Before Race, and After Race: A Response to the Forum on The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages

Abstract

Dorothy Kim’s response to my 2018 book, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, opens with the quotation above, taken from the book itself. In requoting, I’ve emphasized the words thinking critically because most of the articles in this forum see that Invention of Race is scholarship that emerges out of the varied genealogical traditions of critical race theories, even as the book works to remain faithful to the premodern archives with which it transacts—so as to confront head-on, as Amrita Dhar puts it, the “charges of presentism and anachronism” that are invariably visited upon critical scholarship on premodernity.1 Before Invention of Race, euromedievalist work on race largely produced descriptive or taxonomic scholarship (e.g., scholarship that asked who belonged to the “Germanic races” or “Celtic races”), or focused on scrutinizing Muslim, Jewish, or Black characters in literary texts—often, texts of recreational/fantasy literature. Accordingly, the objection raised by the historian William Chester Jordan to discussing race in the European medieval past, in a 2001 issue of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies on race and ethnicity, edited by Tom