Premodern race studies in academic country clubs
- PDF / 117,601 Bytes
- 7 Pages / 535.748 x 697.323 pts Page_size
- 40 Downloads / 212 Views
Premodern race studies in academic country clubs
Ay a n n a T h o m s o n a a n d J e f f r e y C o h e n a a
Department of English, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA.
Abstract This piece offers Ayanna Thompson’s confession about her training in early modern studies and a window into what it takes to master premodern critical race studies. In dialogue with Thompson’s confession, Jeffrey Cohen explores the origin of the groundbreaking #RaceB4Race symposium, sponsored by the Arizona Center for Medieval Studies (ACMRS) on the ASU campus in Tempe for the first time in January 2019. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2020) 11, 338–344. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-020-00181-w
Ay a n n a T h o m p s o n Confession: I am not trained as an early modernist. In fact, I’m fuzzy on many of the intricacies of early modern English history, and I’ve never read Herrick or Lyly (just two of the authors that my current institution requires students to know!). I kept this fact hidden for most of my career because I felt ashamed of my lack of ‘foundational’ knowledge, but a few years ago I started speaking out about it. To remain quiet was to normalize a system that I have come to understand as artificial and constructed, and, therefore, non-natural and changeable. You see, I was admitted to graduate school to study modernism. I had a solid foundation in African-American and postcolonial approaches to modernism Ó 2020 Springer Nature Limited. 2040-5960
postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies www.palgrave.com/journals
Vol. 11, 2-3, 338–344
Premodern race studies in academic country clubs
from my undergraduate days at Columbia University, where I had the honor to study with Marcellus Blount, Zita Nunes, Edward Said, Gauri Viswanathan, and others. But when I got to graduate school, I had an immense sense of imposter syndrome. Everyone knew so much more than I did! While many of my classmates had parents who were academics, my family kept asking why I was still in college. I felt that I had to take steps to catch up, and so I took graduate courses in areas in which I felt deficient and ignorant: contemporary American poetry, Herman Melville, Henry James, and critical theory. It was only after I had completed my coursework in ‘Shit I Don’t Know’ that I declared myself an early modernist to the absolute bewilderment of the early modern faculty. I had never taken any classes in the field, aside from a fantastic Milton class taught by Barbara Lewalski, and the faculty in the area had never seen any of my writing. Needless to say, no one wanted to take me on as their advisee. It was only years later when I was on graduate committees that I realized how many unwritten codes of conduct that I had broken; after all, unwritten codes of conduct are meant to serve those in the know and to disadvantage those who are not already in the club (see Jeffrey Cohen’s confession [following mine] for more on this type of Country Club model). It is sort of a miracle that I made it through with my PhD in hand, a
Data Loading...
