Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Examines how literature and language work to reflect, perform, complicate, and critique constructions of race, ethnicity, and national and diasporic identities and spaces. May draw from post-colonial approaches, critical race theory, and Indigenous and decolonizing methodologies. May be further organized by historical period, genre, or critical approach. Breadth-Humanities.

COURSE DETAILS:

Mapping Borders and Making Race in the Middle Ages

Ask most people about the period we now call the Middle Ages—the long, complicated span from the 5^th century to the 15^th—and you won’t hear a lot about racial diversity, religious heterodoxy, colonization, or borderland hybridity. Knights fighting for God, crown, and honour? Check. Maidens in Towers and hoard-guarding dragons? Check. Bearded alchemists, mead-soused paladins, and tonsured monks? Check, check, and double check. But a complicated understanding of racial and cultural identity? A delicate detente between religious orthodoxy and ecumenical heterodoxy? A filigreed and shifting world map that placed England not at the centre of the known world but right up against the edge? These things don’t often make it into our cultural conceptions of the medieval period.

This course will strive to push back again prevailing understandings of the Middle Ages as a White, Christian, nationalist, hetero-normative monolith. We will engage with several canonical Old English, Anglo-Norman, and Middle English texts; however we will seek to explore, contextualize, and decenter them to develop a more nuanced understanding of medieval literature and the medieval world. In so doing, we will also consider the pre-modern roots of some of our most pressing cultural and social issues, and we will address how the familiar cultural fiction of the Middle Ages continues to (mis)inform and to fuel contemporary struggles around race, religion, national identity, and colonialism.

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

Of studie tak ye moost cure and moost heede.
Noght o word speke ye moore than ys neede,
And that is seyd in forme and reverence,
And short and quyk and ful of hy sentence;
Sownynge in moral vertu is yowr speche,
And gladly wol ye lerne and gladly teche.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING:

REQUIRED READING NOTES: