Antiracist Medievalisms: From "Yellow Peril" to Black Lives Matter by Jonathan Hsy (review)

Antiracist Medievalisms: From "Yellow Peril" to Black Lives Matter arrives in the wake of a sea change in medieval studies. After years of the field coming to accept race as a worthy lens through which to read certain medieval texts and as a structuring apparatus that precedes scholarly engagement, discovery or justification are no longer the foremost critical interventions. Rather, what seems to have been missing from this conversation is the infrastructure upon which durable projects on race and the Middle Ages can be built for decades to come. This need echoes the succession of political events that helped expedite the racial turn in medieval studies: a resurgence of white nationalism, the concussive murders of unarmed Black people, and a rise in anti-Asian violence among other social and political crises. As the urgency of these events threatens to recede, so has the possibility held by the racial turn in medieval studies. Antiracist Medievalisms solidifies the gains of the initial wave of scholarship on race and the Middle Ages, while also expanding the theoretical terms upon which medievalists can draw to enrich the conversation about race. Hsy draws on sources as divergent as José Estaban Muñoz's theory of "disidentification," ecopoetics, queer studies, and Black feminism to move the field into the important and ongoing conversations within race and ethnic studies.

As a result of its critical ambitions Antiracist Medievalisms both examines and occupies cusps and borders. The introduction's stated project—to ask "what is at stake when communities of color create things (texts, stories, objects) that 'feel' medieval"—belies Hsy's formal innovations and archival reach (9). While Antiracist Medievalisms indeed places its emphasis on modern usages of medievalisms by specific communities of color, much of the strength of the project's intervention derives from its juxtapositions, particularly the author's adroit bridging between modern archival materials and medieval sources. To capture the sense of things that "feel" medieval, Hsy draws together both deep insights honed from a career as a medievalist and astutely chosen archival materials to craft a layered portrait of American appropriations of the Middle Ages. For example, his first chapter puts into conversation Frederick Douglass (c. 1818–95), Chinese-American journalist Wong Chin Foo (1847–98), and Arab-American author Ameen Rihani (1876–1940) as writers engaging with and critiquing "gendered Western imperial ideologies of progress and expansion" (23). The conjunction puts writers that are often part of divergent scholarly conversations into the same landscape.

This initial move anticipates broader arguments about a global Middle Ages and solidarities across racial lines. Hsy configures these in two main ways. At times he draws correspondences between medieval texts or forms, and modern mobilizations of them. The most daring version of this comes in the third chapter, "Place: Indefinite Detention and Forms of Resistance in Angel Island Poetry," in which he reads poetic inscriptions that Chinese immigrants carved into the walls of Angel Island against medieval Tang dynasty poetic forms. This chapter is sustained by a sensitive and melancholy reading of physical and temporal distance as contemplated by the Chinese detainees who found solace in Tang poetry that was produced by poets struggling with displacement and a loss of meaning. In so doing, it advances a layered argument about the possibilities of connecting differing cultural frameworks for the Middle Ages. As Hsy frames it, Tang poetry quite literally is part of the landscape of western medievalism. He posits "a symbiotic relationship of built environment and organic matter" that results from how the detainees' literary production "transforms the meanings of a physical environment" (72).

At other times, Hsy draws connections among his objects of study to put narratives into proximity to one another. In this way, the reader is led to see parallels and allegiances where they might not be apparent. His fourth chapter, "Passing: Crossing Color Lines in the Short Fiction of Alice Dunbar-Nelson and Sui Sin Far," for example, interlaces the...