By Jonathan Hsy
Jonathan Hsy is an Associate Professor of English at George Washington University, and his teaching and research interests span medieval literature, translation studies, and disability theory. He blogs at In The Middle (a group medieval studies blog) and co-directs the Global Chaucers project, a real-life and online community exploring Chaucer’s modern reception throughout the contemporary world.
I’ve been impressed by the postings by students on this blog, and I’m glad that Cord Whitaker has kindly invited me to share some thoughts in this online space about classroom racial dynamics and the teaching of medieval literature. In this guest post, I’d like to reflect on some of my recent experiences discussing racial issues in my Chaucer class last semester and how I have tried to navigate racial subjectivities (including my own) through such conversations.
Earlier in the fall semester, we expanded an ongoing discussion about anti-Semitism in Chaucer’s The Prioress’s Tale by reading some excerpts from articles by two medievalists who teach in the US: historian William Chester Jordan (who happens to be an African-American) and literary critic Geraldine Heng (who happens to be of Asian ancestry). Both scholars use the situation of medieval Jews as a touchstone in their discussions of medieval culture but approach race from distinct cultural vantage points. In an essay entitled “Why Race?” (2001), Jordan establishes the messy contingency of medieval Jewishness as a complex phenomenon that is at times defined by ancestry, religion, law, language, or custom—or varied configurations thereof; he ends his essay by reflecting on a spectrum of ethnic identities that can emerge across the generations of one modern-day biracial (black/white) US household. In an article written a decade later on “locations” of medieval race (2011), Heng frames race as a structural relation that can work to disadvantage a minority group (in this case, she refers to systemic violence and discrimination against Jewish communities in medieval Europe); Heng’s surprising point of comparison for illustrating such processes of social control and exclusion is the forced internment of Japanese-Americans in the US during World War II. In the classroom, one tricky point that emerged from our discussion of these two essays was the idea that race is an abstract, seemingly intangible idea that has deep real-world implications. Race is at once a notoriously slippery and elusive concept and yet it’s also a social phenomenon that can have real, irreversible effects on people’s lives.
My own position as the only Asian face in a racially mixed classroom (in this particular term, a Chaucer classroom including both white and black students) meant, as it always does, being sensitive to the varied subject positions of the students. After an initial discussion of Jordan’s argument, a student who self-identified as African-American remarked that Jordan should have been more open to discussing medieval “race” rather than preferring to frame his approaches in terms of the less volatile (hence more palatable) term “ethnicity.” An awkward silence followed, and I pointed out that while my own medieval scholarship doesn’t deal with race or ethnicity, I’m well aware that I am a minority within a literary subfield whose scholars tend to be white; the discussion then turned to consider how Jordan’s status as one of the few nonwhite scholars in European medieval studies in 2001 might have made him very careful not to make his readers uncomfortable (one could say that scholarly conversations about race in English medieval literature were only just beginning in earnest at that time). Heng’s more recent scholarship marks quite a contrast from Jordan’s essay both tonally and politically—reflecting her different personal sensibility as well as a new cultural moment. In the essay we discussed, Heng pivots from medieval contexts to directly implicate modern American racial fears and preoccupations. Elsewhere in her work, Heng addresses fantasies of the medieval past and the political implications of Islamophobia in present-day Western political discourses, and Heng’s brief reference to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II has rather surprisingly gained new urgency in response to current US political discourses that collectively cast Muslims, immigrants, refugees, or any other vulnerable minority group as a “dangerous threat” to mainstream society.
I’m constantly learning from my own students, and one thing I am taking from this particular conversation is that we can and should strive to earnestly engage with perspectives, identities, and experiences that are unlike our own. Neither Jordan nor Heng self-identifies as Jewish, yet both find through historical research on medieval English Jews some important support for their respective approaches to racial identity today. Both scholars seek to get readers to think outside of their “comfort zones.” But they make their appeals in ways that can incorporate certain aspects of their respective backgrounds and subject positions. Heng and Jordan show how it can be a powerful writerly technique—both intellectually and personally—to strategically oscillate between contexts that seem utterly unfamiliar (the Middle Ages) and concerns that are intimately familiar (our present moment). Nobody in a present-day classroom is “medieval,” and we all have different vantage points and experiences that inform our readings and responses to a distant culture.
Many campuses across the US, including my own, are having difficult but crucial conversations about the racial demographics of faculty on college campuses and ongoing efforts to foster an inclusive campus climate for students and everyone on campus. My reflections here are one small indication of how a diverse faculty—and an inclusive syllabus—can be just as important as cultivating a varied student body. A medieval literature classroom by definition must engage with an alien past that does and does not “belong” to all modern readers in exactly the same way. By multiplying our modes of accessing the past—even through approaches that are in tension with one another—we can open up productive ways to rethink medieval culture and be ever mindful of the dynamic role that racial legacies play in our present.