenous” entered the English language. From the earliest uses of the term, it is associated with the relationship of a people to a place. The Indigenous population of a region has an identity uniquely connected to the land with an autochthonous quality of having originated from the place they inhabit rather than having moved to it. Terms such as “native” and “aboriginal” are synonyms and have sometimes been used interchangeably when referring to members of a particular society original to a region or locale. But even in the 17th century, when one the first recorded uses of the term “indigenous” appears in print, in Sir Thomas Browne’s Psuedodoxia Epidemica (1646), it is already enmeshed in a discourse on race. In Browne’s essay, “On the Blackness of Negroes,” he compares the skin color of tropical Africans with that of what he calls “the indigenous or proper natives of America” living at the same tropical longitude. As the author speculates on the differences in skin color among humanity, he also frames both Native Americans and Africans as distinct others from Europeans. An earlier occurrence of a variant term, “Indigenae, or people bredde upon that very soil,” occurs in the writings of Richard Hakluyt where, in discussing the native peoples of the Arctic regions of Russia and Scandinavia, the Samoyed and the Samí respectively, he links indigeneity with barbarism or the primitive. The term seems never to have been used with a neutral value attached to it, but rather placed within a hierarchy of human societies at the level of the primitive. While the contemporary uses of the term “indigenous” in cultural studies and elsewhere continue to refer to the original inhabitants of a specific place, it has taken on a more narrowly defined valiance within such fields as critical Indigenous studies. This owes much to the articulation of the notion of settler colonialism in the late 1990s and early 2000’s. Scholars such as Patrick Wolfe did much to distinguish between the extractive colonialism, practiced by several European nations in Africa, Asia, and the Americas, and the settler colonialism they inflicted on large portions of the Americas, Australia, and parts of Oceania. Unlike extractive colonialism, settler colonialism meant to eliminate the Indigenous population and replace it with European settlers on a permanent basis. In such regions the term Indigenous (capital I) has come to be the shorthand for indicating not merely the aboriginal population of a region, but those peoples who are native to a place and experience an on-going settler colonial existence, wherein they have become a disenfranchised minority in their own homelands. This is of course true of the Indigenous peoples of Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, New Zealand, portions of Oceania, the United States, and Uruguay. At the same time mestizo and mixed-race majority populations add yet another layer of complexity to the concept of indigeneity in Latin America. While often conflated, the terms Indigenous and race are not interchangeable; the Samí of northern Scandinavia, though Caucasian in contemporary racial parlance, are recognized as an Indigenous people. In my classes, I ask students to contemplate the fact that in each settler colonial nation state the Indigenous population was once 100% of the population before the coming of Europeans and their descendants, and today they are often less than 10% of the general populations in those same countries. Like critical race theory, which attends to the socially constructed underpinnings of racism, critical Indigenous studies acknowledges the impact of such concepts as race while also using Indigenous ways of knowing to challenge the hegemony of Western epistemology. Typical of critical Indigenous studies is a turn to the authority of collective knowledge from our communities and based in our own epistemes. Indigenous peoples were made racially Other by European notions of physiognomy and culture even as the perpetuation of settler colonialism continues to support the hierarchical structures that deny Indigenous legitimacy politically and intellectually. We should look back to the early modern period, and the rise of European global imperialism, as the instantiation of notions of white supremacy and the delegitimization of Indigenous knowledge and sovereignty.

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.

Early Modern

Literature

Reading list

Scott Manning Stevens

Reading the Doctrine of Discovery

Reading suggestions for a deeper dive into the centuries of jurisprudence for stealing Native lands set by an obscure early modern religious decree.

Essay

Scott Manning Stevens

The legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery

How an obscure piece of Renaissance era religious doctrine—the Doctrine of Discovery—infiltrated the United States’ legal system and justifies the seizure of Native lands to this day.

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.

Works cited

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

Early Modern

Literature

Essay

Scott Manning Stevens

The resources of sovereignty on Caliban’s island

Close reading opportunities to engage students in discussions of sovereignty and self-determination in Shakespeare's The Tempest.

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.

Early Modern

Literature

Essay

Scott Manning Stevens

The false conflation of indigeneity and race

It is imperative that, while teaching about indigeneity in our classrooms, we dissect how the term came to be and how it is often conflated with race. Using texts by Richard Hakluyt and Sir Thomas Browne help to demonstrate the conflation to students.

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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Early Modern

Literature

Video

Madeline Sayet

A brief history of Indian policy

A bit of the history leading up to the start of the contemporary Native theater movement. While not a comprehensive history, this is a small ideological dip into some of the major cultural shifts and moments in policy.

When I begin talks about the Indigenizing Shakespeare Movement, I'm often confronted by the need to give listeners access to a bit of the history leading up to the start of the contemporary Native theater movement. Unfortunately, I can't go through the history of each of the more than 570 federally recognized tribal nations, not to mention the state-recognized ones right now: that would take weeks. What I'll give you is a small ideological dip into some of the major cultural shifts and movements in policy helpful for general context. Each Native nation is a sovereign nation. That means they have their own rules, languages, and cultural protocols. There's no collective Native American culture. Rather, there are hundreds, each with their own distinct arts and history. When you go to a bookstore, if your town still has a bookstore, and see Shakespeare everywhere and no Native plays, that's not an accident. It's a result of hundreds of years of policy that centers one voice while actively eliminating others. In fact, Native arts were illegal for swaths of US history. In the early 1900s it was illegal for Native people to perform their own traditional dances, while one of the few ways for them to make a living was to perform fake versions of Native dances in white-created Wild West shows. For hundreds of years, non-Natives had control over any public artistic representation of Native peoples. It wasn't until the 1970s that Native people could legally practice their art, religions, and culture without fear. Let's look at a few major moments that show the ways in which US policy was dedicated to taking land resources and the ability to practice art, ceremony, and culture from Native people. Erasure of matriarchal leadership. Did you know that many Native nations had matriarchal leadership structures? When the settlers arrived in the 1600s, they couldn't comprehend the idea that women were in charge, so they didn't write down what the women were doing. Once the US was created, Native women were stripped of many of the rights they had had in their own nations. Indian watching. The theater has a history of being weaponized against Native people. The press made much of Pocahontas's attendance at Ben Jonson's The Vision of Delight in London in 1617. Articles were written noting the reactions of Native guests at performances throughout the 1700s and 1800s, including Cherokee dignitaries at a 1752 performance of Othello in Virginia. As Miles P. Grier argues, these writings were intended to represent Native peoples as a "racial type, distinguished by an inability to grasp or wield the mediations of urban capitalist modernity." Redface performance. In 1829, the hit play Metamora; or, The Last of the Wampanoags, popularized redface on Broadway. That same year, Andrew Jackson was elected President, and then the next, he signed the genocidal Indian Removal Act, commonly associated with the Trail of Tears, into law. At this devastating moment in history, the major commercial entertainment was white actors performing stereotypes of Native people in redface, proclaiming they were the last of their race and bolstering a belief in white supremacy. Residential schools. Assimilationist missionary schools began with colonization, but in the 1870s, the government built schools to more systematically assimilate Native youth. Stealing them from their homes, their hair was cut, they were beaten for speaking their languages, their living conditions were terrible. Many children died. Made to take English names, one student at Carlisle Indian School in 1881 took the name Will Shakespeare. Outlawing Native religious practices. In 1883, the Religious Crimes Code made practicing Native dance and ceremony illegal and would remain so for nearly a century. If this brief summary feels long, keep in mind that this is merely a fraction of the injustices and harms done to Native peoples in the United States. Termination era. Beginning in the 1950s, the U.S. sought to terminate many tribal nations, denying their sovereignty and separating Native communities from each other and their traditional land. In 1956, the Indian Relocation Act offered Natives job training to encourage them to leave reservations and move to cities, where the incentives promised did not pan out. This separation of Native peoples from their communities and lands allowed the government to break up reservation trust plans. In 1958, the Indian Adoption Project separated thousands of native children from their families, placing them in non-native homes. Red power. Resistance to these relocation, termination, and school policies led to the Red Power Movement in the 1960s, alongside other civil rights movements. Native peoples wanted self-determination. In 1968, the American Indian Movement AIM was founded. That same year, the Indian Civil Rights Act was passed. In 1969, a 19-month occupation of Alcatraz Island led by Richard Oakes and urban Indian college students argued that the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie required that the now unused land be given back to the native people. This drew enormous attention to the struggles of Native peoples. Shortly after in New York City, in the early 1970s, the Native American Theater Ensemble and Spiderwoman Theater, a feminist Native theater company, were founded, launching the contemporary Native theater movement. Self-determination. In 1973, the standoff at Wounded Knee drew national attention to Native issues, and in 1975, the Indian Self-Determination Act gave Native nations authority to administer their own programs and services within their nations. Finally, in 1978, the Indian Religious Freedom Act restored the rights for Native people to practice their ceremonies. And the Indian Child Welfare Act means children can no longer be stolen from Native communities and adopted out. It's important to remember that the Constitution of the United States acknowledges the inherent sovereignty of all Native nations. Every decision made that strips Native nations of these rights is unconstitutional.

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.

Early Modern

Literature

Video

Madeline Sayet

Indigenizing Shakespeare Movement

Many Native artists have found ways to reimagine Shakespeare, bridging communities to illustrate the importance of Indigenous language revitalization, Native art, and storytelling.

When you think of Shakespeare in America, most people's first mental picture isn't of Native peoples. Why not? If you think of Shakespeare in any other country, your mind draws an image that combines the peoples of that land and Shakespeare. But here, Native peoples have historically been erased from the theater narrative, while Shakespeare has been touted as its epitome. British culture is mythologized as our theatrical heritage, and Shakespeare is the most produced playwright on these shores. His plays are widely taught in US schools, and for hundreds of years, Native students have been required to engage with Shakespeare. Meanwhile, the American government made Native arts illegal for long periods of history. None of this is by accident, of course. Shakespeare's work is used as a part of colonizing systems on these lands. Native people have as much right to interpret Shakespeare through their cultures as anyone else. Putting so much value on a single artist's work is dangerous when we could have many voices that represent all of us in the circle. 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 arts, and storytelling. Here are a few examples: 1923. Amidst the residential school system that was taking Native children from their homes and forcing them to attend boarding schools where they were beaten for speaking their own languages, there is a story of possibility. At Haskell Indian School in 1923, two Native teachers, Ella Deloria and Ruth Muskrat Bronson put on a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream with the students. Esther Horn, who played Hermia in that production, wrote that her teachers “had the unique ability to weave Native culture into the non-native curriculum, empowering students and their cultures.” In 2004, Tlingit Macbeth, produced by Perseverance Theater and Sealaska Heritage in Juneau, was directed by a non-native, but had an all-Alaskan Native cast, artists, and translators, weaving Tlingit language, song, dance, and philosophy into the production. It was spoken in both Tlingit and English, with the English being used for moments in which characters behaved more ambitiously and individualistically instead of focusing on community. Since then, Perseverance has produced many Tlingit plays by Tlingit playwrights with Native directors and designers. In 2012, grappling with language loss and reclamation in New York City, I directed my first production, set in my people's Northeastern homelands, centered on the post-colonial reimagining: What if Caliban could get his language back? This production of The Tempest began with a prologue in Mohegan spoken by Ariel, setting up the play as a story of something that happened a long time ago, with the settlers leaving at the end of the play, leaving us our world, and the need to heal it. Unlike Tlingit, which still has elders who are fluent speakers, my Mohegan nation lost our last fluent speaker in the early 1900s, so our language revitalization project could not yet translate a whole play, but beginning with a Mohegan prologue allowed me to imagine an alternative world without colonizers here, a world in which our language was used once more. At the same time in 2012, the only American representation in the World Shakespeare Festival in London was a production performed by white actors in redface. Major funding was still going toward white performers embodying stereotypes of Native peoples, instead of going toward Native artists. In 2013, while touring Shakespeare to Native villages in Alaska, the Fairbanks Shakespeare Theater was asked, "why aren't you telling our stories?" So, with Gwich'in artist Allan Hayton (who also worked on Tlingit Macbeth), they co-conceived a Gwich'in production of King Lear, Lear Kehkwaii, re-imagining Lear in 1800s Alaska. He played the role of Lear as an elder, concerned about what's being passed down to the next generation. In 2015, they also did a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, which included Gwich’in, Tlingit, and Yupik languages. In 2015, the Instead of Redface Movement launched in response to several major redface productions, which was still at that point, the dominant representation of Native people in American stages. Native Voices at the Autry in LA produced Randy Reinholz's adaptation of Measure for Measure, Off the Rails, set in the Indian Boarding School system, examining the horrors and corruption of those spaces. In 2017, Off the Rails became the first Native play produced at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, opening a path for more Native plays to be produced in the future seasons. From 2014-2016, the Native Shakespeare ensemble at Amerinda (American Indian Artists, Inc.) created two urban Indian productions. First, a production of Macbeth, where the witches represented colonialism. The play also questioned what it meant for Macbeth to drop the eagle feather -- failing the good leadership Duncan wanted to pass down. The second was The Winter's Tale, examining intergenerationality, Indigenous futurism, matriarchy, extraction, and the role of the seasons. In 2019 and 2021, the South Dakota Shakespeare Festival had Native directors lead their productions of Midsummer and Othello, actively recruiting native actors from many nations who also led workshops in the community. Director Tara Moses adapted Othello to exist in a world post-full Indigenous sovereignty and full Black liberation, but where the lingering effects of colorism in society still had to be grappled with. In 2022, Iāsona Kaper, a graduate student in the University of Hawaii Manoa's graduate program in Hawaiian theater, adapted Twelfth Night into Hawaiian and also created a new work that explores the intersection between Julius Caesar and Hawaii's political landscape during the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom. 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. There's more to these stories when they are put in conversation with ours. Often, when Native-centered re-imaginings of Shakespeare's plays are produced and performed, it makes theaters want to learn more about Native stories, and they're more likely to produce Native plays in future seasons. Applying Indigenous philosophies to Shakespeare's works has changed the future of theater and made space for a wider spectrum of Native theater across the nation. In performance today, what's most important is not what the text meant hundreds of years ago, but what it means to the communities who interact with it now.

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.

Early Modern

Performance

Reading list

Madeline Sayet

Indigenous Shakespeares

Selected readings to contextualize Shakespeare and indigeneity in your classroom.

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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Early Modern

Literature

Essay

Madeline Sayet

Shakespeare and the history of Indian policy in the United States

It is important when teaching Shakespeare in America to acknowledge the colonial legacy that brought his texts to this land.

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.

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.

Early Modern

Literature

Video

Chouki El Hamel

The Hamitic myth as a political tool

Politics and myths like the curse of Ham are natural allies in creating an ideology and moral justification for discrimination, enslavement, and colonial oppression.

Politics and myths like the curse of Ham are natural allies in creating an ideology and moral justification for discrimination, enslavement, and colonial oppression. The Hamitic myth was used and misused all the time. It traveled from the Middle East, because a lot of scholars have been translated in Spain from Arabic into different languages. So, these ideas were copied in the west. It is not actually a surprise that one of the first texts that talks about slavery in Africa came with the famous Prince of Portugal, Prince Henri the Navigator. He's basically the first enslaver from the European perspective. The first nation to go to Africa and enslave black people is basically Portugal. Prince Henri the Navigator was part of it. The question of slavery, the enslavement of Africans, was a state affair. Prince Henri the Navigator had auctions of slaves that he auctioned in his own country. One writer who was in his service, Gomes Eannes de Azurara, wrote a book to basically glorify his king. And in this book, he mentions the Hamitic myth. He says that actually the Blacks are like the Moors. And the Moors means Muslims in this context. But the only reason that they're slaves is because of the curse. It’s a clear connection. The story is actually much bigger. It’s so silly, so misleading, so bad, that I don't know why it is written in some books. We can go to Napoleon Bonaparte and his invasion of Egypt. Before he invaded Egypt, he had to educate himself about the region. One of the books he read was by Volney, with descriptions of Syria and Egypt. And in this book, Volney says that “I was surprised that the civilization of Egypt was Black.” African Black. There were scientists that Napoleon took with him to investigate this, the grandeur of Egypt, to see why ancient Egypt was so amazing in its achievement. These scholars came up with 23 volumes of descriptions of Egypt, called Description de l'Égypte. They try to understand the population of Egypt. They couldn't call them black. Why? Because they could not comprehend why people of black descent, who are used as slaves, basically as animals in the plantations—but here, we are seeing this civilization—built by black people? How could that be? So they came up with something crazy, and they said, well, this is built by the Hamite, but these Hamite are not black, they're white. So this is actually where now the Black Hamites were reversed to become white. Basically the people were Middle Eastern, and they traveled to the African continent. They traveled to a foreign continent, and they civilized it. Wherever you find civilization, it means that the Hamite is the white Hamite. It is vital to talk about race in the past, not just because it's a part of our history and we need to understand it: there are injustices committed against these people. Talking about the past is the point: it is still concealed in social relations that there were these injustices. Talking about the past is the starting point of healing. We must recognize that race and racism is so embedded within our social systems and so ingrained within the epistemological construct. It is not easy to dismantle. We must find ways to talk about its formation.

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.

Ancient

History

Video

Chouki El Hamel

What is the "curse" of Ham?

The curse of Ham myth is rooted in some of the nascent formations of race and racism. This story—its revisions and retellings—continues to shape a set of beliefs about the inferiority of Black people, which persists in our world today.

The only thing that the Bible says is that, when Noah was drunk and then his son Ham saw him naked, Japeth and Shem covered the nakedness of their father. They were blessed because they did the right thing according to Noah. But Ham did the wrong thing, so he was cursed. But actually it's not him who was cursed, but his children: the Canaan people were cursed. The curse, for some reason, would be manifested or transferred as an act of slavery or servitude. They would be servants in the house of Japheth and Shem. That’s all there is. There’s no Blackness. There are no nations. There are no racial classifications in it at all. Scholars at the time existed in the Middle East area: in Palestine, in Iraq, and in Israel. These thinkers tried to figure out the peoples of the earth, the populations. They divide them according to the Bible, because that was the framework. And the people that don’t fit the somatic norm, the image of themselves, are different. Different, and sometimes different with the qualification that they are inferior. They thought: these people, if they're different, it's because of the curse. And Blackness was basically associated with the curse. In the Talmud, the scholars of that time talked about color. They say clearly that Ham was cursed and his children became black because of the curse, that they became degenerates. The Quran came: it has nothing about this. In the entire Quran, there is nothing about race at all, or racial divisions, or the story of Ham. These biblical stories? They're not mentioned. The verses in the Quran offer moral points. They serve some cause: something has to happen in order for the Quran to be revealed. For most of those moral points, they are not going to have a story, like the narrative in the Bible or the stories in the Talmud. When the scholars in Islam were trying to build, to establish the narrative for Islam, they drew some from the Bible, but the Bible does not say everything. In the classification of races, they had to go through Abrahamic traditions. And most of those scholars belonged to Abrahamic traditions. One of them was called Wahb Ibn Munabbih, who died around 730. He was a person of the book, probably a Jew or Christian, and he was versed in the Abrahamic traditions in classifying the races. He's the one who introduced, from the Talmudic traditions, the notion of the Hamitic myth in Islamic literature. And what he said is that Ham was once a beautiful person, and then God cursed him to become black, and his face ugly. The word ugly and the children of Ham are then associated with the people of Sudan, in Africa. Tabari, also at the beginning of the 10th century, used the Hamitic myth to classify races. He mentions that the Semites: the Arabs, the Persians and the Byzantines, are the good race. And the others, the Hamites, are not the good race. Ibn Hawqual who wrote The Geography of the Earth, also in the 10th century, mentions the Hamitic curse. Ibn Hawqual went to Morocco. He didn't go to Sub-Saharan Africa but was almost there. And he probably encountered Black people. He not only talks about children of Ham as cursed, Black, and servants of other races, but he also mentions that people of the “Black race” have no civilization and are not worth mentioning. We talk about race before race. That makes me think of Hegel. Hegel said, oh, why should you be bothered with Africa? It doesn't have any history. Egypt, yes, but Egypt is not Africa. And the North Africans are not Africans, and that Africa proper has nothing to talk about. They don't belong to human civilization. Ibn Hawqual in the 10th century already said that. And Hegel was around 1800. There are a lot of parallels, but in time they're so far away. And that proves, you know, that talk about race was well elaborated in the Middle East and North Africa long before Europe had any conception of it.

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?

Ancient

History

Video

Ruben Espinosa

Immigration and Henry V

Ruben Espinosa draws attention to how the English language and the production of English identity are troubled in Henry V and asks students to reimagine their relationship with the Bard and his legacy.

Why Shakespeare? This is the first question I pose to my students every semester. It's a deliberate move to invite them to question Shakespeare's value in our present moment and to debunk the myth that his works are somehow universal and inherently good for us. The question that follows then is not, “Why should Shakespeare matter,” but rather, “Why should Shakespeare matter to us?” Through my experience teaching at Hispanic-serving institutions, I do not try to make students appreciate Shakespeare's language for the legacy it has already left. Rather I invite them to consider how their view of Shakespeare stands to redefine the legacy he leaves in their communities. What does their apprehension of his works have to offer? The key is to allow students to understand that it is their view of Shakespeare that makes his works and words relevant. While race and racism in Shakespeare are consistent topics for class discussions, the fraught nature of linguistic identity is particularly relevant for Latinx students. In communities on the US-Mexico border, the command of the English language is often imagined to be a barometer of one's value and sense of belonging. As a Chicano living in these communities, addressing this in my Shakespeare classes is important to me. When it comes to rich discussions surrounding linguistic and cultural identity, Henry V has been an invaluable play in my teaching. Because of its explicit attention to empire building, the play offers an interesting glimpse into the way language is mobilized. I ask students to consider how the play parodies the English that Katherine, Fluellen, Jamy and MacMorris speak. These characters are objects of derision because of their broken English. Those who have an inexact command of the English language are mocked not only on Shakespeare's stage, but also in our present moment. The English have a clear idea about the way one should look and sound, and many Americans feel the same. The characters in the play, and Latinxs in the US, are so often the objects of ridicule. Outwardly, Henry V seems to be promoting ethnocentrism, but I ask students to consider how the play may be subversive. Not only does Fluellen exhibit pride in his Welsh identity, he goes so far as to steal Henry's thunder when the king claims victory at Agincourt on St. Crispin's Day. In that moment, he reminds Henry that Edward the Black Prince, "fought a most prave prattle here in France" and goes on to say, "if Your Majesty is remembered of it, the Welshman 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 leek upon St. Tavy's Day." Just as Henry attempts to memorialize that English victory, Fluellen reminds him of the Feast of St. David, the patron Saint of Wales. He establishes a longer, richer cultural history, traditions and contributions by the Welsh that existed long before the emerging English empire. It is Fluellen's confidence and pride in his cultural identity that resonates with students who so often feel overshadowed by the colonizing energies that persist in our present moment. To be clear, it is much more than Fluellen's act of calling the king's attention to Welsh history that infuses the play with contemporary cultural relevance in La Frontera. It is the everyday mockery that Fluellen endures and his response to that mockery that I find compelling. For example, Pistol publicly ridicules Fluellen for wearing the leek in his cap, honoring St. David's Day. Fluellen endures this mockery until he violently confronts Pistol. He overpowers Pistol, forces him to eat a leek, and injures him to the point of bloodshed. It's so heated that the Englishman Gower says to Fluellen, "Enough, captain, you have astonished him." After Fluellen exits, Pistol claims he will get revenge. But Gower says to him, "Go, go. You are a counterfeit, cowardly nave. Will you mock at an ancient tradition begun upon an honorable respect and worn as a memorable trophy of predeceased valor, 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." Many it seems, both in Shakespeare's world and ours, are in need of a Welsh correction. And while I do not encourage violence, we must underscore the importance of demanding dignity in the face of those who seek to devalue your worth. For young Chicanxs, this is critical. Don't abandon your cultural traditions. Don't take down your Mexican flag. Don't forget your language. When I teach Shakespeare, I don't aim to have students gain an appreciation for, or an understanding of his language, only so that they can feel more legitimate in the eyes of others. I bring to the table the long, tired tool of the colonizer, so that my students can unearth therein a Shakespeare of their own, one filled with possibilities and opportunities to speak back and demand dignity in whatever language they find fit.

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.

Early Modern

Literature

RaceB4Race Highlight

Margo Hendricks

What is premodern critical race studies?

Margo Hendricks offers her insights into 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.

MARGO HENDRICKS: Okay, I have permission to do this. [LAUGHTER] Y’all thought I was joking? [PLAYS SHORT CLIP OF “CALIFORNIA LOVE” BY 2PAC FT. DR. DRE] All right. Michael’s never going to invite me back to the Folger! [LAUGHTER] First of all, I want to thank all of you for being here. I’m a little nervous, because it’s been a while since I gave a talk, and the last one I did—and I have no pockets, and please, somebody, let’s start really seriously giving women pockets—the last time I gave a talk, it was supposed to be my farewell to Shakespeare studies. It was a rough time. I did not care for the direction that I saw the field going, and I’m one of those individuals, if I don’t like something, I say it, and then I disappear. Unfortunately, there were certain people who didn’t allow the disappearance. This talk is called “Coloring the Past, Rewriting Our Future: RaceB4Race.” For anyone who doesn’t know me, you will quickly discover I have no filters. Well, maybe one or two left. My academic career on paper has been successful, though I haven’t written or published an academic article in years, which makes me either uninvested or an ancestor. Because I write romance novels, I’m going with the latter. Consider me your ancestor. However, before I claim ancestral privilege, I want to share. Who I am in the academy falls squarely on the shoulders of the following people, and this is in no particular order, so: Kim Hall, Arthur Little, Ayanna Thompson, Joyce Green MacDonald, Francesca Royster, Elder Jones, Anthony Barthelemy, Imtiaz Habib, Patricia Parker, Geraldine Heng, Peter Fryer, Peter Stallybrass, Hayden White, Harry Berger, Michael Warren, Don Wayne, Karl Marx, Raymond Williams, Christopher Hill, Perry Anderson, Stuart Hall, Terence Hawkes, and, most of all, Zeola Culpepper Jones, my great-grandmother whose father was born enslaved. She was not. So, you can either blame them or sing their accolades for the fact that I’m standing here. I much prefer you do the latter. In other words, cite, cite, cite. In the Beginning Was the Word, and the Word was Race In the only essay I will unapologetically go, “Damn, that was good,” I wrote: Somehow, giving our silent mestizo the voice [and the “silent mestizo,” if you don’t recall the essay, which is Midsummer Night’s Dream “Obscured by Dream,“ was the Indian boy]—Somehow, giving our silent mestizo the voice of another mestizo, rather than that of an academic like myself, seems fitting. The words of this half-Scottish/half-Irish changeling stand as a vivid reminder that it is in the “antique fables,” the “fairy toys” produced in the colonizing dreams of Europeans, that the “shaping fantasies” of modern imperialism began. These words are a reminder that it will be the mestizos—the racialized descendants of those who framed the lexicon and practices of modern imperialism—who, in dealing with it, will write the final epilogue to the shaping fantasy of race. This essay followed upon the heels of Women, Race, and Writing in the Early Modern Period. Of this book, I’m inordinately proud. It is a reflection of what I wanted to achieve as an early modern Shakespeare studies colonizer. The book was never intended solely for literary dialogue. Its purpose was to initiate conversations among and between academics working on race and gender in the early modern period. The absence of male contributors was deliberate. I believe Pat Parker and I succeeded with that book. In 1997, I organized a University of California Humanities Research Institute residential research group, entitled “Theorizing Race in Pre- and Early Modern Contexts.” This group was made up of classics, medieval, and early modern academics. Now, 20 years later, I’ve been invited to speak about historical periods, race, and bridging a divide. What I learned from the members of the residency group: There is no divide. There is, however, a problematic rupture worth exploration. For the purpose of this conversation, I’m going to refer to it as the “White settler colonizing” of “premodern critical race studies.” I’m also going to insist that we make a distinction between “premodern race studies” (PRS)—or “priss,” I can’t do this with the next acronym, so I’m sorry, I don’t have one—and “premodern critical race studies” (PCRS). PRS is the practice of approaching race studies as if “you’ve just discovered the land.” Practitioners ignore the preexisting inhabitants of the land or, if PRS scholars deign to acknowledge the land is inhabited, it’s viewed as uncultivated and must be done so properly. In this body of work, all evidence (or nearly all of the evidence) of the work done to nurture and make productive the land is ignored or briefly alluded to. In other words, the ancestry is erased. No articulation of the complex genealogy that produced premodern critical race studies exists, which in turn, drew these academic “settlers,” and I am calling them “settlers,” to premodern race. And just like capitalist “White settler colonialism,” PRS fails to acknowledge the scholarly ancestry (the genealogy) that continues to inhabit and nurture the critical process for the study of premodern race. As Patrick Wolfe cogently reminds us, White “settler colonialism destroys to replace.” It is not an invasion, so much as it is a structural event, driven by “the logic of elimination.” Much of the theoretical and analytical critiques that form anti-settler colonialism are framed around indigeneity, which admittedly complicates the centrality of the notion of anti-Blackness being the center of “race” in the premodern period and what it means for premodern critical race studies. For the moment, I want to highlight—and I want to shift our gaze away from anti-Blackness—and I want to highlight why I link PRS to White settler colonialism and why it needs to go. White Settler Colonizing in Premodern Race Studies I want to suggest, I want to declare, “White settler colonialist” thinking is integral to premodern race studies. Why? Because “Whiteness” is centralized in PRS as the privileged narrative creep. PRS relegates its critical race studies’ ancestry to a citational entry, buried in a lengthy footnote, surrounded by scholarly Whiteness. This creeping Whiteness mediates the narrative by insisting on the sanctity of White-centric ideologies, genres, and, of course, the privilege of engagement: who gets cited, who doesn’t. Using this creep, anyone can wear the mantle of premodern race studies. What this individual fails to see in such practices is the ways PRS intersects with the ideologies of White supremacy, and PRS’s insistence on what Lehua Yim describes as the “arrogance of assumption” embedded in the inclusive “we.” Let me just take a minute and thank Lehua, because that woman talked me through some stuff. She’s friggin’ amazing. All right? That’s all I’m going to say. I love her. This “we” envisions itself acting inclusively, engaged in the political work of furthering premodern race studies by structuring race as an event. Okay, I’m going here, Michael. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than the blurb for Stephen Greenblatt’s led edX online course, “Shakespeare’s Othello, the Moor.” I’m going dramatic on you here, okay? And this is the blurb, or part of it: In this course, we will read Shakespeare’s Othello and discuss the play from a variety of perspectives. The goal of the course is not to cover everything that has been written on Othello. Rather, it is to find a single point of entry [I’m a romance writer, and when I read that line, Lord, I was about to run with it]—Rather, it is to find a single point of entry to help us think about the play as a whole. Our entry point is storytelling. . . . From lectures filmed on-location in Venice, London, and Stratford-upon-Avon to conversations with artists, academics, and librarians at Harvard, students will have an unprecedented access to a range of resources for “unlocking” Shakespeare’s classic play. Greenblatt’s online course typifies, in my opinion, a classic, “White settler colonialist” move. Through the “logic of elimination,” this course de-centers the theoretical, historical, and analytical work done by premodern critical race theorists and scholars, none of whom, to my knowledge, are at Harvard. In effect, by focusing on the play as a matter of “storytelling” and framing it as a filmic piece—if you haven’t seen this, I can only take 45 minutes, but it was filmed—Greenblatt ensures that the spectatorial gaze is always White centered (“eyes on me”) and Othello’s sovereignty is consumed so that his race is always received as a structural event, rather than a structural process. A structural event. Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat—over and over again. There is a deep connective tissue between a resurgence of White supremacy and fascist discourse at present and the “White settler” colonizing that informs PRS, a connection which reinforces the underlying belief systems inherent in White supremacy—perhaps out of ignorance for PRS, perhaps not. In both cases, anti-Blackness sits as a peculiar litmus test for who does or who doesn’t do PRS. On the one hand, PRS sees the value of race as anti-Blackness, and therefore will turn Othello, Aaron, Caliban, and Ithamore [editor: from Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta] into an “I am woke to premodern race studies” badge to wear. The problem with such wokeness is that generally, though not always, it fails to turn inward. Rarely do these individuals ask of themselves: How does my discursively arguing for Othello’s emasculation, Ithamore and Aaron’s vengeful turns, Caliban’s de-humanization sustain a White supremist ideology? In what ways can I think about these characters independent of a gendered Whiteness, of White supremacy, of White settler colonialism? What if, instead of anti-Blackness, I consider these characters from a critical lens of anti-Whiteness? In other words, what if I disengage from my White privilege? Not asking these questions shows how deeply White settler colonialism and its logic of elimination are implicated in the direction premodern race studies has taken over the past decade or so. Those of you who heard me kind of do this riff at SAA [Shakespeare Association of America] 2011, this is a little bit more sophisticated. Don’t get me wrong, race equaling anti-Blackness is still a jumping-off point for, I think, premodern critical race studies. We need to not let go of that. However, within PRS, race has come to be used as a structuring event for gender, lineage (or blood), nation, and class without any attention to skin color or indigeneity. As an ancestor, I own my responsibility in these acts of diffusion. Some of my publications do lend themselves to this type of “race signifies ______” and you fill in the blank. However, what always stood behind my writings was the belief that colonialism/imperialism, capitalism, and White sovereignty were handfast. They were wedded. When we fall into the trap of trying to pinpoint the “actual first use of race” as a definitional or critical device, we inevitably fall into White supremacist discourse. When we make anti-Blackness the pivotal narrative, we elide the anti-Indigenous strategies woven into White supremacy’s insistence on anti-Blackness. It’s actually a very good strategy on the part of capitalism and its colonial arm. White settler colonialism happens through the mind. The enslaved Indigenous peoples removed from the continent of Africa were the first to undergo the horrors of colonization. White settler colonialism stripped the enslaved of their right to sovereignty as a capitalist experiment. An experiment that involved the destruction of a relationship to land, a relationship to community, and a relationship to the idea of sovereignty itself. By elevating the idea of individuality, a fundamental tenet of premodern and modern capitalism, and by stripping Indigenous peoples of their relationship to the means of production—you hear my anti-historical materialism work in here—their labor, and most importantly, land, White settler colonialism ensured that not only descendants of the enslaved, but all Indigenous peoples, remained locked in a capitalist experiment. This experiment is what PRS fails to see, when the storytelling narrative is about “anti-Blackness” and not about White settler colonialism and its “anti-Indigeneity.” I told you this was going to be short. Premodern Critical Race Studies Someone asked me, “What does that mean?” [LAUGH] “I don’t know.” So I thought about it. So what does PCRS look like? I have no idea, except it’s not PRS in its current iteration. I do want to suggest, as part of the larger critical race theory practice and practices, PCRS actively pursues not only the study of race in the premodern, not only the way in which periods helped to define, demarcate, tear apart, and bring together the study of race in the premodern era, but the way that outcome, the way those studies can effect a transformation of the academy and its relationship to our world. PCRS is about being a public humanist. It’s about being an activist. Unlike PRS, PCRS resists the study of race as a single, somatic event (skin color, in most cases) and insists that race be seen in terms of a socioeconomic process (colonialism). What truly distinguishes PCRS from PRS, of course, is the bidirectional gaze, the one that looks inward even as it looks outward. As bell hooks observed, “spaces of agency exist . . . wherein we can both interrogate the gaze of the Other but also look back, and at one another, naming what we see. The gaze has been and is a site of resistance for colonized . . . people globally.” I want to argue that PCRS entails, or requires, both an oppositional and an insider definitional gaze. That like the term “Indigenous,” PCRS is strategic and political. It recognizes the analytical gaze’s capacity to define the premodern as a multiethnic system of competing sovereignties. PCRS will resist PRS’s tendency to make the study of race something akin to ecotourism (a passive-aggressive form of White settler colonialism). PCRS is an intellectual, political, and public interrogation of capitalism’s capacious erasure of the sovereignty of Indigenous peoples, whether in the Americas, the Pacific islands, Asia, or the African continent. PCRS is the work of humanists/activists who recognize that the kinetic importance of their work is not strolling through Venice, posturing your PRS creds, but finding ways to destabilize the academy’s role in furthering capitalism’s use of White supremacy to sustain itself. That’s what PCRS does. PCRS also recognizes and acknowledges its genealogies. It celebrates that lineage—citation—and it uses it “to dismantle the master’s house” since the master’s tools are ineffective. I’m going to end now. This is an epilogue. Since I’m both an academic and a romance writer, I will end with something I wrote years ago. Willoughby Plantation, Barbadoes 1649 The young girl sat at the feet of her Black nurse, entranced as the woman’s aged fingers moved swiftly and certainly through the cane husks, bringing to life a past nearly forgotten. “Tell me once more, Nana. Tell me about the Negress Maria.” “In the veins of the Negress Maria flowed the blood of kings. Both she and her sister (who was called Phillipa), were taken as young girls, no older than you. Maria was perhaps fifteen. The Spaniard who stole her kept her as his mistress. Her beauty then bewitched an Englishman. It was he who taught her the secrets of love and hate. Francis Drake, the Dragon,” the old woman spat. The woman stroked the girl’s dark hair. “Drake fathered Francisco, your mother’s grandsire, on the Negress Maria then left her to die on an island with no women to care for her. None to bring the babe into the world. They lived, mother and child. They lived. Francisco was always a wild seed, not African like his mother but not English like his father. The Spanish called him Mulattos, little mules. He was of that temper. When an English ship came to the island to take on food and water, Francisco persuaded the captain to take him on. Maria’s son worked hard for the merciless White man, and when Francisco came to England he left the barbaric captain and went in search of his father. Alas, it was not to be. The Dragon was dead. With no mother, no father, no lands, Francisco was lost. Desterrado.” “Exile,” the child mouthed. “Exile,” the old woman acknowledged. “His child begat a child and that child begat a child, you, and with each generation, the Negress Maria’s blood grows thinner and Drake’s stronger. Francisco knew that those of his seed would wear the Whiteness of his father and pass among the English as one of them. Before his death, he made his daughter Elizabeth swear to remember his line. His daughter’s daughter was to be called Aphra. For the dark earth that nurtured her ancestors. Aphra, A-P-H-R-A. To remind her that, despite her Whiteness, she was of the land, of Africa, was forever mestizaje, forever desterrado.“ All right, one last comment before I walk away—well, not permanently, because Ayanna won’t let me. Y’all are the next generation. I’m handing it over to you. Don’t come looking for me to be brilliant. Don’t come looking for me to save y’all. Don’t look for me to be theoretical. I’m just going to be me. Thank you so much.

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.

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