Digital Roundtable: Race, Nationalism, and Fantasies of the Middle Ages and Renaissance

The CSULB Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, with the support of the CLA Faculty Council’s Inclusive Excellence Committee, invites students and faculty to attend our sponsored digital roundtable:

Race, Nationalism, and Fantasies of the Middle Ages and Renaissance

Register in advance for this webinar here.

Popular western media often claims inspiration from the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and the results are famously inaccurate in representing the past. Scholars have addressed this disconnect first by cataloguing inaccuracies and then by engaging with the cultural contexts that engender these mis-representations. In response to recent resurgences of white-supremacy, scholars have revealed the many connections between race-based nationalism and enthusiasm for an imagined European past. 

This panel asks scholars working in this field to consider more deeply the connection between medievalism and white supremacy, and to interrogate some of the assumptions that have driven the conversation thus far. In what ways does “White Supremacy” fail to describe the groups whose nationalism often uses the Middle Ages as their origin?  In what ways does the specter of the “White Supremacist” provide a scape goat for more popular fantasies of race-based nationalisms? To what extent does scholarly focus on stereotypical types of medievalism ignore more feminist or socially progressive reproductions of the past? This panel seeks to further the discourse on popular medievalisms while identifying the current cultural function of various reproductions of the past.

Roundtable Participants: 

Esther Cuenca, History, University of Houston Victoria

Usha Vishnuvajjala, English, Cardiff University

Jason Thames, English, PhD Student, Harvard University