Hicks-Bartlett, Alani. “Redefining the 'foreign' in medieval and early modern texts.” Throughlines. www.throughlines.org/suite-content/Redefining-the-foreign-in-medieval-and-early-modern-texts. [date accessed].

Redefining the “foreign” in medieval and early modern texts

Breaking temporal and linguistic boundaries

Download the transcript
Alani Hicks-Bartlett
Brown University

Students often perceive premodern texts, especially those with origins beyond the English language, as inscrutable or “foreign.” To help bridge students’ relationship between their present and the cultures and histories of the premodern, Hicks-Bartlett assigns texts across temporal and linguistic ranges. Putting premodern texts in conversation with contemporary critical theory and scholarship guides students to deeper understandings of the reverberations of race, gender, and class across time.

Further learning

Recommended

RaceB4Race Highlight

Performing diversity work in medieval studies

Sierra Lomuto examines the field of medieval studies and how it privileges whiteness in knowledge production. The Global Medieval/Early Globalities as a methodology can open up current structures and create a spacetime beyond Europe.

Sierra Lomuto
Video

The cliché of race

Probing the cliché of race is a necessary moral objective and pedagogic requirement that begins by making race visible in Shakespeare’s texts to disrupt the prevalence of a destructive, convenient untruth.

Ian Smith
RaceB4Race Highlight

Defining race, periodizing race

In her 2019 RaceB4Race talk at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Geraldine Heng argues for thinking about race in transhistorical terms.

Geraldine Heng