Thread by @dorothyk98

#MedievalTwitter #ShakeRace #RaceB4Race So this is Open Access. This was from the first RaceB4Race conference. But I would like to discuss the long journey this took to get published. Thread. 1/ onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/17414113/2…

The conference happened in January 2019 because of Academic REJECTION. Specifically Rejected from the @KzooICMS in 2019 of all the Medievalists of Color sessions (except the one where we basically do diversity labor for white people). 2/

@acmrs_asu & @jeffreyjcohen (Dean at Humanities) invited all those rejected to present instead at a symposium at ASU that @acmrs_asu would organize. Since Ayanna Thompson had just taken over as head of @acmrs_asu, she also thought it would be a good time for coalition building 3/

and for the medievalists of color to talk to the #ShakeRace folk. I think we expected at most maybe 40-50 people including speakers. Instead, they had to move venues because 300+ signed up to show up. At the conference, several editors showed up, including the Penn editor 4/

and one of the editors for @AHAhistorians flagship journal. The AHA editor requested our talks for a roundtable for AHR. So here is point number 1. The white male editor who came to this symposium solicited the papers for AHR. He saw all the papers, he heard people introduce 5/

the panelists. So he knew it was all (or should of through the program or by listening) that we were predominately literature scholars, mostly working on England. You can ask why that is but it's fairly simple 1. the people deeply involved in doing premodern CRT & organizing 6/

medievalists of color were literature scholars (mostly working on England) and the point was to have a conversation across periods with the #ShakeRace people who had been organizing in early modern studies and especially Shakespeare studies for several decades. 7/

The papers, edited by Ayanna Thompson, went to AHR for their proposed roundtable. We were then REJECTED (again from an editor and journal who knew we were all literature scholars) from AHR because they were confused why there were no historians. 8/

So then we took the roundtable, papers were already submitted, editing had happened, etc. and proposed it for PMLA the journal of the Modern Language Association for one of their forum discussions. They REJECTED us. 9/ medium.com/the-sundial-ac…

And we've already written as well as did a topic model of their premodern author numbers to show how WHITE WHITE WHITE that part of their publishing output looked in the previous 10 years. We never did the topic model for AHR, but I expect it's the same if not worse. 10/

It has been 3 years since this initial conference. #RaceB4Race has become a research collective & conference series, a book series at Penn Press, & in the last several months was awarded a 3.2 million grant from the Mellon Foundation 11/: news.asu.edu/20210921-solut…

I am super curious AHA & MLA, what research collective that you have published in the last 10 years has done that in under 3 years. When PMLA REJECTED us, I was able to create space at Literature Compass for this special issue. I can do this b/c I am co-editor of premodern & 12/

& my co-editor and Exec. Editor have my back. These pieces were then sent out for double-blind peer-review (THANK YOU PEER REVIEWERS), and revised again. And this is now available for open access reading (I am not sure how long, so download now folks). 13/

It is a special issue w/ almost all BIPOC-identified authors & editors (Ayanna Thompson and myself). Because of how Literature Compass functions, I was able to early publish @_theBrownprint_ 's piece in 2021. It is now the most read piece in LiCO's history. 14/

So the special issue opens with Ayanna Thompson's introduction, "Rejected: Introducing the stakes of Premodern Critical Race Studies," 15/ onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/li…

The next piece is my "The Politics of the Medieval PreRacial" which I suggest you read in tandem w/ my "Introduction: Critical Race and hte Middle Ages" & the Introduction to the Bloomsbury Cultural History of Race 1350-1550. 16/ onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/li…

Next is @_theBrownprint_ 's article: "Hood Feminism": Whiteness and segregated (premodern) scholarly discourse in the post-postracial era. It also has a teaching guide. 17/ onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/li…

The next article is Noémie Ndiaye's "Rewriting the Grand Siècle: Blackface in Early Modern France and the Historiography of Race" which I believe is part of her forthcoming Penn book 18/ onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/li…

Next is @UrvashiChakrav 's "Spirited away: Race, slavery and childhood in early modern England" 19/ onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/li…

@ShokoofehR 's article is next: "The Intellectual Body, the Body Intellectual" 20/ onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/li…

@cmthomas is next with " Embodying Antiracist White Latinidad in Medieval Studies" 21/ onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/li…

and finally @pakhimie 's article and teaching guide: "Cultivating Expertise: Glossing Shakespeare and Race" 22/ onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/li…

Download everything as soon as you all can (I don't know when it will go behind the lock) and enjoy what happened at that first #RaceB4Race conference that really shifted the conversation in premodern critical race studies. Enjoy. Fin.