Race in/from the Middle Ages: Confronting a Double-Edged Sword by Opening up Margins of Hope
Geraldine Heng, Adam Miyashiro, and Cord Whitaker each confront the double-edged sword that traditionalists have wielded to keep race and the Middle Ages separate (and not equal): the position that, on the one side dismisses the construct of race as incompatible with scholarship on the Middle Ages and, on the flip side (just in case one would think about approaching the argument from the opposite angle) declares the Middle Ages exempt from the question of race. In her introduction to The Invention of Race titled “Beginnings: Racial Worlds, Medieval Worlds: Why This Book, and How to Read a Book on Medieval Race,” Heng revisits her “working minimum hypothesis of race” from her 2011 viral article that “animates this present volume” (3). By providing a common definition of race from which medievalists could work, Heng lays the groundwork, creating a common space from which scholars could think and write about race. (To confront a problem, after all, step one is to name/recognize it.) Building off the work of Heng–he cites her aforementioned book and her 2003 book, Empire of Magic, which her introduction frequently recalls–Miyashiro argues not whether racism pervades medieval heritage, but rather that “recent discussions about race, white supremacy, and the Middle Ages overlook the relationship between Islamophobia, settler colonialism, and Indigeneity as a category” in his Literature Compass article, “Our deeper past: Race, settler colonialism, and medieval heritage politics” (1). Whitaker, in contrast with Heng and Miyashiro’s panoramic viewpoints, launches “Race-ing the dragon: the Middle Ages, race and trippin’ into the future” from his own, unique and intimate positionality with regard to the study of race in the Middle Ages. Like Miyashiro, because they both build upon and prominently cite Heng, Whitaker ultimately argues not whether, but how, the Middle Ages and the study thereof are/were “raced.” By calling out racism and racist theories and practices what they are, Heng, Miyashiro, and Whitaker bear witness to, and refusing to whitewash, racist realities which occurred during the Middle Ages and continue to do “real” damage when wielded by extremists and denied by scholars.
Heng writes that her definition of race served first to “test the waters” then went viral “with more than 25,000 document views on Academia.edu to result in a “working hypothesis” that was “hardly controversial” (3). Thus, she entered the discourse not at the deep end but at the shallow end, leading the way for more in-depth claims/deep-dives into the subject of race in the Middle Ages, proceeding from whether to how. Heng’s definition is as follows:
Race is one of the primary names we have–a name we retain for the strategic, epistemological, and political commitments it recognizes–that is attached to a repeating tendency, of the gravest import, to demarcate human beings through differences among humans that are selectively essentialized as absolute and fundamental, in order to distribute positions and powers differentially to human groups. Race-making thus operates as specific historical occasions in which strategic essentialisms are posited and assigned through a variety of practices and pressures, so as to construct a hierarchy of peoples for differential treatment. My understanding, thus, is that race is a structural relationship for the articulation and management of human differences, rather than a substantive content (3).
This definition of race as a “primary name” “attached to a repeating tendency” enables scholars to start using the term race rather than “old terms” such as “ethnocentrism,” “xenophobia,” “premodern discriminations,” “prejudice,” and “fear of otherness and difference”; it is a “primary name,” after all, and the fact that it describes a “repeating tendency” adds to the importance of using it, not once, but over and over again.
Heng having encouraged scholars to “name” repeatedly “the impacts and consequences of certain laws, acts, practices, and institutions in the medieval period for what they are”: racist (4), Miyashiro proceeds to work with and define additional race-related terms, naming “white genocide” as a conspiracy theory to argue that “Anglo-Saxon” signifies colonial whiteness (1). Likewise defining “white supremacy” as “transnational, deeply rooted in the myths of white, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ heritage,” Miyashiro’s intersectional analysis of the categories of “settler colonialism, Islamophobia, and ‘white heritage’ politics” identifies the “mythical template upon which white identity movements are fashioned and weaponized” (9). Miyashiro is able to confront the dual-sided argument of traditionalist medieval scholars–that race is not a viable construct for the Middle Ages and that the Middle Ages precede and thus evade the question of race–at multiple axes, opening up what Whitaker refers to as a “margin of hope,” the end to his scholarly means.
As stated above, by beginning the article describing his own unique positionality with regard to race in medieval studies, Whitaker participates even more obviously than Heng and even Miyashiro in intersectional praxis. [Note: In the special issue of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Cho, Crenshaw and their co-authors further describe the importance, and exhibit the value of, the positionality (or reflexivity) statement.] While numerous disciplines–such as sociology, anthropology, education, to name a few–have adopted intersectionality, stemming from Kimberle Crenshaw’s groundbreaking work in civic justice on the discrimination faced by black women at the intersections of race and gender, not all fields within literary/cultural studies have fully adopted intersectional praxis valued in other disciplines. [Note: Crenshaw’s TED Talk, “The Urgency of Intersectionality,” calls on us to bear witness to the reality faced by black women who, in her work in civic justice, she finds “get hit by both” racism and sexism. Through their writing, Heng, Miyashiro, and Whitaker bear witness to the reality faced by marginalized groups during the Middle Ages themselves and the contemporary study thereof.] Such overt personal statements are often seen as irrelevant and unprofessional, in fields such as early modernism and eighteenth-century literary/cultural studies, so I was surprised to see it so overtly used in medieval studies, a field seen as far more rigid and traditional. In the field of education, it is considered critical that articles using intersectionality begin with or are accompanied by a positionality statement. [Note: Chaudhry’s article “Researching ‘My People,’ Researching Myself: Fragments of a Reflexive Tale” brilliantly depicts the value and application of an effective positionality statement as used in the education field and as exemplified by Whitaker in “Race-ing the dragon.” Chaudhry positions herself in relation to her research subject, and the implications of that relationship on (1) her scholarship and (2) her human subjects as she navigated subjectivity and objectivity as a researcher.] In acknowledging one’s position within the structure of domination, one can situate one’s “self” in relation to the objects of examination, providing not only transparency for the reader but also a context. This practice allows the writer and reader to occupy the same space, thus opening up a mutual vantage point. Whitaker writes that is his goal: to “open a ‘margin of hope’” to “deal with the sediment and to assist the flow” through passages blocked by race (9). Whitaker, Miyashiro and Heng confront the double-edged assertion/fallacy that race and medieval studies are incompatible by working toward a common language with which to unblock passages and thereby open a “margin of hope.”
Works Cited
Cho, Sumi, Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, and Leslie McCall. Toward a Field of Intersectionality Studies: Theory, Applications, and Praxis. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 38, no. 4, 2013, pp. 785-810.
Chaudhry, Lubna Nazir. “Researching ‘My People,’ Researching Myself: Fragments of a Reflexive Tale. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, vol. 10, no. 4, 1997, pp. 441-453.
Crenshaw, Kimberle. “The urgency of intersectionality,” 7 December 2016. Accessed: 15 January 2020.
Heng, Geraldine. “Beginnings: Racial Worlds, Medieval Worlds: Why This Book, and How to Read a Book on Medieval Race.” The Invention of Race in the Middle Ages, Cambridge University Press, 2018, pp. 1-14.
Heng, Geraldine. Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy.” Columbia University Press, 2003.
Miyashiro, Adam. “Our deeper past: Race, settler colonialism, and medieval heritage politics.” Literature Compass, vol. 16, no. 9-10, 2019, pp. 1-11.
Whitaker, Cord. “Race-ing the dragon: the Middle Ages, race and trippin’ into the future.” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, vol. 6, no. 1, 2015, pp. 3-11.
