Since its publication in 2018, Geraldine Heng’s The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages has considerably revolutionized the field of medieval studies. Her call to look at “what happened: the impacts, effects, and outcomes produced by laws, institutions, and behavior as these affected populations and peoples” has become a road map for the critical study of race in the Middle Ages to access a holistic picture of medieval history and culture (“Before Race” 160). Critical race studies is not a new concept; nevertheless, Heng’s work and the recent scholarship of other medievalists who apply critical race studies to premodern texts continue to be polemical both within and beyond academia.Footnote ¹ First, this is because scholars that apply critical theory are constantly questioned—regardless of their period of study and inquiry—and their work is often considered not rigorous enough. James H. Sweet’s monthly presidential column in the American Historical Association’s Perspectives on History from August 2022 serves as an excellent example of the claims against critical identity studies: that it is presentist, anachronistic, and political. Second, the discipline of medieval studies since its inception has defined and imagined the Middle Ages as both European and white, which makes accusations of presentism and anachronism even more pronounced.Footnote ² Two questions are usually posed as a result: Why would you study the Middle Ages (when you are not white)? Why would you study critical identity studies and the Middle Ages (since these identities did not exist in the Middle Ages)? With this logic, certain scholars posit that the Middle Ages should be hermetically sealed off from presumed “others” who are corrupting and infiltrating the field.

Charges of anachronism and presentism are certainly not new to medievalists; when the field of medieval studies wishes to dismiss new ways to study the Middle Ages, detractors of these new forms of inquiries turn to anachronism. Indeed, this was the tactic deployed against minoritized scholars who were debating anti-Semitism and the Middle Ages, especially after World War II; centering feminism, sexism, and medieval women writers in the aftermath of the civil rights and women’s liberation movements that led to the creation of women’s and ethnic studies departments; and using postcolonial theory after the 1980s, to name three examples. What these cases have taught us, however, is that arguments like Sweet’s that attack “presentist” and “political” research are in fact calls to maintain the falsehood that whiteness is the main source of knowledge, history, and culture; these attacks too are political enterprises. In fact, the impetus for President Donald Trump’s fascist directives against academic institutions and ideologies of diversity, equity, and inclusion are driven by the growing number of educated people who are not white, cis-male, and able-bodied. As women-of-color academics, we embody knowledge and expertise, and our research and teaching signal forms of expertise other than whiteness. Our very existence as academics, leading experts in our fields of study, threatens the myth that whiteness is knowledge.

Attacks against the study of the past in “presentist” and “political” ways are another side of an anti-intellectual, white supremacist exclusionary move to not engage with arguments that question whiteness as normalized knowledge. Indeed, as Alexander Ponomareff and Amrita Dhar remind us in this cluster, race and racism are also both political constructs. Therefore, the presumption of these attacks, that white empiricism is the only method of knowledge production that exists, is a political choice and not an intellectual disagreement. The argument that research such as Heng’s should not have been done in the first place—a logical fallacy and an attack on academic freedom—establishes a notion that the scientific method is not empirical or applicable to the humanities (and we should not wonder why attacks on the humanities continue to multiply and have now expanded to include the sciences). This attack is particularly striking considering Rankean objective and scientific approaches to the humanities in the nineteenth century. Therefore, the problem is not “presentist,” “political,” or “critical” scholarship; the problem is white supremacy.

The idea of the Middle Ages as a locus of white-centric, white-culture frameworks has a very long history. In the posthumously published essay “The Wretched of Middle-Earth: An Orkish Manifesto,” Charles W. Mills argues that J. R. R. Tolkien uses his knowledge as a medievalist to create a mythical fantasy designed through a “a literal transcription of…the racist ‘Aryan Myth.’” Furthermore, Mills demonstrates how Tolkien’s body of work follows the “central racist myth of European thought” to racialize the orcs as an “ultimate composite ‘Wild’ Other to the defining Self of white, Christian, class-structured Western civilization” (115). In this context, the extermination of the orcs is presented as necessary and logical. Mills concludes:

This example affirms why Tolkien discouraged Stuart Hall from analyzing Piers Plowman through contemporary literary criticism (Lavezzo 1). As a result, the field of medieval studies, which encompasses literature, history, art history, and philosophy, to name a few areas, helped construct a past (a history) that erased the contributions of most people in the world. Until relatively recently, those working in medieval studies understood the medieval past as a “pre-racial, pre-political era in which Europe was homogenously Caucasian and an unproblematized Christianity reigned supreme” (Heng, “Who”). Indeed, as Heng shows, these scholars sanitized and whitened the past, rendering the continent monoracial. Likewise, Nicholas R. Jones remarks that premodern scholars refuse “to dialogue with non-Eurocentric modes of scholarly inquiry…[and] sub-Saharan Africa and its transoceanic diasporic” (3). He calls for analysis that relies on “black culture, black expression, and black livingness” not as a “uniform, self-coherent concept” but as “capacious, complex, unsettled, spatial, and rich, while its utility is historical and rhetorical” (2). Therefore, to study race and racism in the Middle Ages is to participate in the critique of Western civilization and to politically align with the work of Black and ethnic studies (see Robinson 8; and Ponomareff’s essay in this issue). We pursue non-Eurocentric modes of scholarly inquiry.

Moreover, the danger of whitewashing the past is very apparent in our contemporary moment, as it allows white supremacists—those that have unwittingly and wittingly constructed whiteness, Europe, and the West as the ushers of modernity—to replace the contributions of Islamic, Judaic, Arabic, Hebrew, Egyptian, Chinese, Mongolian, and Islamicate cultures, among others, with a cultural fantasy of an ahistorical racialized past that falsely assumes white European superiority and development. Undeniably, this approach has not only ignored the profound impact of those cultures but also denied them and usFootnote ³ from holding our rightful place in the making and understanding of literature, history, and culture. By doing so, arguments for a preracial medieval era perpetuate the myth that only Europe, and by extension whiteness, ushered in the modern world—a logical fallacy and a profound fiction. By all accounts, the field of medieval studies is a presentist and anachronistic field because it was “invented” in the early twentieth century by academics, quickly becoming a “jealously guarded particular domain,” to borrow the words of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (12). It is time that we get over it.

Critical studies scholars have been breaking away from some of the most pervasive and harmful lies in academia—that the West is and was only white, and that knowledge, knowing, and expertise are white products. Heng’s work reminds us that the past is never truly the past but is always with us. Similarly, as Michel-Rolph Trouillot wrote in Silencing the Past, “the past does not exist independently from the present. Indeed, the past is only past because there is a present, just as I can point to something over there only because I am here. But nothing is inherently over there or here. In that sense, the past has no content. The past—or, more accurately, pastness—is a position” (15). In the spirit of recovering or unsilencing the past, and rethinking our present, our Theories and Methodologies special feature gathers scholars leading the push against entrenched belief in the naturalness of the “epidermal-as-race” personhood that continues to permeate the fields of English, literature, language studies, sociology, anthropology, history, and more.

The special feature assembles scholars who are experts in a wide range of chronologies, geographies, and disciplines—from Africana and media studies, history, language departments, and political science—both early-career and senior researchers from a range of institutions. They represent an effort to recover other possibilities of the past in their respective fields. In many ways, this special feature impels us to seek the otherwise that leads to epistemic freedom. Indeed, “[d]oing anticolonial work in the academy and talking about race in relation to discipline and interdiscipline,” Katherine McKittrick notes, “can be enriched by thinking across texts and places” (45). We have invited scholars, moreover, whose expertise lies in a period of specialization beyond the scope of medieval studies precisely because we reject claims of anachronism (only Otaño Gracia is concretely a “medievalist”). Thus, thinking across texts, temporality, and places is exactly our charge with this special feature.

We come together with the following guiding questions: What does it mean to understand race as evolving and unfixed, detectable not only in postenlightenment eras but also in the premodern? How can premodernists and scholars of contemporary literatures, cultures, and histories understand race as imbricated by other characteristics (gender, sexuality, religion, space, class, disability, affect, and so on)? How does finding a common language or languages across temporal and disciplinary divides help demonstrate that premodernists’ applications of critical race theory to their subjects of study are not dismissible as “presentism” but in fact are acts of retrieval that seek to disentangle the academy from its devotion to whiteness? Furthermore, this special cluster invites scholars to create common languages and strategies to discuss our fields of study—from the premodern to the present—and to celebrate work that pushes against and decenters white academic frameworks and Western epistemologies.

Our special feature opens with Ponomareff’s contribution, which brings Black studies into conversation with Heng and her challenge of “canonical race theories.” While he highlights underlying tensions, Ponomareff establishes that Black studies scholars and Heng share more affinities than differences. For him, Dorothy Roberts and Heng recognize that race was not only a social construction but also a political one. Moreover, with his discussion of Sylvia Wynter’s challenge of the overrepresentation of Man as human in Western civilization and how Heng also nudges us to reconsider the overrepresentation of the West, he demonstrates that both scholars confront the entrenched racist logics and Western epistemes that structure and sustain whiteness as a key organizing principle.

Next, Nahir I. Otaño Gracia discusses the logics of medieval whiteness by delineating how whiteness functions in the Middle Ages. Otaño Gracia examines medieval Arthurian romances, showing that Europeans engaged in race-making through the construction of her concept of chivalric whiteness. Even as a cultural project of fantasy, Arthurian texts helped normalize a white medieval Europe that was predicated on exclusion. She argues that by doing so Arthurian literature made “violence seem effortless and natural,” justifying the dehumanization of racialized enemies and defending themselves and their whiteness. In many ways, Otaño Gracia reveals that the lives and afterlives of Arthurian literature have embedded political, cultural, and racial meaning that shapes our very understanding of Arthuriana.

In Belinda Deneen Wallace and Kathy L. Powers’s piece, the authors draw from Heng’s study of the Black queen Belakane in Parzival, by Wolfram von Eschenbach, to offer an analysis of the door of no return, referencing the poet Dionne Brand. The door of no return is an opportunity for reclamation, repair, and care that disrupts the hold and power of medieval logics in our contemporary moment. In essence, it is a form of wake work that offers us a way of dealing with entrenched medieval logics (Sharpe). These logics are so embedded in British society that Britain was able to see itself as heroic and chivalrous in its abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. As a result, the profits and material benefits of the trade as well as “the initimaces of four continents” are ignored or glossed over (Lowe).

Like Wallace and Powers, Adrienne N. Merritt begins with Belakane, the Black queen designed for a medieval German audience, but quickly moves her study to the contemporary world of Afro-German popular culture, offering an analysis of two German texts through Tina Campt’s concept of the Black gaze. Merritt uses Black gazing to reject and repel the overwhelming whiteness of both German and medieval studies. She moves from a medieval text that is anti-Black, applying Black gazing to reject the construction of Belakane through whiteness, to works produced by the contemporary Black Nigerian German hip-hop artist Megaloh, who uses Black gazing to connect to the audience. Merritt shows that Black gazing provides us with an “oppositional gaze” as bell hooks intended and creates counterdiscourses that go against and “along the bias grain” (Fuentes 16).

Dhar begins with Heng’s capacity to elucidate on the interconnections between empire-making and race-making to take Miltonists to task for refusing to analyze Milton through the sociopolitical context of his life, a time when England’s colonial ambitions were deeply entangled in the slave trade. As Dhar reminds us, “Milton knew about race and was writing about race—because he couldn’t very well not be doing so as a responsible man of letters in seventeenth-century Europe.” Therefore, Milton’s own invention of the human was steeped in ideologies of race and empire because that is the context in which he wrote, even if Miltonists often refuse to engage with this reality—a true disservice to the study of Milton and his works.

Shifting from Milton to contemporary times, Sunnie Rucker-Chang observes the slipperiness of whiteness in southeast Europe. Through a critical whiteness studies lens, she delineates the contours of east European transnational and transactional whiteness, discussing “the experience of the majority that is white at home but ‘off-white’ or ‘peripherally white’ when away.” Furthermore, she, along with Heng, reminds us of the long history of racialization of the Roma, which problematizes discussions of race in her field of east European studies. Her essay explores some of the consequences of race and racialization to people characterized by the majority group as white, nonwhite, and off-white, as well as the slipperiness and porosity of race as both a political and a social tool.

Taking a different approach, Angelica Pesarini interviews Justin Randolph Thompson to discuss the collaborative, academic, and artistic recovery work happening in Italy. They argue that the dominant, state-sanctioned histories of places such as Florence have created a “fragmented, undernarrated history” of premodern Italy that has removed and invisibilized the contributions of people of color. It upholds a “white” vision of a premodern Italy that “venerates figures representing extreme power and wealth without questioning where that wealth came from, what their connections were to global movements of trade, or what was happening elsewhere in the world at the same time.” The impact of silencing other forms of historical narratives reverberates throughout Italian public life. And for the last decade Pesarini and Thompson, alongside other scholars and artists, have continuously worked to highlight the Black Italian Renaissance and its archives, participating in the same kind of recovery work as Heng and other critical scholars of the premodern.

Tiffany N. Florvil brings us to the late twentieth century and provides us with an intervention that positions the Black German poet and activist May Ayim as a “quotidian intellectual” who challenged white empiricism and white objectivity. She did so by unsilencing the past, especially the presence of Black people in Germany from the Middle Ages onward. Florvil demonstrates that Ayim’s magisterial 1986 work Farbe bekennen (Showing Our Colors) not only countered archival erasures and affirmed Black people as ontological but also established Black German studies as an important intellectual undertaking that could be divorced from Western epistemologies. Ayim also demonstrated the falsity of Hegelian claims about Africa in the 1830s as having “no historical part of the world; it has no movement or development to exhibit…. What we properly understand by Africa, is the Unhistorical, Underdeveloped spirit, still involved in the conditions of mere nature” (Hegel 103). It was Africa’s so-called pastlessness that justified the enslavement of its inhabitants. Florvil argues that Ayim as a quotidian intellectual accomplished some of this recuperative work before Heng’s critical intervention in 2018.

We close our special feature with a response from Geraldine Heng. Our ambitious goal was to honor Heng’s contribution, confront the question of “presentism,” and break with the expectation that a cluster on a field-changing book in medieval studies must be populated by medievalists. Instead, we contend that just as Heng wrote her book in conversation with scholars of the past and the present, our respondents should do the same.

Indeed, there are no easy answers, but the enterprise of scientific inquiry is to hypothesize based on observation, research, and evidence—the exact work our contributors do in their scholarship. By tackling the subjects of race, racialization, and whiteness before and after The Invention of Race, we aim to further expand inquiry away from whiteness and white supremacy. We welcome our colleagues to join us in recovering our pasts and dismantling white-centric understandings of the past and present. And in doing so, we hope to create new possibilities for epistemic freedom for all.