Noah’s Ark Being Rebuilt Here

by Jeffrey J Cohen and Julian Yates

Dear ITM Readers,

Below you will find an account of our recent pilgrimage to God's Ark of Safety in Frostburg, MD. Anyone who has traveled Interstate 68 has spotted its scaffolding, looming over the highway, and its cheery if faded blue sign announcing the erection of a modern ark.

We are writing a book together called Noah's Arkive: Groundless Reading from the Beginning Until the End of Time. The project examines how versions of the Noah story circulate around the imagination of climate catastrophe, from ancient Mesopotamia to contemporary envisioning of sea level rise. In the course of writing the book we hope to visit a series of replica arks being built around the world, including this famous one in Kentucky and this infamous one in the Netherlands. 

Let us know what you think. This blog post is the book's official embarkation (though in fact we've been working on it for a while). 

-- Jeffrey & Julian 

“Noah’s Ark Being Rebuilt Here!”

Because we are building an ark, we traveled to western Maryland to visit an ark being built.

Transport

Frostburg MD is a city of the road. In 1806 Thomas Jefferson approved the construction of the National Pike (now US 40) to enable the easy flow of goods to eastern markets. “Mount Pleasant” grew as a waystation for travelers, tourists and itinerant laborers. Over time the dirt track widened and was paved with asphalt. Mount Pleasant became Frostburg, taking its name from Meshach Frost, builder of its first house and hotel. The C & O canal was cut nearby. A railroad constructed. Stagecoaches gave way to automobiles and freight-laden trucks. Frostburg grew. The discovery of coal led to a boom, beautiful homes, a stately hotel. But times changed. Routes changed. Frostburg shrank. The houses and stately hotel are still there but a walk down Main Street is now met with some lively storefronts, some boarded windows, signs welcoming bicyclists, and posters that plead “Don’t Frack Frostburg.” The little city remains tied to the road, but Interstate 68 now bypasses Main Street and most vehicles do not stop.

On November 16, 2016, we headed to Frostburg from Washington DC by car. The journey takes a little more than two hours depending upon traffic and traverses varied terrain: urban expanses of impressive density to sprawl, to farmland and undulating hills; blue portion of a liberal state to its purple middle and red edges; rapidly changing, racially and culturally diverse areas with numerous recent immigrants to majority white communities established in the early 1800s and smaller now than in centuries previous; centers of finance and government to towns that depend on tourism, agriculture, resource extraction; East Coast to near Appalachia. The passing miles yield glimpses of differently paced cycles of economic flourishing and retraction, as well as discontinuous histories of challenge, resistance, reduction.

It’s easy to miss the ark. Or, more correctly, it’s easy for those seeking the ark to over-anticipate its appearance, to want its immensity to loom above the city. Traveling west, you pass the structure quickly on the right as the highway skirts the town. The road bends and there the ark is, fractionally behind you: perched high above the road, which keeps on going, leaving the red steel beams to your rear view mirror. ”Noah’s Ark being Rebuilt Here!” announces a blue billboard. Yet its location when you exit the highway is difficult to find. We back-tracked to reach the site--small roads and sharp turns, no pedestrians, just the occasional passing car. We drove by modest houses, then a stretch of much larger ones, built on former farmland. Up a steep hill, and we arrived at a sign mounted upon immense steel beams announcing ARK OF SAFETY. The sign reminded us of those we had passed along the way that declared HONDA or FORD, and our suspicion that the congregation had repurposed a defunct car dealership to house their place of worship was later confirmed. It also struck us that to find this ark you have to know your way, possess local knowledge -- or use Google maps, which includes the Ark of Safety as a site of possible local interest.

Itinerance

It’s easy to wax poetic about this kind of pilgrimage experience, to give in to a certain touristic drive to narrativize epiphany and encounter, to hang out with an ethnographic desire that never quite materializes. Truth is we were apprehensive. Donald Trump had just won a contentious presidential election on a platform of exclusion, containment, and wall-building. Much support for his vision of an America made great again derived from those distant from what his campaign derided as “the bi-coastal elites,” many of whom imagine a national community that is open, itinerant, cosmopolitan. Trump had significant support for his vision among evangelical voters. And there we were, two academics heading off to see this stalled project of an ark, started 40 years ago as part of an evangelical congregation’s desire to be, to grow, to become. We were worried about what we would find, worried that we would be all condescension, all knowing smiles that might really just be raised guards against a worldview that comprehends everything in advance, including us. Who would we be made out to be by and through the encounter? And who were we, really? What were our intentions? We knew we wanted to visit the ark, but why we had that desire for encounter was difficult to articulate.

There’s so much talk these days about respecting the metaphysics or ontology of other forms of life--animal, plant, let alone human animals who belong to particular ecologies, locales. What then of the closer to home metaphysics of this evangelical ecology that grew up in situ, in Frostburg--very precisely in Frostburg, a city given to itinerance, to roads, and even, come the coal boom, to a routing of matter so that this capital might flow elsewhere, a flow that the anti-fracking signs on Main Street now seek to stem? We have to take seriously the story the congregation broadcasts to the world through its blue highway billboard: “Noah’s Ark Being Rebuilt Here.” For they share and do not share this here with us. Both they and we are building arks. Their sense of here might not be ours, but we did not want to re-write them according to our world view. Neither did we want to be scripted into theirs.

Like it or not, their ark arrests. Respond to their sign. Get of the road; search for the structure; park your car; and you do feel like you have arrived. But what is offered here, in Frostburg, is not a destination. It’s more the point at which another kind of journey might begin. What then does it mean to stop at this site of a landlocked vessel, being built here? What exactly would we encounter at this half built, some might say half-baked ark?

We are not sure that we rose to the occasion. But we did, we think, allow this visit to become an occasion for emergence. Of course, the ark helped.

Encounter

Perched on the hill above the small city, it all looked a bit disappointing. Lock your car at the almost empty lot, look the congregation’s car dealership converted to a place of worship in the eye, and you could be forgiven for thinking this was some wild goose chase. No one about. Just the wind. The sound of crickets in grass that was just days past the need for mowing. Clean, cool air.

What beckoned at first was the steel beams, and then, when we climbed the hill, the concrete. The expansive slabs shaped in an immense rectangle and the long rows of bases for buttresses that do not yet exist seem almost a Fountains Abbey here in Frostburg. These concrete squares offer the shape of an ark to come. Not an “authentic” ark, whatever that would be, but a Noah’s Ark in prospect, adapted for the nearby congregation. Laying a foundation according to the dimensions God delivers to Noah in Genesis but adding an extra floor, this ark’s engineer assumed a cubit must be 18” in length, making the concrete outline extend about a football field in length.

Truth is we were impressed by the scale of the endeavor, a little overwhelmed. This ark in process, whether or not it ever finishes, has already created a strange little ecosystem: a lively home for insects, squirrels, birds; a field full of weeds and wildflowers, gone to seed; on one side, an indentation of matted grass and mud, with dried algae suggesting that rainwater pools, lingers, evaporates. We felt something like wonder, something marvelous, even if it was unlikely we would agree to miracles (the Ark’s website announces two of them). It was under the sign of this wonder, wide-eyed and canny, that we would speak to one of the faces of the ark--the man who, so we would learn, had poured all that concrete, far more than is visible to the eye (that is how foundations work: they compress, harden, render themselves invisible even as they subtend). Our wonder, we hoped, would afford a shell of protection for us but also a space of shared affect and sympathy.

There was movement at a nearby building. Actually there wasn’t. But we spotted a red station wagon and an open door. What happened next is hard to describe because it wants to be easy to describe, wants to fit into an expected narrative. We met Pastor Spence beside a metal building that last winter’s snow had collapsed. He and a fellow congregant, whom we never met, were removing ceiling tiles and some wall boards. His black jacket was white with dust and he was wearing a protective mask over his nose and mouth. We had written to Pastor Spence twice before our visit to Frostburg, introducing ourselves and hoping he would be willing to speak with us about the Ark of Safety, but our requests had gone unanswered. We thought it might be him at the door but we were not fully certain. We caught his attention and told him how impressed we were. He took the mask from his face and placed it above his head, thanked us, did not introduce himself or ask our names. But we talked. He spoke of laying the concrete foundation years ago, the amount of labor required. “I was an engineer at GM,” he told us. “I drove here to build the ark.” The ark was Pastor Green’s vision, he emphasized, not his. He had inherited the project from a man now absent.

We were interested and Pastor Spence warmed quickly to the narration of ark stories. He told us how a construction team from Winchester had to erect the metal frame since no one in his congregation was licensed to do so. We remarked at the amount of labor that must have gone into to getting this far. So much time, so much pulverized stone, so much metal. Pastor Spence emphasized how deep the foundation plunges, invisible concrete set as anchor for a structure yet to arrive, a vision not yet made solid. The ark had to be checked and approved by an engineering firm, and its metal scaffolding was pronounced secure--safe beyond what any final building would require. It had cost a lot. But such is life. We don’t know the circumstances that followed after the completion of the concrete base and the partial metal frame, but work on the ark stopped a decade and a half ago and has yet to resume.

Neighbors

To what does the phrase “God’s Ark of Safety” refer? Not to or not only to this beached ark, beached to begin with, by design. It refers also and always to the congregation itself, whose ark idea this skeletal construction enacts. For what else is a congregation than an ongoing convocation, a shared conviviality?

We asked Pastor Spence what the people living nearby thought of his Ark. He spoke offhandedly of struggles with homeowners: a few nasty phone messages, demands that the steel structure be demolished, embarrassment at this white elephant, fears of devalued property. Arks are as likely to attract derision as they are to cultivate wonder. Would they prefer a vacant lot? Pastor Spence remained cheerful, but not exactly hopeful. As we wandered the site we had noticed places where the concrete was deteriorating, its steel rods exposed. The beams are covered in rust. Ruination is a form of renewal, maybe, but that process also crumbles dreams. Or maybe not. Maybe there is in revelation and grand visions and majestic arks a coldness or a closedness that an unfinished ark rebuffs. This modest ship that was never meant to sail possesses an intensity that a larger architecture might not be able to hold. Well that is our extrapolation. But this sense of productive incompletion as somehow generative runs in parallel with Pastor Spence’s own buoying sense that this ark endeavor, this refuge in Frostburg, had traveled the globe as story, bringing thousands of people to God and even curing the sick.

Pastor Spence had recently visited Ken Ham’s Ark Encounter in Kentucky. He spoke with wonder of that ark’s situation, its scale, its monumentality. He was proud to admit to crying when he first glimpsed Ham’s achievement: rounding a hill and beholding a fully realized vessel built to a 24 inch ell scale. Since we seemed interested, he offered that his own congregation had gone about their own project backwards. The Ark Encounter had taken only six years to design, secure necessary land and funds, and then build. The Ark of Safety had been embarked upon without a plan for raising the money needed for completion. We felt bad. We interrupted. We attempted to reassure Pastor Spence of what had already been accomplished. Funny, this rush to sympathy that did not allow the man quite to finish what he was saying or thinking. But arks do that. All that labor, all that time and money, all that good will--who would want to think it had all gone to waste? Not that that was what Pastor Spence might have been saying.

In retrospect it seemed to us that Pastor Spence had learned to dwell alongside the ark in its incompletion, and that dwelling as a neighbor to a project forever ongoing was at this moment enough. From time to time though (as if he felt it necessary to invoke some future in which the ark might be fully realized) he spoke of investors from distant states who might underwrite the project, if only they could find the time to visit Frostburg. But then his story would become local again. Just as the project was about to float upon liquid capital pouring in, the narrative would turn to the congregation and their lives here and now, with the ark offering a rather modest future. What does it mean always to be working at ground level, aspiring to a view from its highest deck, but suspecting that an such a view will elude? And there is so much of the ark below ground that you cannot see. Forever anchored to a hill in Allegany County, unfaithful to the rules that God delivered to Noah, this ark is not the vessel of Genesis. Pastor Spence assured us that he believes in the literal truth of the bible, the Deluge as historical fact, but his structure is tied to its local origins, the product of Pastor Green’s revelation. The congregation is not building Noah’s Ark, but rebuilding it, building it again, in this this new time and place. The Ark of Safety, Pastor Spence stressed, has extra “nonbiblical” space for his community, four floors rather than the Noachic three. They want room within to meet, to pray, to work. An auditorium. Some offices. Elevators at each end for ease of access. We could almost envision those partitions and this inhabitance as he gestured towards the skeletal steel structure, four storeys tall. “It was never meant to float,” he said. This ark is a house, not a boat. It doesn’t necessarily expect catastrophe and it is not being built against global flood. It is for them, for anyone who exits the interstate, and who decides to remain here.

Parabola

“Noah’s Ark Being Rebuilt Here!” It’s easy to accustom yourself to that gerund--look, that act of building is so permanent a condition that it’s not actually happening any more. Most cars pass the weathered sign and the ark’s steel frame and continue to Hagerstown or Cumberland. Some people stop, drawn by what they have noticed or by internet sites that detail the strangest roadside attractions you might glimpse as you travel the US. As we ate lunch in downtown Frostburg and filled our notebooks with what was already becoming a memory of a visit, an encounter reducing itself into narrative, we asked someone at the restaurant about the town’s relation to the Ark of Safety. She related a different origin, heard from a friend, involving a man who sold a vision of an ark as a trick to take the money of others and then vanished. She did not know if that tale was true. She did not have an opinion on the ark itself. She was just reporting what her friends who had lived in Frostburg for a long time had told her. These competing local narratives will not add up to a settled story.

Pastor Spence narrated a miracle to us, an event that unfolded in the time of Pastor Green, the man who first dreamed the ark. A traveling salesman arrived in Frostburg driving a fancy car, wearing a $500 suit, intent on selling the Ark of Safety congregation a security system for their worship building. Pastor Green listened patiently to the pitch, noting how the salesman wiggled uncomfortably in his chair. He asked the man from out of town if he had a back problem and if he could pray for him? The salesman was not interested. “I’ve listened to you talk for an hour about your security system,” said Pastor Green, “Let me tell you about mine for a few minutes.” And so he did, and he prayed, and the man was healed. Pastor Green suggested that the salesman donate a security system to the congregation--which he did. The salesman stopped traveling. He stayed, became a friend, opted for the ark, a different itinerary or state of itinerance. Pastor Spence told us that he had just come across the congregant’s x-rays last week in the building he was now working upon. Because the man did not want them returned he threw them in the trash.

Parables want to be read. Actually they don’t. They prefer to be enacted--or re-enacted as if for the first time in the lives of those who receive them. So, as writers now, this is what we received. It was perhaps too easy for us to render this little story an allegory. A traveling salesman who sells security systems becomes secure in the Ark of Safety. His changed body speaks his conversion and he stops moving (no more life on the road, no more writhing in his seat). The Ark of Safety, an ark in progress, is its own system of security, foundation. Doubled in its reference both to the ark and the congregation, it takes up a relation to the world premised on a profundity of faith that means something, that gives shelter, that encloses. Recognize that and you would have to stop. Park your car. Not move on and decide to join the rebuilding here. Of course you too would eventually toss away the image that shows the old, faulty support systems, the skeleton before it was properly aligned. X rays and their filmic remains are useful. They diagnose. But maybe true security lies in a different sense of system, a different way of understanding and responding to what goes unseen, a different sense of being in the arkive. X-rays that are not wanted enact the closing off of one security system and the adoption of another.

But what else would we say? We are interested in arks less because of what is stored within them than because of what they discard or exclude, the stories that do not make it aboard, everything left to the rising water. The salesman was captured by the vision of an ark at hand aspiring to a greater ark to come. We dwell with the concrete support for the unbuilt ship, the part underneath the ground that you cannot see, with the strange little eco-system, if not security, that this unrealized ark allows rather than the revelation of some completed structure, some future that may or may not arrive.

We distrust our ardor for Pastor Spence’s story of the miracle, the story of an archival trace recently and conveniently vanished. The tale when we retell it corroborates too neatly what we came to Frostburg hoping to find, the confirmation of our own theory of arks. The discarded x-ray image of the converted body of the itinerant salesman condenses too many of our expected itineraries: the price of inclusion into small community, the linking of enclosure to safety, the inevitable abandonment of some objects, people and histories to the outside, movement become stasis, story become architecture, waste become wonderfully generative.

The parable proves more complicated. Its narrative arc enables the security system which faith provides to comprehend and thereby enclose the knowledge that techniques like x-rays furnish. It does not deny the unseen. The traveling salesman’s back hurt. The traveling salesman needed a home. More than that expected trajectory, however, “security” at the Ark of Safety offers alternate modes of community, belonging, and meaning that are more immediate, longer-lasting, that take less time to sell. If we are prone to distrust the ease with which we seem able to read and so rewrite this parable, it is perhaps because this parable is also a reading, a different way from ours, of programing a relation between belief and technique. Like a car, or a metaphor, parable describes a movement or transport: parabolas are curved planes, the warping of forward trajectories by gravity’s relentless, invisible pull. One arkive encloses another, comprehends it, discards its remnant (the film) but not the information or the impetus it provides. Much the same is true of our project and the reading or rewriting of the Ark of Safety that we condense into parable. Every enarkment collects its own economy of affect, wonder, and violence. But every ark is also a shared space that traverses history, collecting stories along the way, curving towards a certain predictability perhaps but never quite hitting a foreordained mark, never quite realizing a future known in advance.

Unsecured

As Pastor Spence remarked in a moment of complete candor, we have no idea what the inside of Noah’s Ark was like. The Genesis story yields no specifics: no arrangement, no scheme, only a reference to lower, middle and upper levels. So it is that, in Kentucky, Ken Ham’s Ark Encounter materializes the biblical narrative through complex technologies of watering and feeding that automate the labor of caring for all those animals taken aboard, a fully enclosed ecosystem. The biblical narrative offers a blueprint for a structure’s exterior and general divisions but no instructions for inhabitance. The difference we share with the Ark of Safety then is this: we too do not know what life on the ark was like. We do not imagine that we can come to comprehend how that interior should “really” be (re)built. What we do know, though, is that to fill that space, to compartmentalize its vastness and populate those chambers with these but not those entities is to decide everything in advance: to authorize a series of irreversible paths, roads without roadside attractions. A completed ark would be a disappointment, a suffocating space, too delimited, devoid of escape hatches. Refuge too easily becomes gated community (the kind that complains about nearby, unrealized arks), or a prison.

The Ark of Safety is a local ark. “Noah’s Ark Being Rebuilt Here!” as the highway sign in Frostburg declares. The ark is not an allegory for anything else. Pastor Spence is a person like no other. He is not a character, or a type. Yet as we drove home we talked about Pastor Spence as Noah, in the sense of the ordinary medieval townsman who might be asked to play the role when the cycle play was being performed. Everyone knew it was really just their neighbor Joe, that Noah was a tradesman and father and maybe even a ne’er-do-well rather than a visionary, a perfect model of obedience to a distant God. That ark in the drama where he played at being Noah was a sometimes structure, easy to take apart and store, lacking in one sense of depth, but still saturated in another. That ark would be no less beautiful for all its deficiency. As we write our book and so, like it or not, rebuild our own ark, does that mean that we too are Noah, asking questions about security and itinerance and conviviality and parables as we speed away from Frostburg, returning to our respective home-base bubbles in a safe little car?

We think that it is so. We also become or come to person Noah by our undertaking to write this book. The question, we suppose, is who else shall we become?

The story I want to tell

screen grab of the NYT article

by J J Cohen

By now you have no doubt heard that the National Policy Institute met over the weekend here in DC, where they bragged of being newly emboldened to speak their racist ideology. If you read the New York Times, you might even be excused for thinking that their ebullient hate is situation normal around here these days, the fabric of a changed social landscape where we can marvel at their flourishing but not feel a particular call to action, not intuit that anyone is doing anything about their presence, their statements, or their actions. The article by Joseph Goldstein on November 20 (I won't link to it because I don't want to drive up its popularity but it's easy to find) reports upon their meeting at the Ronald Reagan Building and provides details like:

• the institute's leader "railed against Jews" and "with a smile" quoted Nazi propaganda in German
• the institute's leader declared that America belongs to "white people ... a race of conquerors and creators" who now that Trump will soon be president are “awakening to their own identity.”
• at his words some in the audience of two hundred stretched out their arms in Nazi salutes
• someone on or near the front of the room shouted “Heil the people! Heil victory!" and the room shouted the phrases back.
• the institute's leader said to the NYT reporter "White identity is at the core of both the alt-right movement and the Trump movement, even if most voters for Mr. Trump 'aren’t willing to articulate it as such.'"

And so we are told that "these are exultant times for the alt-right movement." 

What we are specifically not told in the course of the New York Times article is that 

(1) the presence of these white supremacists in Washington DC was met with unremitting protest (an image used to illustrate the article shows the protesters but they appear nowhere in the piece itself: all we get are the words and actions of the "exultant alt-right"); (2) the Hamilton hotel refused to host a meal or meeting for them when they discovered who they are and what they believe (as a government building, the Reagan Center cannot deny them space); (3) when members of the institute went to NW DC to eat together on Friday night, they were followed by the protesters who attempted to rush into the banquet room which these white supremacists had reserved under false pretenses; (4) the restaurant closed immediately and asked the white supremacists to leave when the manager realized who they were (his first thought was for the safety of the multiracial staff). 

I want you to note that I am using "white supremacists" throughout this post rather than "alt-right." That latter term is the one these racists prefer for themselves -- as well as the only descriptive term used for them within the New York Times article. Not once does "white supremacist" or "Neo-Nazi" appear in the report ("Nazi" is used only to refer to an "era" that is bygone). The decorative image of the protestors that stands before the actual article shows a man holding a placard that states ALT-RIGHT = NEO-NAZI but Joseph Goldstein does not make that equivalence himself. In other words, the article is so invested in inhabiting the "exultant" world of the "alt-right" that you would never know that their presence was met with protest, counter-discourses, struggle even over terms, and some refuge-making. That side of the story is left to an illustrative picture, if at all.

Through the beckoning of this partial and fascinated gaze, my friends, is how the Donald Trumps of the world win. This is how the racists triumph. They captivate public attention through outrageous spectacle, theatre of hate. They keep the spotlight on themselves so successfully that you would never know there is a crowd just over to the side chanting against white supremacy, or hotels canceling their plans to dine, or a restaurant tricked into serving them realizing its mistake and publicly apologizing in a carefully worded rebuff to everything these people stand for. The story is not the Nazi salutes in the Reagan Building, or the questioning of whether Jews are really people, or the the thousand other tedious racist narratives being placed into intensified circulation -- or at least, such is not the entirety of the story. The protests matter. The refusal to welcome matters. DC was far less helpless, far less placid during their presence than that article implies. I wish Joseph Goldstein had left the room in the Reagan building from which he reports on alt-right exuberance to bear witness to other, more affirmative modes of passion.

Let me offer a more personal story. The restaurant in northwest DC where the white supremacists gathered for their meal is in my neighborhood, about a 15 minute walk from my house. Before the protestors made their way inside the establishment and before its manager realized who these people that his staff were serving really were, those gathered in the restaurant tweeted this image:

The photo was shared with great outrage on social media. I recognized its setting immediately: the banquet room where almost seven years ago we celebrated our son's bar mitzvah, his coming into his adult Jewish identity. In that space where we had gathered with friends and family to honor a moment of passage that to our grandparents and great-grandparents might have seemed impossible (they were remnants of families that fled to the US for refuge rather than face death simply for being Jewish), in that room where my family had one of the happiest moments we've ever had together, white supremacists extended their arms in Nazi salutes. 

Our daughter has chosen the same restaurant for the celebration of her bat mitzvah this coming March. Tonight we are supposed to go there to select the menu. My first thought was to cancel, move the celebration to another venue. Seeing the tweeted image made it feel like something had been taken from us -- and we were not sure at first how the restaurant had responded. But I know there is too much quick action these days, not enough sharing stories to understand who is struggling with you. So I contacted the restaurant's manager and requested some context for what had unfolded. I spoke with him for a long while yesterday morning. His voice cracked as he narrated the events of the evening. Many of those who work at the place are black or Latino, and they had served these people whose values are so hostile to them. They had served people who hate and demean them, and done it without knowing who they were, that their safety might be at stake. The manager told me that the group's reservation had been made without reference to their institute or beliefs; they had simply called it a family reunion. That he had enabled them to gather at a place he is in charge of keeping safe profoundly troubled him. We had a good talk ... but I told him I needed more than a good talk or his personal remorse to restore my confidence. I needed some affirmation of what his establishment stands for, something that makes it clear that the group inadvertently hosted was not and never will be welcomed. Later that day I was contacted by the company's VP of Operations in Dallas. She apologized for what had unfolded, again stating that had they known, they would never had allowed white supremacists to use their establishment. She read me the public apology that was about to be released -- and it covered almost everything I could want (we quibbled about mentioning the protestors as the statement did; I pointed out that what occurred was not about them, even if they had triggered safety concerns; they would not have been there had Neo-Nazis not been eating inside). Maggiano's also donated significantly more than the profits they had earned that evening to the Anti-Defamation League. Their $10,000 to support an organization inimical to white supremacists seemed right.

That is the story I want to tell. Too many narratives marvel at the theatricality of hate. Let's have stories of the challenge such hate receives, of the challenge that must be amplified if we are ever to get through the next four years. Unlike the New York Times, I will not adopt the anodyne terms like "alt-right" that these racists christen themselves with. I do not want to inhabit a room with a reporter as he watches white supremacists exult. I want to be outside with the protestors. Rather than dwell within the Reagan Building, which had to host their event, I want to stand with the Hamilton hotel, which refused them welcome. Even if the only way to get this story is by telephoning them myself, I want to hear of the restaurant that when tricked by these white supremacists donated all their money and more to an organization dedicated to diminishing their power. 

Our daughter has decided that her bat mitzvah celebration will be held in that restaurant as planned. I will no doubt think at some point about that image of the Nazi salute in a space of family happiness that day, just as I am doing now. Yet I also know that our daughter, having chanted her Torah portion and achieved something that during these long days of tutoring and hard work at Hebrew sometimes seems impossible, will be dancing with her friends, inviting us all into her community, making it impossible not to share her joy.

Don’t Ride that Frog, Mouse

by KARL STEEL

Read Jeffrey first. And over on twitter, he's compiled these responses, from here and elsewhere: this, this, this, and this.

Colmar, Bib. municipale 0409 (493), f.1r

The tale of the mouse and the frog appears in all the major medieval British Fable collections: Marie de France (37-39), Berechiah ha-Nakdan (9-11), Walter of England (29-30), John Lydgate (358-525), Robert Henryson (2777-2975), William Caxton (one example). It's a fable worth remembering as we hear calls for compromise (eg: cf this to this).

In the fable, a mouse needs to cross a body of water, and, being unable to swim, agrees to let itself be tied to a frog; partway across the water, the frog tries to drown the mouse, and a bird of prey, hearing the struggle, snatches up the pair and has a meal. The moral is that tricksters will be tricked themselves.

An alternate moral, not one I've encountered in the medieval tradition:don't get on that frog's back.

A bird might rescue you and eat only the frog (Marie, Berechiah, Lydgate). Or it might eat you both (Caxton, Henryson). Maybe you'll get away, maybe you won't. Better just not to get on the frog's back.

(image from a manuscript [Colmar Bibliothèque municipale, 0409 (493)] of the translation into Latin by Carlo Marsuppini (1399–1453) of a classical Greek parodic epic, the Batrachomyomachia, The Battle of the Frogs and Rats. In this particular case, the frog drowns his passenger (who, in Chapman's translation, "Cried Peepe, and perish'd") because he's frightened by a water snake. War follows.)

On being present in a time of danger

by J J Cohen

Hello everyone,

I want to share with you a few thoughts about public presence, speaking out and security. 

Belonging to any publicly visible group with an activist or somewhat liberal or even a humane slant is a risk. Such groups include educators, writers, publishers, artists. Speaking individually or collectively as a member of such a group is a risk. Community is a perilous endeavor, inherently. So is having opinions or ethical stances and disseminating them by speaking in groups or classrooms, tweeting, blogging, or utilizing other kinds of social media. 

Writers, artists, thinkers do public work. We strive to support each other -- and anyone endangered by hate -- visibly, collectively, resoundingly. We belong to a collective even when we speak individually (a heavy burden to bear, and for some of us, unwanted). That visibility means, though, that we cannot ensure animus, harassment and worse will not come our way. That possibility is certainly something to keep in mind in the days ahead, especially in the footprint of your social media presence. I have seen some people deleting their Facebook accounts. I certainly understand that impulse.

Personally I think we are always at risk, but that we ought to better bear in mind how some of us are far more at risk than others. In the wake of the election we have seen a litany of populations singled out for hate: the disabled, LGBTQI individuals and groups, people of color, immigrants and refugees, Muslims, Jews, women. Opting out of presence typically increases danger to those who can't go invisible. Being public both shares that pervasive risk more widely and assists in building more capacious shelters from harm. If we refuse visibility, outreach or outrage in the name of safety, we lose. If we choose quiet privacy over public action, we lose. If we shun risk and allow others to pay the price for the preservation of our small safeties, we lose.

Thanks for being here. 

Jeffrey

[I originally wrote this post for the group WATCH and adapted it for Twitter. I share a rethought version here for you to do with as you will, including telling me I'm wrong.]

WATCH (Writers Artists Thinkers Challenge Hate)

in progress

by J J Cohen

Over the past week many of us have been discussing on Facebook how to form coalitions that strengthen our ability to resist some of the hatred, violence (physical, legal and discursive), and vitriol that has been burgeoning in the US after the election, in the UK after Brexit, and so on. We've founded a group called WATCH: Writers Activists Thinkers Challenge Hate. You are very welcome to join us and help construct and guide the community. So far we are only on Facebook but we hope to expand to other platforms soon. The collective is member driven. It may well be ephemeral. But we need community in the days ahead, of whatever affirmative kind. Here is the description we have so far:

WATCH (Writers Artists Thinkers Challenge Hate) is an open, alliance-based collective to respond more effectively and forcefully to the troubles of the times. We are feminist, anti-racist, queer affirmative, and refuge making. We experiment, we document, we brainstorm, we create, we call out, we affirm, and we protest. Through creative and critical community, we crowdsource resistance. 

Building things is hard work. Any help appreciated. The group belongs to everyone -- it is OURS, so please share and shape.

Love > Hate.

[Join]

On supporting university presses

by J J Cohen

University presses are dedicated to field changing scholarship. Unlike many commercial publishers motivated solely by maximizing profit, most university presses dedicate themselves to making the work they publish accessible to wide publics. These presses pay their staffs a living wage and enable vocations rather than gigs. They employ highly skilled editors, copyeditors, designers and publicists who create works of scholarship that are also works of art. They foster longterm relationships with their authors and are invested in their continued success. What university presses accomplish is essential to the academic world, and to an educated public. I think the recent election proved we need both now more than ever ... and yet most university presses are accomplishing what they do with dwindled institutional support.

University presses make academic careers possible. Without the University of Minnesota Press I would not have been granted tenure: they happily took my first edited collection when I had no secure job, and my first book at a time when I would have been able to place it elsewhere only by rendering it a far more traditional work. Without their continued support (this and this and this and this and this) I would not have had the career that followed. UMP has enabled me to flourish and for that I will always be grateful. When I was asked to share a link to their fundraising campaign I gladly agreed -- and if you have the resources I urge you to support them.

All university presses deserve our support, whether it is by purchasing from them the books we like, ensuring our libraries order these books, or donating directly. UMP has a special place in my heart though. Read about their drive here.



UPDATE 11/18
I wrote this little paean to university presses yesterday, partly to assist the University of Minnesota Press in their fundraising efforts. But I was thinking this morning about how much all of us -- academics or not -- owe these nonprofit presses and their dedicated staffs. The books they create might not sell as well as those pushed into the market by the big for-profits, but that's their strength: in a time of bottom line driven production university presses make new knowledge widely available, and push at the boundaries of fields.


It's not a perfect system. I'm perpetually astonished, for example, by the prices Oxford and Cambridge charge for their volumes, essentially locking them into major research libraries. That's the opposite of access. But presses like Minnesota, Fordham, U Penn, Penn State, Duke, Chicago (among many others) typically make works available as an archive-quality hardback (these will outlast any digital copy), an affordable paperback, and often an inexpensive digital version. The money goes to paying the staff who foster and produce these books and most of the labor occurs onsite. These presses are communities in ways that an outsource crazy, acquisitions hungry, high turnover outfit could never be (you know who I'm talking about). They also tend to maintain longterm, supportive relationships with their authors. Recently they have also been developing the most promising models for open access publishing, utilizing the kind of foundation support only nonprofits can garner -- see, for example, the new Manifold initiative at Minnesota, supported by the Mellon Foundation.

So all hail university presses. Visionaries like Richard Morrison and Douglas Armato have enabled me to have a career (that is no exaggeration), and I am grateful. My story is one of very many.

Allow me to share a moment of pride in my department

by J J Cohen

The English Department of the George Washington University just published this important statement of affirmation. Credo.

"GW English and Creative Writing affirm that we are absolutely committed to fostering programs that recognize the value of studying all aspects of human experiences. Learning from and alongside student movements across the country that – as signs in Kogan Plaza have recently announced – say no to any form of sexism, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism, our department will continue to be a space for thinking deeply, critically, and historically about the rich diversity of the many cultures that have brought us to the moment we inhabit.  Our department offers courses and programming that centralize immigrant or migrant experiences; African American, Latino/a, Asian American, indigenous lives; and the stories and struggles of Muslim, Jewish, and other religious minorities.  We have been at the forefront of developing courses centered on disabled and LGBTQI lives.  We share our students’ concern about the need to end economic injustice and the devastation of the planet we share, and our work as teachers and scholars will continue to reflect that.  We will continue to think about the struggles that unite us across borders and we will not be impeded from carrying out that vital intellectual work. As a faculty, we believe strongly that the Humanities are needed now more than ever.  Our doors are open for study and critical reflection on all of these issues."

Narrative Proof, or 'You Lost. Get Over It.'

Angry ape on wall of the Halle Saint Pierre

by KARL STEEL

The King of Tars is story about proof. So is Guy de Cambrai's Barlaam and Josephat. And likewise an account of a divining ape at the early 17th-century Mughal court. The first needs to demonstrate the proof of Christianity: it does this, spectacularly, by transforming a "wonderlumpe" (from Sarah Star, here) -- a unformed, bloodless, boneless nub of stuff -- into a baby, through baptism; its father from a Black Sultan into a White Crusader; and the near east, from Islam to Christianity, through a crusade that batters its Muslim opponents into bloody submission. The second, a medieval Christianized version of the story of the Buddha, similarly ends its philosophical debates -- about the unity of the Trinity and the singular power of the Creator and the uselessness of worldly pleasures -- with its own crusade, rare in the Barlam tradition, in which Christianity wins again by beating its pagan enemies down. And in the last story, we have an ape unerringly drawn to Christ's name:

his Majesty...caused in twelve several papers in Persian letters, to be rewritten the names of twelve Lawgivers, as Moses, Christ, Mohamet, Ally, and others: and shuffling them in a bagge, bad the beast divine which was the true law: who putting in his foot tooke out the inscribed of Christ. This amazed the King, who suspecting that the Apes master could reade Persian, and might assist him, wrote them anew in Court Caracters, and presented them the second time: the ape was constant, found the right, and kissed it. Whereas a principall Officer grew angry, telling the King it was some imposture, desiring he might have leave to make the lots anew, and offered himselfe to punishment if the Ape could beguile him; he wrote the names putting only eleven into the bagge, and kept the other in his hand. The beast searched, but refused all; the King commanded to bring one, the beast tore them in fury, and made signe the true Law-givers name was not among them. The King demanded where it was, and he ran to the Noble-man and caught him by the hand, in which was the paper inscribed with the name of Christ Iesus. The King was troubled, and keepes the Ape yet. (here; also here; and here; and see here for more)

All of these stories are about proof. Narrative fundamentally differs from philosophy in its mode of proof. Philosophy tends to operate sequentially, but timelessly, in a kind of parallel universe in which the only things that move are arguments, and in which the final argument somehow reaches back through the whole line of proofs to affix it in a quivering, shining stasis. Narrative operates sequentially as well, but it ends when action must stop, when the genre demands that it be wrapped up, not when thought has sufficiently demonstrated itself.

The problem with narratives of proof, therefore, is their being narratives, bound to action, and as a result, committed to establishing their proofs through action. Whatever the truth of Christianity, or a Trump Electoral College victory, the only real order of truth these narratives are able to follow is that of action, in which truth is established when the other side is made to stop talking, or when some dumb beast proves truth because it cannot do anything but. Or when the rules of the genre demand that the game end.

We see, then, that narrative proof fundamentally wants to escape from reason and disputation. This is a Christian 'humanism' - or an electoral movement - that wants an end to conversation, that yells at us to 'give up! you lost!', and is always seeking some way not to have to reason anymore (see #3 here, for example). That always wants the action to relieve them of the work and responsibility of having to think.

your humble author, in the midst of it.

The Unbearable Whiteness of Medieval Studies

a guest post by Dorothy Kim

[ITM has been publishing as blog posts the presentations from the New Chaucer Society congress session "Are We Dark Enough Yet? Pale Faces 2016." Here are the pieces by Cord Whitaker, Candace Barrington and Wan-Chaun Kao. 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 -- which has now become even more urgent and timely -- JJC]

The Unbearable Whiteness of Medieval Studies: Post-Brexit, Post-Trump

This post began as my talk at NCS 2016. I have added more at the end to address post-Trump era and the US Elections.

On Saturday, July 9, 2016, my colleague and collaborator Helen Young and I met up in Brixton to go to the #BlackLivesMatter protest in Windrush Square which was named after the 1948 ship, the Empire Windrush, that brought several hundred Jamaicans to England. This immigration has been touted as always the beginning of multicultural Britain. The protest started with a number of speakers who brought up the connections between #blacklivesmatter in America and the conditions of the black community particularly in Brixton because Brixton has had a long history of police abuse and violence. The speakers connected US racism with British imperialism, settler colonialism, and postcolonialism. They discussed how they were a diaspora and how the British fight for #blacklives is also about Brexit, austerity, gentrification, the abuse toward detention and asylum seekers, and also about how #blacklivesmatter in education and in history. Numerous times, speakers pointed to how much British history and literature is white history and literature. And how no one seemed to have ever been taught by teachers who looked like them.

We, as academics, should not be shocked by this emphasis on education and the complexion of the academic world. It has been an ongoing campaign here in Britain under the hashtag #WhyIsMyCurriculumSoWhite? The discussion of this means is clearly delineated by the National Union of Students on their site:

“Universities in the UK have operated under a colonial legacy, perpetuating ‘Whiteness’ both structurally and in the confines of knowledge reproduced. Symptoms of a White curriculum can be seen far and wide, from the glorification of thinkers such as Galton, to the distinct absence of academics not racialised as ‘White’ from faculties, reading lists and ‘core’ subjects.”

http://www.nusconnect.org.uk/articles/why-is-my-curriculum-white-decolonising-the-academy

         

These issues of curriculum and bodies in academia are intertwined. They cannot be uncoupled. In relation to curriculum, Britain is not the only country where students have demanded a change. Likewise, you see this also in the US with #blacklivesmatter protests in the university and have seen it in our field of English literature with the protest at Yale regarding the core canonical authors class. In those demands, Yale English students demanded to know why their curriculum and core required class is a bastion of colonial male white privilege. They want their classes decolonized and they have, of course, named Chaucer as part of the problem.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jun/01/yale-english-students-call-for-end-of-focus-on-white-male-writers.

In South Africa, this has sparked a huge student push in activism with the hashtag #RhodesMustFall. The point is to address how to decolonize a university and its curriculum (starting with the University of Cape Town). This piece by Surren Pillay, given as a talk in 2015 crystalizes this issue and has so much resonance now in a post-Brexit and post-Ferguson world:

“But we have to ask ourselves always, what more can we do to work towards undoing the epistemic violence of colonial knowledge? Should we settle for a supplemental concept of history, where we now add African Studies onto the existing curriculum with the danger of once more ghettoizing it from the other mainstream disciplines? Or, do we have to reconfigure the entire curriculum in ways that allows us to think the world, now equipped with the intellectual heritages that we have been taught to ignore from across the previously colonized world? …How do we recruit new knowledge into our universities that breaks with geographical and linguistic apartheid so that the antiquated idea of a Department of English can be a department for the  comparative study of Literature? And how do we bridge the continental fault lines between Anglophone, Francophone, Lusophone, and Arabic knowledge? And should a decolonized knowledge project ask questions about the work that the disciplinary forms of knowledge do to reinforce unequal power relations or inhibit our thinking about certain objects of knowledge in particular ways?” (http://africasacountry.com/2015/06/decolonizing-the-university/)

My answer is a resounding YES. We must do all these things to decolonize medieval studies and particularly medieval English studies. And if we consider our disciplines histories, English studies was already always about the world (and the non-white world) before they became part of white English canon.” I also suggest reading this great piece about British universities (http://www.consented.co.uk/read/rhodesmustfall-but-british-universities-also-need-to-decolonize/).

Gauri Viswanathan wrote in 2014 in the preface of her 25-year anniversary republication of the now classic “Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India” that now “Perhaps the most significant effect of postcolonialism—with all its shortcomings, blind spots, and metropolitan evasions—is that the curricular study of English can no longer be studied innocently or inattentively to the deeper contexts of imperialism, transnationalism, and globalization in which the discipline first articulated its mission” (xi). She points out in this study but also in thinking of the work done since the first publication of her book that English literature as a field has a very short history (150 years) and in fact began as a colonial project and thus was formed internationally before become a “national” literary field (xii-xiii). We need to ask ourselves as Viswanathan suggests: “precisely where is English literature produced?” I was particularly delighted to note that in her preface the work that most impressed her in “refocusing attention on the linguistic, literary, and cultural hegemonies that established the terms of colonial identity and difference” and “succeeds in disrupting some of the national geographies and periodizations that generally structure disciplinary identifications” (xiii) was the volume edited by Patricia Ingham and Michelle Warren, Postcolonial Moves (Palgrave: 2003). As medievalists, we have a view from the past that already should see medieval English studies as already always global, inclusive, multilingual, multicultural.

At Leeds last week in a late-added session on #femfog, a number of medieval panelists noted the issue of the whiteness of medieval studies. Christina Lee said that Anglo-Saxon Studies has a whiteness problem. Another panelist suggested outreaching to high schools in order to change the complexion of our classrooms. However, I would like to point out that this suggestion is part of the problem. #WhyIsMyCurriculumSoWhite and other campaigns, researchers, highered critics have discussed how the best way to make the field more inclusive is to make the bodies teaching in permanent positions less white. The assumption that was made when this suggestion was made at Leeds is that somehow we have a “pipeline problem.” This is a myth, just like, “broken windows” is a myth of how to fix an inequitable system.

We know that UK universities have a dismal record of diverse faculty. In 2011, the Guardian reported there were 50 black professors in a field of 14,000. In 2013, 17 was the count of black women professors. The US does not get off so easily either. The numbers are down in relation to black faculty in highered institutions in the US in the last decade. And if we didn’t have over 3,000 Historically black colleges and universities who employed 97% of black faculty in the US, those statistical numbers would plummet dramatically possibly down to the UK’s current .3% range.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/11/12/its-2015-where-are-all-the-black-college-faculty/. In the United States, the demand for our curriculum to change, for our universities to decolonize have come from #blacklivesmatter and student protests have prioritized in their top ten lists of demands an increase in black faculty of 10% campus wide, thus, on par with the percentage of black students on campuses.

http://www.columbiatribune.com/list-of-demands-from-concerned-student-group/pdf_345ad844-9f05-5479-9b64-e4b362b4e155.html

I knew of at least seven people of color this year who were on the job market in N. America and Europe in medieval English (widely). Though there were not a huge number of jobs, can we guess how many of them were hired this year. The answer is none. Again, we do not have a pipeline problem. Instead, the question is what are you doing to change the complexion of your departments, the complexion of your field. Let us do some radical counting. Let us look at what you have answered in your surveys. [I asked everyone to answer two questions at the beginning of the talk: 1. Tell me how many faculty colleagues you have who are POC 2. How many of them are medievalists?} How many of you have medieval colleagues of color in your departments as faculty? Talking is all well and good, but isn’t it time to actually do something to change the complexion of our departments and our discipline. I gave the inaugural talk at Yale’s DH Lab this winter. I spoke about “Decolonizing the DH.” The points I gave there can be applied here: Are you creating research grants and fellowships specifically for POC who are graduate students and faculty? What do your keynotes and panels look like? What does the complexion of your departments look like? And finally, do you even know the POC in the history of medieval studies? I recently found out that Carter Revard, whose work I know from his excellent discussion of the early 14^th c. Harley 2253, is also a famous and reknowned Osage Native American poet and Native American Studies scholar.

The framework for this session was to ask Why are we so pale? I would say, the real framework should be, what do we do to make it less pale? I am interested in action not in rhetoric or discussion. Post-Brexit and in the wake of another round of wrenching #blacklivesmatter protests, we don’t need more discussion and really more white guilt and fragility, we need commitment and action to fight for inclusiveness, equity, and justice for POC.

Post-Trump and the anniversary of Kristallnacht

Nov. 9, 2016

"Thanks to the white people who voted for hate, 2 million people are about to lose their health insurance with the repeal of the ACA. 3 million American Muslims are at risk of being sent to internment camps or deported. Roe v Wade might be overturned. Planned Parenthood is at risk of getting defunded. Forget getting equal pay for women any time soon. Every executive order that President Obama signed to protect LGBTQ folks is at risk of being overturned. We've lost the chance at a liberal supreme court. Black people will continue to get shot by cops, not to mention that might increase thanks to Goldemort's call for stop-and-frisk nationwide. And forget comprehensive legislation for either gun control or immigration reform. This is also the guy who wants to overturn birthright citizenship. Thanks to white people voting for the hateful xenophobic racist misogynist, we're about to lose 8 solid years of progress AND may soon be seeing America's more fascist side.” (A Graduate Student)

Today in Philadelphia, there was Nazi vandalism on the anniversary of Kristallnacht. The US Elections and the white nationalist agenda delivered Donald Trump the White House. The statistics of the election show that white men and women (and a lot of them with college degrees) voted for racism, sexism, xenophobia, ableism, etc. What they voted for was to keep white supremacy and whiteness as the center and power in this country. This violence is only the beginning. We can see what happened in post-Brexit England to view what will happen to black communities, POC (particularly Latino and Muslim communities and anyone else seen as an immigrant), LGBTQA friends, the disability community.

Medieval Studies, you are at a crossroads. Why do I say this? Because Medieval Studies has become the historical belly of white nationalism and white supremacy. If you don’t believe me, then read this really insightful Washington Post article about Derek Black: “The White Flight of Derek Black” . As an academic community (because the contemporary publics do not ignore this) you must face our field’s long history and current complicity in white nationalism and what we see happening now on both sides of the Atlantic. What will you do to make sure that Medieval Studies is not imagined as an academic space that upholds white supremacy? What will you do to make sure that students don’t imagine that if they take a medieval studies class it will be a lesson in the centrality of white nationalism? Not addressing this, not considering how you have not decolonized our field, your research, your pedagogy, in fact bolsters white nationalism. Neglect and silence are not an option, and in fact make you complicit in upholding systems of white supremacy/ white nationalism."

But what about the bodies in academic medieval studies—the researchers, graduate students, the undergrads? Academia is a toxic white space and also an incredibly antifeminist one. What these twinned events (Brexit and a Trump presidency) will have done is basically make all of us who are not white, cisgendered, Christian, heterosexual upper middle class males targets. This is not just about implicit bias anymore, this is about virulent aggression and violence towards anyone who does not fit the image of male white supremacy and white nationalism.

Being silent, accommodating this, hoping that it will go away will only put the bodies not welcome in these spaces further in jeopardy, further in danger, further from ever being able to be in these spaces again for their own safety. Do not tell your students that you want everyone to come together. The students who do not have white male cisgendered bodies are targets and will see Medieval Studies as the center of the white nationalist patriarchal agenda.

In other words, medievalists wake up.

Your colleagues and students are now specific targets of virulent attack, not just bodies that have to deal with implicit bias and a host of daily microaggressions. There is going to be no progress in our field in academia against racism, sexism, transmisogyny, ableism, xenophobia, antisemitism, Islamaphobia, etc. Medieval Studies doesn’t even have enough POC to become 1% of the population of Kalamazoo. We are going to be driven out not by implicit systems of discrimination and small cuts but by larger, virulent, and a more bold and vocal whiteness and white supremacy.

What are you going to do about it medievalists? Will you hide and just hope that being silent will allow you to be overlooked? That somehow it really won’t change the conditions of your life in academia? Will you comply with the academic structures that mean you uphold white Christian able-bodied men at all junctures? Let’s call it what it is, will you collaborate? If this is your thought or answer, this is also your incredible privilege. Guess what, it completely changes the bodies in this field who do not have your cisgendered, white, male, Christian privilege. Your silent, tacit, or enthusiastic compliance will mean these bodies will be violently driven out of the field.  

What happens in Medieval Studies is not my choice. It is your choice, my white colleagues, to shape what this field will look like. Will you be silent in the hopes that you will not be a target? Or will you defend and fight tooth and nail for your vulnerable colleagues? If you choose to comply, we will be gone from this space. Medieval Studies will be seen as the nexus of white nationalism and be a space in which any student of color, queer student, disabled student, and women would feel that your classroom is a hostile space of white masculinity and white nationalism. But hey, maybe that’s how you imagine Medieval Studies will be saved from the chopping board of austerity. Your version of Medieval Studies will uphold the white nationalist interests and thus will be enshrined as canon and also be given money. Your choice also means the rest of us who do not have this privilege will disappear from this academic space. It means Medieval Studies will continue to be known as a space of white supremacy and virulent sexism filled with “nice, silent” white men perfectly willing to grab all of us by the “queynte” without consequence. No one will even realize we were ever here.

What can I do you ask? Do the work and fight for us in every arena, if you do not, expect this field to look the way it did in the nineteenth century when it was explicitly formed to help distinguish European White history from the history of non-white colonies. Your good wishes and intentions and feelings that you are good people are not going to help any of the bodies not normal in this field be able to survive Medieval Studies.

I don’t want this Medieval Studies. This is not my Medieval Studies, but I am enough of a pragmatist to realize that it is many people’s Medieval Studies in this field. What are you going to do to fight this? What are you going to do to make sure these bodies don’t disappear from the scholarship, the conferences, the classrooms now and in the future. Be assured, we are going to disappear without intense fighting from our white colleagues to keep us here. The pressures of virulent and implicit white supremacy have already begun to make us disappearing acts. Or let me be even clearer, your marginalized colleagues are going to be attacked and run out. What are you going to do about it?  It is on you what this field will look like, what reputation this field has now and in the future. 

We get this week to mourn. Next week, let's get to work.

Dorothy Kim is a medievalist, digital humanist, feminist. She teaches medieval literature at Vassar College.