Medieval Literature
Class Information
Instructor: Chaganti, Seeta
CRN: 42275
Time: M 12:10-3:00
Breadth: Earlier British
Focus: Method, Theory
Description
Medieval Race
In the winter of 2019, Mike Chin (Classics) and I co-organized an overload reading group on critical race theory in classical and medieval studies. The present course acknowledges the labor of the contingent faculty and graduate students who contributed to that earlier course and builds upon its insights and syllabus. Medieval Race will explore how both the constitution of medieval studies as a modern scholarly field and its epistemological and methodological protocols in the present time have shored up and solidified multiple systems of systemic racism inside and outside the field. From Southern American legal obsessions with Anglo-Saxon law, to British editing and paleographical techniques that reinforce constructs of whiteness, to the erasure of black agency in the historical scholarship of the late Middle Ages, Medieval Race will consider how dismantling one scholarly field?s practices and assumptions might intervene usefully into larger questions of social and racial justice. The reading list below provides a sense of the course's range but is not exhaustive.
Texts
Chaucer, The Book of the Duchess
Sierra Lomuto, "The Mongol Princess of Tars"
Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages
Barbara Fuch, Exotic Nation
Matthew Vernon, The Black Middle Ages
Cord Whitaker, Black Metaphors
Lisi Oliver, The Beginnings of English Law
Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother
Malcolm X, "Message to the Grassroots"