Hendricks, Margo. "Coloring the Past, Rewriting Our Future: RaceB4Race." Throughlines. www.throughlines.org/suite-content/what-is-premodern-critical-race-studies. [Date accessed].

What is premodern critical race studies?

Margo Hendricks defines the "critical" in premodern critical race studies.

Download the transcript
Margo Hendricks
University of California, Santa Cruz (emerita)

In 2019 at Race and Periodization: A RaceB4Race Symposium, Margo Hendricks offered her insights on what exactly premodern critical race studies is (especially in comparison to premodern race studies), and what it means to be a practitioner within this field. Her working definition is a guide to the methodological and theoretical background of PCRS, as well as a rallying call to continue to expand understandings of the past.

Read the complete transcript and listen to her talk, archived by the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Further learning

Recommended

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
Video

Premodern race as a critical canon

Heng offers insight on approaches to teaching the traditional, canonized literature of premodern Europe through the lens of premodern critical race studies.

Geraldine Heng
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

Selected annotated bibliography