The following provides the schedule of texts that participants at the Lexicon Project seminars gathered to discuss during Autumn and Winter quarter in the academic year 2019-2020. Further resources, including an extensive crowd-sourced bibliography, can be found at Medievalists of Color.
Friday, October 11, 2019:
David Nirenberg, “Was There Race before Modernity? The Example of ‘Jewish’ Blood in Late Medieval Spain”, in Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in the Middle Ages and Today (University of Chicago Press, 2014), pp. 169–190 (earlier versions pub. 2007 and 2009).
Ania Loomba, “Race and the Possibilities of Comparative Critique”, New Literary History 40.3 (2009): 501–522.
James M. Thomas, “The Racial Formation of Medieval Jews: a Challenge to the Field”, Ethnic and Racial Studies 33 (2010): 1737-1755.
Friday, November 1, 2019:
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Race,” in A Handbook of Middle English Studies (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 109-122.
Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Preface + Chapter 1.
William Chester Jordan, “Why ‘Race’?” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31 (2001): 165-173.
Cord Whittaker, “Race-ing the Dragon: The Middle Ages, Race and Trippin’ into the Future,” Postmedieval 6 (2015): 3–11.
Friday, November 22, 2020:
The Combahee River Collective, “The Combahee River Collective Statement,” 1977.
“Editor’s Introduction” to Afro-Pessimism: an Introduction (Racked & Dispatched, 2017), 7-13.
Cornel West, “The Ignoble Paradox of Modernity” and “Race and Modernity,” in The Cornel West Reader (Basic Civitas Books, 1999), 51-86.
Peter Erickson and Kim F. Hall, “‘A New Scholarly Song’: Rereading Early Modern Race,” Shakespeare Quarterly 26 (2016): 1-13.
Margo Hendricks, “Coloring the Past, Rewriting our Future: RaceB4Race,” keynote address at the Race and Periodization: RaceB4Race Symposium organized by the Folger Library and Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, September 2019.
Ania Loomba and Jonathan Burton, introduction to Race in Early Modern England: a Documentary Companion (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 1-36 [optional].
Friday, January 10th, 2020:
Hannah Arendt, “Race-Thinking before Racism,” Review of Politics 6 (1944): 36-73.
Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended : Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-6. New York: Picador, 2003, Lectures 3 & 4.
Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. 2nd Edition. Chapel Hill & London: University of North Carolina Press, 2000, 9-28; 71-100.
Friday, January 22nd, 2020:
Kathleen Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularism Govern the Politics of Time. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008, introduction.
Carolyn Dinshaw, How Soon is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012, chapter 2.
Adam Miyashiro, “Our deeper past: Race, settler colonialism, and medieval heritage projects,” Literature Compass 16 (2019).
Daniel Lord Smail, “The Original Subaltern,” Postmedieval 1 (2010): 180-186.
Carol Symes, “When We Talk About Modernity,” American Historical Review 116 (2011): 715-726.
Patrick J. Geary, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002, chapter 6. [optional]
Bruce W. Holsinger, “Medieval Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and the Genealogies of Critique,” Speculum 77 (2002): 1195-1227. [optional]
Friday October 9, 2020:
S. J. Pearce, “The Inquisitor and the Moseret: The Invention of Race in the Middle Ages and the New English Colonialism in Jewish Historiography.” Medieval Encounters 26 (2020): 145-90.
Vincent W. J. van Gerven Oei, “Finding Old Nubian, or, why we should divest from Western tongues.” postmedieval 11.2-3 (2020): 301-9.
Bryan C. Keene. ed. Toward a Global Middle Ages: Encountering the World through Illuminated Manuscripts (J. Paul Getty Museum, 2019), preface and introduction.
Cornell Fleischer, Cemal Kafadar and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “How to Write Fake Global History.” Cromohs (Cyber Review of Modern Historiography. [optional]
Pamela Kyle Crossley, “Why Women Have no Home in ‘Global History.'” [optional]