a guest post by CORD WHITAKER
[Over the next few weeks two ITM will be publishing as blog posts the presentations from the New Chaucer Society congress session "Are We Dark Enough Yet? Pale Faces 2016." This collaboratively shaped roundtable pondered the ways in which literary medieval studies has both changed and resisted some profound challenges to its self-identity over the past decade and a half. Returning to the theme of Carolyn Dinshaw's 2000 Biennial Lecture in London "Pale Faces: Race, Religion and Affect in Chaucer's Texts and Their Readers," presenters wondered about diversity among medievalists, the place of the personal, the matter of race, and the decolonization of medieval studies as a discipline.
Please share and add to the discussion! It is our hope to formulate an action plan out of the event and its aftermath. -- JJC]
Pale Like Me: Resistance, Assimilation, and ‘Pale Faces’
Sixteen Years On
African Americans
of at least average height are supposed to play basketball. This kept me from
learning to play ball until I became an adult. For as long as I can remember, I
have been about doing what everyone else is not
doing. I have been about going against the grain. This is probably a trait I
share with many of you.
There is sanctuary
in being different, but it can also cause you to need sanctuary. This was the case for Texas journalist John Howard
Griffin. In his 1961 book Black Like Me, Griffin
writes that “In medieval times, men sought sanctuary in churches. Nowadays, for
a nickel, I could find sanctuary in a colored rest room” (140). It didn’t occur
to Griffin, trained in the reporting and analysis of current events as he was, that some nowadays might find sanctuary in
the Middle Ages. To address today’s question—are we dark enough yet?—is
also to ask how medievalism and the identities of persons of color can and do
intersect.
Griffin’s book was
groundbreaking. From October through December 1959, Griffin, a white man,
assumed the identity of a black man through a combination of skin darkening
medication, tanning, and staining his skin brown. He travelled through the American
South. One might say he masqueraded—and
a number of news outlets used exactly that term—but the masquerade no doubt
seemed very real when he was being chased down the street and bombarded with
racial epithets. One might also claim that something of his black
experience—and the extreme media attention it received—marked him for the rest
of his life. Griffin writes: “Both Negroes and whites have gained this strange
certainty [that] because I was a Negro for six weeks, I remained partly Negro
or perhaps essentially Negro” (175).
Griffin’s
experiment shows that a masquerade can have very
real implications. It can reveal very
real truths. For Griffin, it revealed that there is a wall between the
experiences of blacks and whites—a wall that usually makes experiences mutually
unintelligible. In “Pale Faces,” Carolyn Dinshaw writes of her father’s
conversion to Christianity:
The Parsi religion of his family, so
vague and so strange, as he put it, with its rituals and prayers in an
indecipherable language—my father left all that behind…But his conversion, like
the medieval ones I mentioned earlier, left a residue…There was a racial/religious
remainder in the household. (39)
She goes on to say that she “picked
up and lived out” this unassimilable remainder, and that it informs her
queerness. Dinshaw offers us stark realities—some real truths—about the walls
that disrupt even familial relations across axes of geography, time, and social
acceptability. Her comportment toward the world and her medievalism are
realities born of and revealed by her father’s—and to some extent her own—masquerade.
Dinshaw turns to
Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale to study
what the unassimilable remainder looks like. The tale also offers another
bridge between masquerade and reality. In it, the remainder appears in the
Syrian Muslims who convert to Christianity in order that their Sultan might
marry the Roman Christian princess Custance. Famously, the whole thing fails
when the Sultan’s mother and her co-conspirators feign conversion in order to
murder everyone except Custance, including her Roman retinue, the Sultan and
the converted Syrians, during a wedding feast. But in the end, the Romans have
their revenge and the remaining Syrians are slaughtered, too. There seems to be
no difference between the falsely converted Saracens and the real converts. All
die horribly because, in Dinshaw’s words, “the Saracen will always be a
Saracen, even if baptized” (26-7).
The Saracens,
Dinshaw’s father, and Griffin have all been dark in one way or another. And the
reality is that darkness, interpreted as essential, seems to stick.
Today I
consider my own position in this game of masquerading and tainting. I am an
African-American and a medievalist. And to many, these are incommensurate
roles. I must be masquerading in one or the other. The accusation is nothing
new. Growing up the son of a public relations professional, I was taught to
speak only the Queen’s English outside the house. African American Vernacular
English was fine only at home. The result was that I was regularly accused of
talking and acting white. Well before
medieval studies came into view, I was already juggling incommensurate roles.
When I started to
fall in love with Chaucer and medieval literature in college, it was in part because
Middle English made me a much better reader of modern literature—including
modern African-American literature—and in part due to the defamiliarizing
wonders of medieval literature in its own right. Still, there were some who
believed my interest in medieval studies could be nothing more than a passing
fancy. That I was merely playing around. These included one of my senior thesis
advisors. (It was a good thing I had more than one!) When, several years later,
it was clear that I was going to grad school, he admitted that he had never
taken me seriously. He apologized.
In my second year
of grad school, a prospective student visiting my program—a fellow person of
color—learned that I am a medievalist. Her face drooped and her eyebrows rose. She
looked me up and down. With disdain, she said, “You’re a medievalist?”
Even now, I take
care when I tell people what I do. Sometimes, fellow persons of color light up
when they learn that I’m a professor—but when they learn my subject, their
faces become like Custance when she is on trial for murder: pale, as pale as the face of a man being
led to the gallows [II.B.645-648]. They exhibit what Dinshaw calls “a mark of
loss: sudden loss of blood, loss of family, even…loss of purity” (23). I have
broken faith. I am no longer family. No longer pure. Perhaps they fear the
taint of my medievalism, my expertise in things too white. Surely the scene was
similar when Griffin’s experiment was revealed to his white neighbors during a
nationally televised interview. Only the skin colors of those who feared being
tainted and those who represent the tainting were reversed.
I work on the history of race, too, I
add hastily. In this claim, I seek sanctuary from the pallid storm caused by another
sanctuary: my medievalism. The claim is my
colored restroom. Some of my interlocutor’s color is restored. Only some. But
it is enough that I will be sure to add the caveat more quickly next time.
Personally,
to be dark enough would be to embrace the taint until it is no taint. To no
longer give into the desires to massage my professional and personal identities
to fit present company. To refuse to assimilate. I’m working on it.
But
the question of today’s roundtable is meant—first and foremost, I think—for our
field. And I propose that, for the field to be dark enough would be to embrace
our subject as a kind of taint. (And I don’t mean adopting a pose of lowliness:
Oh, I’m just a medievalist, nothing I
have to say is relevant to the modern world.) Instead, I mean to embrace
that in our field inheres the ability to criticize modernity, to pick apart and
expose the dynamics that make modernity comfortable and allow it to appear monolithic,
to utterly annihilate narratives of interminable progress. When medieval
studies takes these stances, it is necessarily seen as a dark stain on the supposedly
glimmering, above-the-fray, modernizing face of the neo-liberal university.
But, here we have a choice. We in medieval studies can all too easily adopt the
pose of those who study a most venerable subject and are the most non-threatening
of professors—who would never rock any boats because we practice in a field
that is by its very nature conservative.
Neither approach is a masquerade, even as each masks the other mutually.
If we have learned
anything from the recent killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. Or
before them, Walter L. Scott. Or going back further, Trayvon Martin. Or in
1999, Amadou Diallo. And on and on and on through the history of slavery and
conquest. If we have learned anything from these ongoing terrors, it’s that to
be dark is to be taken as a threat. Medieval studies can choose to be dark.
Suffice it to say,
we as a field are not dark enough yet. And neither am I.
