Join the IHGC's Reading Lab for a talk by Sierra Lomuto!
With a charge of anachronism following it from the start, the study of race in the Middle Ages began slowly and dubiously at the turn of the century. But nearly three decades later, what was fringe, and often scorned, has become central to the future of medieval studies. Medievalists now widely recognize the importance of engaging questions of race as they pertain to historical contexts before the rise of European imperialism and racial capitalism. Yet, the transportation of race back to the medieval period risks evacuating critical race studies of its praxis-based significance and commitment to breaking apart racialized systems in our own time. That is, it is possible to reify race by locating it in premodernity. This talk thus explores the necessity of anachronism in studies of race and the Middle Ages, for it offers a method of analysis that resists the imperializing moves of progressive history while also maintaining the modernity of race. Turning to Chaucer’s “Squire’s Tale” and its construction of Mongol exoticism as a case study, I will show how race operates within the imaginative space of medieval literature. As Chaucer uses Mongol exoticism to build the literary value of the English language, we may discern the formation of a racial imaginary, one that is not yet occupying but enroute to global conquest and imperialism.
Sierra Lomuto is an Assistant Professor of Global Medieval Literatures in the English Department at Rowan University. She is the editor of The “Medieval” Undone: Imagining a New Global Past, a special issue of boundary 2 (Duke). Dr. Lomuto's essays have also been published in the peer-reviewed journals Exemplaria and postmedieval, The Chaucer Encyclopedia (Wiley), and the edited collections Caroline Bergvall’s Medievalist Poetics (Arc Humanities Press) and Rethinking Medieval Margins and Marginality (Routledge). She has published public essays in venues such as In the Middle, Public Books, and Medievalists of Color; and she has been quoted in The Economist, The New Yorker, and Teen Vogue. She has forthcoming work in Global Medieval Travel Writing: A Literary History (Cambridge), Approaches to Teaching the Arthurian Tradition (MLA), and Journal for Medieval and Early Modern Studies (JMEMS). She is also co-editing the centennial issue of Speculum, titled Speculations.