peace love & the middle ages
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Read 5 days ago and current, but nothing has been published for 4 years.
by Cord J. Whitaker I am trying to order my thoughts today. They have been disordered by the specter of global war in a world where democracy is dying in the face of fascism, where a pandemic continues to bring humanity to its knees, and where my beloved cat has died. To carry on with everyday normalcy is a bit of a struggle. In the past, during times difficult for the world and for myself, I have…
By the Issue Editors: François-Xavier Fauvelle, Collège de France Nahir Otaño Gracia, University of New Mexico Cord J. Whitaker, Wellesley College For far too long, scholarly consensus held that race and racism were mainly Enlightenment innovations, datable to no earlier than the seventeenth century. As long ago as the early twentieth century, some scholars pushed race’s origins to the sixteenth…
by Geraldine Heng The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being…. There will always be one more thing [to explain]. — Toni Morrison, in her tribute to Chinua Achebe, 2008 An extraordinary thing happened in the field of critical race studies this fall. A 46-page book review of…
by the ITM team As members of ITM, we stand in unshakable support of the Black Lives Matter movement and the urgent demands for social justice in our present. In that spirit, we ask all of our readers to read and share this statement by Medievalists of Color in support of the uprisings that have followed the murders of George Floyd, Tony McDade, Breonna Taylor, and other victims of police…
Over the past month, the hereditary chiefs of the Wet’suwet’en Nation have opposed the construction of the Coastal GasLink pipeline on their unceded lands. Protectors have organized mass demonstrations and have blockaded ports and railways in an effort to ensure that government officials respect their rig ht to dictate whether or not the pipeline can be built on their lands. They have faced severe…
A Guest Post by Abby Ang Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE The author buying bao at the Farmers' Market Every Saturday morning in summer 2019, from 8 AM-12:30 PM, I sat twenty feet away from white supremacists selling vegetables. As the founder and lead organizer of No Space for Hate (NSFH) , an organization that seeks to counter white supremacist recruitment and organizing in the…
A Guest Post by Nahir I. Otaño Gracia Last time I wrote a public piece, I wrote about borders : the borders of my new home state, how I see borders in my research, and how we can dismantle borders. Now I would like to talk about other borders, the borders of our field. On September 19, 2017, when we felt the first winds of Hurricane Maria, I was a day shy of turning 37 weeks pregnant. My daughter…
by J J Cohen The following is the draft from a short piece Ayanna Thompson and I composed for an upcoming issue of postmedieval on Confessions. Her section of the short essay explores her nontraditional training as an early modernist and you'll have to wait for publication day to read it. My section relays the genesis of #RaceB4Race (tm) and appears below. (Notice that we had to trademark it:…
Please take a moment to read "B lacKKKShakespearean: A Call to Action for Medieval and Early Modern Studies " by Kimberly Anne Coles, Kim F. Hall, and Ayanna Thompson in the latest issue of MLA Profession. A key excerpt: Currently, overwhelmingly: White teachers teach the works of pre- and early modern periods. White scholars cite each other’s work. White directors direct the works. White…
by Helen Young and Kevin Caliendo Normal 0 false false false EN-AU X-NONE X-NONE In the past few weeks, a blog post by Professor Howard M.R. Williams has been described as reasonable in many social media feeds. The post is in many ways unoriginal and uninteresting – the internet (including the medieval studies corner of it) is already littered with examples of white liberal racism masquerading as…
