The Massachusetts Medievalist in and out of PMLA
The Massachusetts Medievalist is feeling somewhat conflicted about her essay that has appeared in the most recent PMLA. “Afrisc Meowle: Exploring Race in the Old Exodus” is the culmination of years of thinking, drafting, and revising ideas about the African woman at the very end of the poem. I am indebted for support, assistance, and insight to many more people than I was able to thank in the notes; I hope that the essay nudges Old English studies further out of its often-fusty corner and more deeply into the dynamic conversations happening now around the Global Middle Ages.
I know that PMLA is considered the flagship literary studies journal in North America, and I’m happy to have its imprimatur for my work. My department chair is ready to brag about it in her reports to various deans and provosts. Meanwhile, I’m also very aware of PMLA’s rejection of the essay cluster that eventually became the 2021 Literature Compass special issue on Premodern Critical Race Studies. The RaceB4Race Executive Board detailed that rejection in June 2020, with further information provided by Dorothy Kim in January 2022. Despite the MLA’s frequent assertions of support for diversity, inclusion, equity, and antiracism, PMLA’s editorial board critiqued the essay cluster for its lack of “opposing perspectives” and its supposedly “constrained” range of contributors.
It seems like PMLA is interested in potential intersections between premodern critical race studies and canonical literature, but only to a certain point. I’m not sure how or whether my essay fits into this discussion but thought it might be fruitful to share some of the process I went through with PMLA and the way the editors curtailed one of the more provocative parts of the original essay.
It’s been almost three years since I first sent a draft of the essay to PMLA in November of 2019. I’ve revised it five times as it progressed through readers’ reports, board revision requests, conditional acceptance, and final acceptance. Most of the observations and revision suggestions did indeed make it a stronger essay – that’s how peer review is supposed to work, and it certainly did in this instance.
One change I made very grudgingly, however, was deletion of a section that drew on Cord Whitaker’s Black Metaphors to suggest some hermeneutic parallels between exegetical criticism in medieval studies and white nationalist ideologies currently surging in the United States (in Charlottesville in 2017, in various mass shooters’ manifestos, and here in Boston this past Sunday).
After delineating the ways in which Robertsonian exegesis reaches an inevitable conclusion – all medieval literary texts are ultimately comments on and assurances of Augustinian theology– the essay originally pivoted to the present:
“…..This critique of the critical methods of Robertson and his disciples eerily echoes Cord Whitaker's critique of White Supremacist medievalism in the second decade of the twenty-first century. In his analysis of the ways that white nationalists have appropriated medieval and medievalist narratives and symbols, Whitaker argues that these racists have embraced an erroneous version of a firmly hierarchized medieval European social system; they adhere to a ‘fallacy of a heroic Middle Ages in which social stratification was uncomplicated, in which everyone knew their rightful place and stayed in it’ (Black Metaphors 190). With this incorrect vision of the medieval past, they can project onto our present their own desires for ‘uncomplicated’ social and political structures, with white men like themselves unquestioningly in positions of power, and people of color and white women acquiescent to a naturalized inferior status. The distance between Robertson's exclusive library and White Nationalists' medievalist fantasies is not as great as it might seem: both depend on a predictable, hierarchical method of exclusion to arrive at a predetermined outcome, whether that outcome is an affirmation of Augustinian caritas or of white supremacy.” (This paragraph would have appeared on p.467 of the current issue of PMLA.)
The editorial board’s report asked that I “drop the discussion of academic privilege and populist ethnonationalism, since this connection is not clearly established in the essay.” Is it telling that the board wanted this section cut rather than clarified? I don’t know. I do know that I am glad this paragraph has finally seen the light of day, if only on this blog. Reading it now, I want to add that the methodological similarity I see does not imply any sort of moral equivalence -- the intellectual machinations of Robertson and his followers seem petty when compared to the issues at stake in the rise of White Supremacist activists in the United States in the past ten years.
And yes – an African woman (afrisc meowle) does indeed appear at the end of the Old English Exodus. She’s been hiding in plain sight for a thousand years, critically dismissed as an exegetical trope. I hope the essay’s appearance launches more inquiry into her presence and place in Exodus and into a deeper multicultural understanding of Old English literary culture.