Selected annotated 
bibliography of PCRS

This bibliography represents a selection of foundational texts in the field of premodern critical race studies (PCRS). It focuses on secondary sources examining premodern race and how constructions of difference in the past continue to reverberate today. While these entries treat a variety of sociohistorical and linguistic contexts, the studies themselves covered here are all produced in English. This is a continuously expanding document created by the ACMRS Postdoctoral Research Scholars in collaboration with the RaceB4Race Executive Board.

Period
Discipline

Hendricks, Margo, and Patricia Parker, eds. Women, "Race," and Writing in the Early Modern Period. New York: Routledge, 1994.

A collection of essays investigating literary inscriptions of women and race in predominantly European contexts between the 16th and 18th centuries. The essays are grouped into four overarching themes: defining differences, male writing, female authorship, and the interrelations between European and colonial contexts. The work engages discussions in gender theory, postcolonial studies, and the studies of various European literatures.

Early Modern
Literature

Heng, Geraldine. Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.

A study that interprets medieval romance in the context of European encounters with Muslim communities through travel, crusade, and empire formation. The book offers definitions of “race” and “nation” applicable to medieval Europe and focuses on the emergence of England as a nation and the emerging vocabulary of racial classification that arose with it. Chapters focus on Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, several vernacular English romances, and The Travels of Sir John Mandeville.

Medieval
Literature

Heng, Geraldine. England and the Jews: How Religion and Violence Created the First Racial State in the West. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.

A study on the ramifications of the religious violence carried out against the Jewish diaspora in the Latin West. It argues that attacks against Jewish bodies and Jewish lives led to the creation of the first racial state in the history of the West. This book applies postcolonial and race studies in the study of religion to illustrate how medieval England became a racial state.

Medieval
Literature

Heng, Geraldine, ed. Teaching the Global Middle Ages. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2022.

The essays in this volume address pedagogy highlighting early forms of globalism during the Middle Ages. Contributions address topics across various disciplines including music, theater, religion, ecology, museums, and literature. The volume includes proposed syllabi, digital resources, classroom activities, and discussion questions.

Medieval

Heng, Geraldine. The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

A broad study on race in Europe from the 12th through the 15th centuries. The book examines racialization in various cultural and geographic contexts. It explores the relationship between race and religion, empire and colonization, enslavement, and epidermal race.

Medieval

Hsy, Jonathan. Antiracist Medievalisms: From "Yellow Peril" to Black Lives Matter. Leeds: Arc Humanities Press, 2021.

A study on modern usages of medievalisms by distinct communities of color. The book argues that through “restorying,” racialized minorities have long appropriated the medieval past to build solidarity and fight for justice. It puts materials from African American and Asian American studies in dialogue with medieval studies.

Medieval
Literature

Irigoyen-Garcia, Javier. Moors Dressed as Moors: Clothing, Social Distinction and Ethnicity in Early Modern Iberia. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017.

Investigates the intersection of clothing and racial difference in early modern Iberia. Beginning from the context of bans on Muslims wearing clothes coded as "Moorish," Irigoyen-Garcia shows how sartorial praxes and epistemologies configured the construction of a Christian ruling class in 16th and 17th century Iberia, while simultaneously becoming a key part of a racializing code for forcibly converted Muslims and their descendants (Muslim and Christian alike). The book considers conversations in the history of clothing, cultural history, public ritual, and Iberia.

Early Modern
History

Iyengar, Sujata. Shades of Difference: Mythologies of Skin Color in Early Modern England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.

A study of theories of racial difference in early modern England. The book uses the forms of the narrative, lyric, masque, and romance as evidence for understanding race-making processes. In resisting a teleological approach towards racism or racialization, this book explores discursive understandings of skin color and race through cultural ties, kinship, science, and religion. This text participates in discussions of premodern critical race studies, Blackness studies, and whiteness studies.

Early Modern
Literature

Jeong, Don Hyeon. "Simon the Tanner, Empires, and Assemblages: A New Materialist Asian American Reading of Acts 9:43." The Bible & Critical Theory 16, no. 1 (2021): 41–63.

Explores a counter-anthropocentric reading of premodern literary evidence through a passage in the New Testament. The essay situates the episode in question within the frameworks of premodern industry, with specific reference to tanning and the manufacture of leather, and contexts of colonization to challenge anthropocentric hermeneutics in readings of Biblical materials addressed to Asian American communities. The essay is situated within intellectual currents of new materialism and Biblical hermeneutics.

Ancient
Religious Studies

Junior, Nyasha. Reimagining Hagar: Blackness and Bible. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.

Investigates the conceptualization of the Biblical figure of Hagar in 19th and 20th century American literature, with specific reference to portrayals of Hagar as Black. Following an overview of premodern portrayals of Hagar in Christian, Jewish, and Muslim contexts, the book uses contemporary treatments of Hagar as a marker for broader cultural conversations about gender, race, slavery, abolition, and other themes. It engages discussions in the study of Christianity, Black history, and literary history.

Ancient
Literature

Kabir, Ananya Jahanara and Deanne Williams, eds. Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

A collection of essays engaging the intersection between medieval and postcolonial studies. The essays build upon prior approaches to the same entanglement while shifting focus onto approaches in translation, codicology, and material culture across a range of medieval European contexts. The works together participate in a range of conversations, notably on the study of Orientalism, connected histories, and postcolonial studies.

Medieval
History

Kao, Wan-Chuan. White Before Whiteness in the Late Middle Ages. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2024.

Considers premodern whiteness through the frames of fragility, precarity, and raciality. Kao argues for the instability of whiteness as a social and biopolitical category. The text explores the nuances of whiteness as understood through animate and inanimate objects and argues that whiteness should be seen as operational. This work engages in premodern critical whiteness studies, trans*studies, biopolitics, and more.

Early Modern
History

Kaplan, M. Lindsay. Figuring Racism in Medieval Christianity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Examines the intersection of Christian theology and racial difference in medieval European Christian cultures. The book presents an argument about how the Christian notion of servitus Judaeorum (Jewish servitude) prefigured Christian dominance over racialized non-Christian others and teases out the linkages between premodern and contemporary forms of Christian racism. It engages arguments in the study of religion, embodiment, and anti-Semitism.

Medieval
Religious Studies

Karamustafa, Ali Aydin. “Who Were the Türkmen of Ottoman and Safavid Lands? An Overlooked Early Modern Identity.” Der Islam (Berlin) 97, no. 2 (2020): 476–99.

Study of the term Türkmen in medieval and early modern western Asia, with special attention to how its definitions excavate the history of largely rural nomads. The article investigates how the term was used to articulate resistance to Anatolian and Iranian imperial orders after the 16th century. Of interest to students of history, Islamic studies, and Middle East studies.

Medieval
History

Karim-Cooper, Farah. “Emotions, Gesture, and Race in the Early Modern Playhouse.” In Playing and Playgoing in Early Modern England: Actor, Audience, and Performance, edited by Simon Smith and Emma Whipday, 57-76. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.

Examines the kinetic exchanges between actors and audiences in Shakespeare’s work, with specific reference to early modern performances of Othello. The essay demonstrates how bodily movements, hand gestures, and facial expressions constitute significant loci for theorizing the relationship between audience and actors. It argues for an understanding of such phenomena through the lens of critical race theory. The work engages conversations in the study of Shakespeare, Blackness, and performance studies.

Early Modern
Literature

Karim-Cooper, Farah. The Great White Bard: How to Love Shakespeare While Talking about Race. New York: Viking, 2023.

A study of racial formation in the plays of Shakespeare, inviting readers to engage critically with Shakespeare’s legacy so that it might both reveal key components of today’s racialized power structures and be purposed towards present justice. The book draws upon numerous texts—including Titus Andronicus, Antony and Cleopatra, Othello, The Merchant of Venice, and The Tempest—to consider how racial identities were created in early modern England. Accessible to general audiences and of interest to students of English, Shakespeare studies, performance studies, and beyond.

Early Modern
Literature

Kim, Dorothy ed. "Special Issue: Critical Race and the Middle Ages." Literature Compass 16, no. 9-10 (2019).

Special issue on medieval race scholarship that follows Margo Hendricks’ call for a premodern critical race scholarship that acknowledges its genealogies. The contributions examine academic practices in literature and history on the Middle Ages. They address racialization, Eurocentrism, representation, and settler colonialism.

Medieval

Kim, Dorothy and Ayanna Thompson, eds. "Special Issue: Race Before Race: Premodern Critical Race Studies." Literature Compass 18, no. 10 (2021).

This special issue stems from the inaugural RaceB4Race symposium in 2019. Employing a variety of theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical lenses, the essays in this volume critically examine how premodern critical race scholars function as activists in their fields and communities.

Literature

LaPerle, Carol Mejia, ed. Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature. Tempe: ACMRS Press, 2022.

By putting critical race studies into conversation with affect theory, this collection addresses the emotional impacts of racial formation and racist ideologies in early modern literature. The collected essays analyze racial processes as visceral, affective experiences, reading and interpreting literary tradition, religion, gender, class, sexuality, and social identity through investigations of how race feels.

Early Modern
Literature

Lalla, Barbara. Postcolonialism: Caribbean Rereading of Medieval English Discourse. Kingston: University of West Indies Press, 2008.

Interrogates the development of medieval English discourse through a theoretical framing of Caribbean literary history. The book interrogates the ways in which medieval considerations of sociopolitical ills, such as an ambience of iniquity, led to a specific poetics of medieval English as a language expressing popular struggle. The work engages multiple conversations in postcolonial theory, literary theory, vernacularization, and historiography. Lalla makes critical interventions on the theoretical plane, reversing prevalent theoretical-historiographical lenses to better adjudicate an English context from a postcolonial context.

Medieval
Literature
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