Liberatory Potential

I want to thank today’s presenters for their papers. I’m happy I’ve heard them and had the chance to engage with them. To take seriously our professional engagement with the past as having important implications for how we understand the future, to continue all-too-important thought on the implications of periodization, and to take seriously critical mixed-race studies as integral to the future of medieval studies: these are worthy endeavors in their own right. Yet together, they point to the future of our field: a future that, together with the humanities and even a recognizable university, is now anything but assured.

I would be remiss not to recognize that it’s hard for me to be here right now. As you likely know, the Medievalists of Color, a scholarly activist collective that I helped found, is officially boycotting this conference. There are only a few of us here. I struggled with the decision whether or not to come, but I felt a call to chair this session and support these papers in particular. So I’m here. I’ve done a lot to support the Medieval Academy over the years. I have served on the Academy’s Nominating Committee. I recently finished serving on the editorial board of Speculum, the Medieval Academy’s journal and the flagship journal for the field. Even after my board term ended, I sat on the small committee that selected the next editor of Speculum. I led an editorial team consisting of another founding member of MOC and one who has led the charge to boycott, Nahir Otano Gracia. The team also included the eminent historian of medieval Africa Francois-Xavier Fauvelle. Together we developed, shepherded, and edited Speculum’s first-ever issue on race. What’s more, I’m a proud winner of the John Nicholas Brown Prize for my book Black Metaphors.

In short, I have a strong relationship with the Medieval Academy. Yet I find myself here having let my membership lapse and not sure when or if I will renew it. But I am certain of one thing: I will not renew it until some things have changed. The whole reason that MOC is boycotting—and put together quite a nice alternative conference online by the way—has everything to do with the study of race in, and involving, premodernity.

As the Medievalists of Color points out in its statement breaking ties with the Medieval Academy, “In December of 2023, preeminent scholars of Holocaust and Genocide studies asked that we join their efforts in not aiding and abetting Israeli mass violence.” The twists and turns since then would take up too much time today. But ultimately, the Medieval Academy’s response was a June 2024 statement opposing “the deployment of academic boycotts to exclude scholars on the basis of religion, race, ethnicity, or national affiliation.” On its surface, this sounds right, neutral, and even inclusive. But it comes with a misrepresentation of the MOC position and, what’s worse, not even with a condemnation of the mass-scale state violence being perpetrated in Gaza to this day. Take, for a counter example, the case of the American Historical Association. Its membership overwhelmingly voted for a resolution against the violence of Netanyahu’s government. As of this January, its council could not bring itself to accept the resolution and vetoed it. Yet, even as the AHA Council announced its veto, it adds: “The AHA Council deplores any intentional destruction of Palestinian educational institutions, libraries, universities, and archives in Gaza.” That is—to my dismay—more substance than the Medieval Academy offered on the subject.

‘What has this to do with the study of race in premodernity?,’ you might ask. Some of the answer can be found in my own intellectual biography. I started finding my way into this field in the early 2000s, when I was inspired by work on medieval Jewishness and medieval anti-Semitism by scholars such as Sylvia Tomasch and Susan Einbinder. My work on race proceeds from my early readings of and fascination with the Alliterative Siege of Jerusalem. Studying medieval Jewishness meant studying medieval Jewish-Christian relations and then studying medieval Jewish-Christian-and Islamic relations. My personal scholarly journey demonstrates that you don’t get today’s Premodern Critical Race Studies without a deep investment in the history of the religious, political, and cultural conflict that is playing out militarily before our very eyes in Israel, Gaza, in Washington DC, and right here among the members and former members of the Medieval Academy.

The Medievalists of Color statement speaks of the “liberatory potential” of Premodern Critical Race Studies. And we aren’t lying. It liberates the scholar of color who is told—in myriad ways, in daily life, and in the academy—that they shouldn’t be a medievalist. It’s weird. It’s not theirs. I still get the question, as I did 25 years ago: Where were the Black people in the Middle Ages? It liberates those who hear the scholar—those who are really listening—from the notion that race is a natural thing or that, even if constructed, its construction is too hard to see and understand.  It liberates from the notion that some people aren’t supposed to be in some scholarly places. They’re only supposed to be in the spaces that ‘look like’ them.

And now, as the entire university structure is under assault and the full force of the U.S. Federal Government is being marshalled to make sure that those scholarly spaces that do look like traditionally marginalized scholars—the Ethnic Studies departments, Africana Studies departments, to say nothing of Womens and Gender Studies departments—are either further marginalized or soon won’t exist, it is up to us scholars to identify, and use all the liberatory power we can muster. It is our job not only to save medieval studies, but to save higher education as we know it and to improve it as we wish it to be.

In addition to studies of medieval Judaism, Christianity, Islam and their relationships, Premodern Critical Race Studies also owes its existence to postcolonial medieval studies. Thanks to scholars such as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Michelle R. Warren, Kathleen Biddick, Kathleen Davis, and others, we had a new way to understand the power dynamics that drove ostensibly religio-cultural relationships. It was then in understanding the bio-power—to wax Foucauldian for a minute—at play that we were able to discern the presence and roles of race-thinking and race-making in the Middle Ages. All this is to say that the postcolonial studies on which postcolonial medieval studies and Premodern Critical Race Studies are built would not and could not exist without the work of Edward Said, that Palestinian-American scholar who wrote in 1979 that “The fact of the matter is that today Palestine does not exist, except as a memory, or more importantly as an idea, and an act of sustained popular will.” Some 25 years later, Saree Makdisi, currently chair of English at UCLA, identified that idea and act—I think rightly—as “a struggle for the articulation of a new sense of what it means to be human.”

And that’s what we are calling for. That’s the liberatory potential that MOC—and I—are talking about. The very idea of humanity is what’s under attack right now. It’s why the humanistic mission of the American university is Target Number One for the current U.S. presidential administration. It’s why treatment of undocumented immigrants—and now documented immigrants too—is being designed and implemented specifically to deny their humanity. Take the images of the Venezuelan men accused—on real shaky evidence—of being members of a violent gang and deported in contravention of a judicial order. Everything being done to them is about denying their humanity. That’s why it’s becoming criminalized to care about the military ending of tens of thousands of lives as a response to the paramilitary slaughter of fewer than 2000. It takes 60,000 to make up for 2,000. It suggests that some lives matter more than others, doesn’t it? This is what we seek liberation from. If these approaches are allowed to continue without us all working together to unleash the liberatory potential of our studies, of our learned societies like this one, of our voices, then it’s not only our humanistic university jobs that aren’t safe. It’s our very humanity on the line.

These are dangerous times, my friends, as the old structures come falling down around us. But we have the tools to survive and to perhaps even dream our ways into something new and better.

As a way of showing what we know how to see, I want to return ever so briefly to the fourteenth-century alliterative romance Siege of Jerusalem. In the text, Roman forces, who are newly and anachronistically Christian, besiege Jerusalem in 70 AD. The Roman general beats on the gates of the city. He is enraged that the city’s Jewish inhabitants, under their military leader Josephus, will not capitulate.

In lines 764 and following, Vespasian knocks at the gates of Jerusalem. He calls for the Jews to come forth and warns them: ‘ȝe þat Crist slowen; | Knoweþ hym for ȝour kyng, or ȝe cacche more!’ (‘you who slew Christ; know him for your king, or you will (suffer) more!’). When the Jews refuse to respond, Vespasian ‘þan wroþ as a wode bore’ (‘angry as a mad, or wild, boar’), turns from the gates and proclaims:

ʒif ʒe as dogges wol dey, þe deuel haue þat recche!

And or I wende fro þis walle ʒe schul wordes schewe

And efte spaklokere speke or Y ʒour speche owene! (786–88)

If you as dogs will die, the devil have him who cares!

And before I go from this wall, you will speak

And in reply you will speak more prudently before I will

acknowledge your speech! 

In other words, Vespasian blames the Jews of the city for their own destruction at his hand. It’s because they will die as dogs. Not because he will command his forces to slaughter them as such. This is the oldest trick in the book, and it resonates with Netanyahu’s government’s blame of Gazans for their own pain now. As long ago as 2015, Netanyahu claimed that it was the Palestinian World War II era grand mufti of Jerusalem “who played a central role in fomenting” Hitler’s so-called Final Solution. Toward the beginning of the current genocidal war, he blamed the people of Gaza for Hamas’s political control over them. As little as three days ago (at the time of this writing), he blamed Hamas—and therefore the Gazans to whom he ascribes their agency—for his military’s renewed attacks on Gaza that killed another 400 civilians. The term ‘Victim-blaming’ doesn’t carry the appropriate weight.

The Anti-Defamation League’s recent—and powerfully effective—turn from its focus on anti-Semitism on the political far-right toward the blatant conflation of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism is part of why we are here today, too. It was 2022, well before Hamas’s attack in southern Israel, when ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said “Anti-Zionism is antisemitism” in a speech to ADL leaders. He then went on to single out student groups. Since then, his and the ADL’s approach has been over and against the voices of many of its own researchers, who have offered statements such as “There is no comparison between white supremacists and insurrectionists and those who espouse anti-Israel rhetoric…to suggest otherwise is both intellectually dishonest and damaging…”. A number have left in disgust. It is on the rhetorical architecture of Greenblatt’s ADL that the current presidential administration stands when it criminalizes student protest, when it drags off grad student green card holders such as Mahmoud Khalil into immigration detention, when it uses anti-Semitism—all while one of its lead henchmen offers Sieg Heil salutes at events, mind you—not to protect the rights of Jewish people but as a cudgel to suppress dissent and to threaten and oppress Muslim people, Jewish people who are allied with them, and people of color generally.

No, the Medieval Academy’s actions—or lack thereof—have not been neutral. Sure, they tried to be, but power has now been consolidated in the hands of those who are against humanism and humanity. When those are the conditions, then neutrality is no longer neutral. Neutrality is a vote in their favor.  

So that’s a little bit on how we got to be here in a session that seriously takes together critical mixed race studies with important thought on periodization and the future of the field. And it’s also a bit about why so many folks who have embodied the study of race in the field—through their work and through their bodies—are not here right now.

We are not neutral. We cannot afford to be. And I daresay, none of you in this room can afford to be either. I repeat: We are not neutral. Nor will we be moved.

Cord J. Whitaker is associate professor of English at Wellesley, where he teaches medieval literature and culture and the history of race. Whitaker consults on inclusive culture change at Sagely and blogs and podcasts at diversitydifferently.substack.com.