Thread by @dorothyk98

#MedievalTwitter #ShakeRace #RaceB4Race #LitPOC This is a PSA for an incident that happened earlier that smacked of some overt misogynoir. A bunch of those tweets have been erased but I am tweeting now to discuss some things related to ideas of BIPOC scholars & "rigor." 1/

#MedievalTwitter #ShakeRace #RaceB4Race #LitPOC There are certain premodern study "skills" or "areas" that white premodern studies loves to wave around as the only way to go & use it as some sort of cudgel for gatekeeping that smacks of a kind of "white premodern only" 2/

#MedievalTwitter #ShakeRace #RaceB4Race #LitPOC so people are in "shock" when premodern BIPOC scholars actually have these skills and in spades. One of them is often book history, material book culture, paleography etc. But the other one discussed is "philology". 3/

#MedievalTwitter #ShakeRace #RaceB4Race This is about "philology" b/c someone decided to wrap some misogynoir around a comment about not reading Classical, Medieval, or Early Modern Latin, but reading someone's article on an early modern topic written in Latin. 4/

#MedievalTwitter #ShakeRace #RaceB4Race if you use the term "philology" you are discussing an area of study with baggage, racist baggage that goes back to genealogical/white supremacist "origins" of European languages in the premodern as some sort of whiteness is great again. 5/

#MedievalTwitter #ShakeRace #RaceB4Race ppl have written about that. Also that eugenicist parallel urge to trace "origins" in words as a project of language genetics (stemma and all that). Read Harpaham, Said, etc. You can also read ALL the Sociolinguistics who have written 6/

#MedievalTwitter #ShakeRace #RaceB4Race about these things. But what pisses me off @ the comments about an early modern book historian's complaint about having to try to figure out an entire scholarly article written in Latin (not any materials in the various premodern Latin) 7/

#MedievalTwitter #ShakeRace #RaceB4Race is literally some idea that academic premodern scholarship is about being a "fan" in very much the ways that toxic white male "fan" cultures (Gxmergate, SciFi, etc.) imagines who gets to be in those gates. 8/

#MedievalTwitter #ShakeRace #RaceB4Race you are literally imagining that someone (who is a Black woman) should not be a premodern scholar b/c someone decided to write a scholarly article in Klingon (Latin) and so they can't really be a "fan/scholar" of Star Trek (premodern) .9/

#MedievalTwitter #ShakeRace #RaceB4Race I use Klingon b/c it too is a "dead", non-speaking contemporary language w/ a very intense fandom surrounding it. Scholarship is not fandom. Who exactly did this journal or author think this article was for? 10/

#MedievalTwitter #ShakeRace #RaceB4Race shame on this journal, and I speak as a journal editor, for literally accepting & publishing a piece as a form of fan gatekeeping rather than to "communicate & share knowledge." This is so different from say publishing in languages away 11/

#MedievalTwitter #ShakeRace #RaceB4Race from the scholarly global lingua francas (usually colonial European languages). Scholarship should be more multilingual for access and equity. Scholarship written in Latin is not about that, it's about white gatekeeping. 12/

#MedievalTwitter #ShakeRace #RaceB4Race so in relation to the use of the term philology vs. linguistics, the former has a lot of baggage in relation to white supremacy, origins/history of language as a form of white eugenics supremacy, and the latter actually a field of study 13/

#MedievalTwitter #ShakeRace #RaceB4Race in which sociolinguistics is a thing, people do statistical & computational linguistics, where people also talk @ raciolinguistics. So when you say "philology" unless you are critiquing the very long white supremacist history of this 14/

#MedievalTwitter #ShakeRace #RaceB4Race I think people who wave that term around are stuck in racist 19th c. methods of scholarship. So, in this premodern scholarly world, seeing Latin as the entry test into scholarly circles is an example of white raciolinguistics. 15/

#MedievalTwitter #ShakeRace #RaceB4Race please come & discuss when you've hung out & done the work of historical linguistics & want to talk @ metrical modeling, syllable weight, conjunctional @ prepositional patterns & forms. Or want to do visual mappings of dialects. 16/

#MedievalTwitter #ShakeRace #RaceB4Race Finally, this idea that somehow if you are a BIPOC person must mean your lack of access to "old languages" is so laughable. I begin by pointing out how often BIPOC folks are functionally bilingual or multilingual 17/

#MedievalTwitter #ShakeRace #RaceB4Race but apparently that linguistic skill cannot funnel into language proficiency in Old Dead languages, like Latin. So let me finish w/ the example of my mother. My mother finished high school but never went to college. 18/

#MedievalTwitter #ShakeRace #RaceB4Race she was not allowed b/c that meant she had to live away from the family alone in the big city. Mom speaks and reads several languages w/ different script. Her first is Korean; she reads Chinese (b/c the Asian lingua franca) 19/

#MedievalTwitter #ShakeRace #RaceB4Race she reads & understands Latin, her first Roman alphabet, & then English. She reads & understands Latin b/c Mom's family has been Catholic since the 18th c. & she is pre-Vatican II. 20/

#MedievalTwitter #ShakeRace #RaceB4Race she missed Japanese b/c born after WWII, grandparents are fluent but never spoke (b/c violent colonialism). Her first exposure to the Roman alphabet was w/ Latin. She has great liturgical Latin. But never been formally school trained. 21/

#MedievalTwitter #ShakeRace #RaceB4Race for reasons including the devotional Catholic one, Mom's better w/ Latin than w/ English. She hates English. I am sure her Latin is better than quite a few white premodern gatekeepers. But she would never get past the "rigor" gates. 22/

#MedievalTwitter #ShakeRace #RaceB4Race so don't imagine these moves about "Latin rigor" are ever about actual skills. They are always about white gatekeeping. Feel free to read some sociolinguists or about raciolinguistics to understand how that works. 23/Fin.