Rejected: Introducing the stakes of premodern critical race studies

Can we talk about race in periods, literatures, and cultures before the Enlightenment? What archives are available, lost, forgotten, or suppressed? What methodologies work across historical and geographic periods? What can Americanists learn from medieval and early modern scholars? And how can we transmit this knowledge into our pedagogies and classrooms? This special edition, “Premodern Critical Race Studies,” stems from the first RaceB4Race symposium held in January 2019 at Arizona State University. RaceB4Race brought together medieval and early modern scholars who push our fields in new archival, theoretical, and practical directions with race at the heart of the inquiries and frameworks. Collectively, the essays move between archival, methodological, theoretical, and pedagogical lenses, encouraging us to think critically about the ways that premodern critical race scholars function as activists in our fields and in our communities: many of us explicitly embrace the position of the scholar-activist.