Race before Race Symposium 2019 (review)

One need not be in the methodological vanguard of early modern studies to notice that the early modern period has significant bearing on the experience of race in the American present. Many field-transforming scholars in early modern and medieval studies are, in fact, making this claim, such as those present in person or in citation at Arizona State University's Race before Race Symposium in late January 2019. Others, such as those who participated at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association in Chicago two weeks prior in a late and methodologically conservative panel, "The Island Nation and Its Discontents: Transnationalism in Early Modern English Authors," all explicitly avowed in their comments during discussion and, for some, in the opening remarks of their papers the resonance they perceived between the themes of nationalism, dispossession, globality, and xenophobia appearing in their archives, on the one hand, and in daily political discourse, on the other. This resonance often emerged much more intimately and forcefully in the discussions at Arizona State. Patricia Akhimie's talk on the emergence of conduct literature in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century England, for example, observed how so quotidian an activity as walking might be transformed, by the pens of experts in self-fashioning in both the early modern era and the present, into an exercise of upward mobility and healthful flourishing, even as it might also be transformed, by the eyes of police coming to rest on persons marked by racial difference, into evidence of idleness, transgression, and cause for violent punishment (see Akhimie 187–91). If it seems plausible to early modernists that there exists a meaningful connection between the transformations of prior times and the exercises of power in the present, it seems equally plausible, though perhaps somewhat less obvious, that this connection is mediated directly and indirectly through the colonial settlement of America by these same Europeans and their descendants, as well as through the cultural artifacts they produced along the way. The urgent work of unpacking this plausibility within early modern studies, as expressed at the Tempe conference, encourages early Americanists to take up in our own research these questions and insights and to extend them to our unique archives. More specifically, as many of the talks at the Race before Race conference emphasized, this work prompts us to inquire into the subtler vectors—what Ann Stoler has called "the education of desire"—by which settlers brought their racism to America and normalized it.

Race before Race was planned and hosted by the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Ayanna Thompson and Jeffery J. Cohen, in their introductions over the course of the conference's two days, gave a history of the center and the conference. They described the center's mission, in alignment with the university's, to advance scholarship through inclusion rather than exclusivity. These organizers emphasized the aptness that such an urgently needed conference within their fields should be taking place at a public, access-minded institution rather than at the conventional (elite) venues for historical scholarship. They situated the current conference within ongoing work: there will be a second conference at the Folger Shakespeare Library on September 5–7, 2019, and the center has also debuted two new residencies for 2019–20, structuring them flexibly to be more accommodating to scholars unserved by typical residency and fellowship requirements. These reparative structures and events accumulated a critical mass in response to ongoing conditions within early modern and medieval studies made glaringly evident at conferences within those fields over the past several years. ¹Race before Race responded to these attacks on the legitimacy of early modern scholarship on race by affirming the intellectual necessity of projects that challenge the ability of white supremacists to cite the early modern and medieval periods of European history as pristine and exceptional examples of a blossoming civilization. This conversation has been going on for some time online, under the twitter hashtag #ShakeRace and on blogs like In...