To the Editor:

The effort by Hillary Eklund, Jennifer Park, Debapriya Sarkar, and Ayanna Thompson to link premodern critical race studies and environmental humanities is generative and timely, and all the more urgent in the US political landscape that has emerged since their article “Becoming Undisciplined: On Pathways to Environmental and Racial Justice in Early Modern Studies” was published in PMLA (vol. 139, no. 5, Oct. 2024, pp. 791–805). In particular, their call to “undiscipline,” building on concepts developed by Christina Sharpe, Julietta Singh, and others, challenges readers not simply to cross but to abolish disciplinary barriers in a more integral pursuit of justice than hitherto has been tried in early modern studies. As the authors diagnose, the field has often remained comfortably ensconced in historicist, philological, and formalist methodologies insulated from more theoretically driven and justice-oriented work. Premodern critical race studies, pioneered by scholars working primarily on England, has been resolute in redressing this tendency, even as Noémie Ndiaye, Peter Erickson, Kim F. Hall, and Geraldine Heng have argued for reaching beyond English borders. To realize that transnational breadth, those of us whose research programs touch other corners of early modernity must follow suit. But it is also important that the drive to undiscipline the early modern not sacrifice referential precision, lest the anglophone become an unspoken default in that vital endeavor.

In the authors’ purposefully inclusive, boundary-defying exploration, I found the absence of literary culture beyond England conspicuous. This is not to suggest that linguistic or geographic circumscription is intrinsically impoverishing, as their unconventional leveraging of a familiar canon (Shakespeare, Jonson, Webster) delivers readings both cogent and gripping. Even as the authors’ passing references to Latin evince the fact that premodern England was far from monolingual, the PMLA cluster “Monolingualism and Its Discontents” (vol. 137, no. 5, Oct. 2022) reminds us that multilingualism is not an automatic nostrum for exclusion and domination. Single-language scholarship can provide essential inroads to contesting those dynamics of oppression, as Eklund, Park, Sarkar, and Thompson’s intervention exemplifies.

Because their plea to undiscipline is so persuasive, rather, it reveals conceptual, pragmatic, and semantic problems with the very notion of early modern itself. Nominally, the work that the term performs is only temporal, yet, in the absence of a corresponding regional or national referent (e.g., Atlantic, Baghdad, or England), it implies spatial capaciousness. The inverse also holds true: when China is invoked without a preceding dynasty or century, one may reasonably assume that the term refers to a transhistorical concept. Staking only time suggests, if but tacitly, that space is either immaterial, unrestricted, or else dictated by the linguistic medium of the utterance. This last possibility is problematic in an era when English has become an undisputed academic lingua franca, even as the presumptive audience of a given publication venue may attenuate the assumptions around early modern. That geographically unbound term signifies differently in the Journal of Japanese Early Modern History or Shakespeare Quarterly than it does for the readership of an avowedly multilingual title like PMLA.

Early modern responds in part to a practical need for more expansiveness than spatiotemporal markers like Ming, ancien régime, cinquecento, Jacobean, or even Renaissance can provide. It has become an alternative for eschewing the cultural hierarchies embedded in traditional nomenclatures like Golden Age. And the opening of this early modern umbrella has offered collective shelter from perennial institutional pressures, retrenchment, and real or perceived presentist biases among students. Yet, insofar as the transnational might mirror the trajectory of the transdisciplinary, critical questions emerge for the multiregional and multilinguistic stakes of early modern undisciplining. Part of Sharpe’s and Singh’s projects is to overturn the colonial and racial violence embedded in disciplinarity, a violence that inter- and transdisciplinary approaches often just disburse across a wider field. As transnational scholarship has pushed further into the mainstream, one gets the sense that the very adjective transnational is becoming tired or superfluous. But if this perception is accurate, then the prospect of further eroding the lines between English and more- or other-than-English scholarship (un-languaging? un-nationalizing?) might give us pause. If the objective of undisciplining is to dismantle the oppressive institutional logics that interdisciplinarity has reproduced, or even fetishized, then where does that leave early modernists working in area studies programs and in or across “foreign” languages, particularly in an era when English is more dominant than ever and the epistemic violence of English supremacism is newly ascendant?

I pose this question not as one of revanchist territorialism but because how we answer it can materially impact the urgent issues for which the authors of “Becoming Undisciplined” advocate. As Antonio de Nebrija remarked over five centuries ago, language has always been a handmaiden of empire and, therefore, complicit in planetary histories of racial capitalism, colonial extractivism, and environmental exploitation. It follows that making visible and unsettling those histories should entail a collectively global scope. More practically, to transgress, transcend, and refuse geographic and linguistic borders is to embrace the loss of mastery and control that is consistent with the larger aims of undisciplining. And adopting this linguistic plurality, one that is more reflective of our classrooms, communities, and early modernity itself, will require forms of deep collaboration that Eklund, Park, Sarkar, and Thompson endorse and model.

Short of that goal, those adjectival ossifications of nationalism—early modern Chinese, early modern Iberian, and, yes, early modern English—might be deployed as a means not of redrawing borders or retreating to the comforts of disciplinary siloes but of signaling, more precisely and more authentically, the stakes of a given scholarly intervention, no less valid for those delimitations. Doing so could help ensure that an undisciplining of the early modern does not reinscribe old patterns in new paradigms. Using early modern as shorthand for early modern England tends to reinforce the hegemony of English and the dominance of Anglo-American scholarship. In unlearning our siloed philologies, we must not revert to subsuming linguistically informed difference to a synecdochic periodization that is transnational in name only.