Critical confessions now
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Critical confessions now
Abdulhamit Arvasa, Afrodesia McCannonb, and K r i s Tr u j i l l o c a
Department of English, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA. Liberal Studies, New York University, New York, NY, USA. c Department of Comparative Literature, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA. b
postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2020) 11, 151–170. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-020-00187-4
On the occasion of postmedieval’s tenth anniversary, we have come together to celebrate. But how and why do we celebrate or, more urgently, how do we celebrate now? What the present moment makes clear is the extent to which there is no possibility of unbridled celebration — that is, no possibility of celebration taken out of contexts shaped by the vicissitudes of hope and despair. The rituals and rites of celebration bring into relief that the commemorative function of celebration carries with it the sedimentation of historical force and memory; celebration is always already the acknowledgment of the present’s conditioning by the past and the past’s re-emergence into the present. These pasts, of course, can be both constraining and enabling. Our decision to focus on confession in this special issue provides an opportunity to perform a collective confession of appreciation for the decade of work made possible by the platform built by postmedieval. Thus, we called for a diverse set of contributors to engage in a confessional mode of writing. We tasked the authors to reflect on the ways in which each author’s positionality is 2020 Springer Nature Limited. 2040-5960
postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies www.palgrave.com/journals
Vol. 11, 2-3, 151–170
Arvas et al
constituted by and constitutive of postmedieval’s ‘present-minded approach’ to premodern studies. By calling these authors, these devoted readers and writers, to confess, then, we ask them to take up the first-person singular in order to bring the past and present ‘into productive critical relation.’ We are guided in part by Amy Hollywood’s reminder that ‘confession was not only an admission of sins but also an act of praise and a profession of faith’ (Hollywood, 1995, 60) as this commemorative issue offers collective praise for and faith in the project of postmedieval. This faith, like this celebration, however, is not unconditional but rather guided by the journal’s own call for ‘productive critical relation.’ In other words, to be most faithful to the spirit of the journal is to embrace even these moments of praise as also opportunities for self-critique — to account for our affective attachment to and investment in premodernity while also recognizing and safeguarding against the inequity, violence, and injustice engendered by medieval and early modern institutions and forms of life. Thus, we imagine with Hollywood’s contribution to this issue ‘a medieval tradition deeply at odds with itself, a tradition that distrusted itself as much as I did it’ — that is, we imagine a counter-tradition internal to premodernity tha
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