ROOMCHANGE----Department of the Classics and the Standing Committee on Medieval Studies Harvard Premodern Race Seminar Session 6 (with feedback-link in details)

Date: 

Monday, November 21, 2022, 12:00pm to 1:00pm

Location: 

Room 114, Barker Center, 12 Quincy St, Cambridge MA, 02138

Department of the Classics and the Standing Committee on Medieval Studies

Harvard Premodern Race Seminar

Session 6: Reading: Shokoofeh Rajabzadeh, “The Depoliticized Saracen and Muslim Erasure,” Literature Compass (2019).

For a more detailed description of PRS and its goals, please visit the Canvas site: https://canvas.harvard.edu/courses/81116.

 

Dear all,

Please join us at the last meeting of the Premodern Race Seminar of the fall semester, on Monday 21st November, 12-1pm in the Plimpton room (Barker 114).

***PLEASE GIVE US FEEDBACK! ***

If you have attended sessions of the Premodern Race Seminar this semester (or if you haven’t, but wanted to, and plan to attend next semester), we’d be grateful for your feedback and suggestions on how we can improve the seminar. Please fill out this anonymous google form Links to an external site.. If you would like to volunteer to run a session (suggest readings, provide framing questions, and even moderate discussion if you are willing), please email lydiashahan@g.harvard.edu

* * *

Please find below, a message from Professor Anna Wilson, who will moderate our discussion next week:

In our final session of the semester, we will discuss Shokoofeh Rajabzadeh, “The Depoliticized Saracen and Muslim Erasure,” Literature Compass (2019) (available through Hollis or through our Canvas site, and attached below)

In this short, provocative article (winner of the 2021 MAA Article Prize in Critical Race Studies) Rajabzadeh discusses modern scholarly uses of the term ‘Saracen’ (a medieval term from the Christian west with a range of ethnic and religious implications). Writing powerfully about her own experiences as a Muslim-Iranian-American scholar studying the representation of Muslims in the medieval Christian west, Rajabzadeh argues: “that with few exceptions and unless it is a direct quotation, all qualified and unqualified uses of Saracen should be replaced with the word Muslim in scholarship on European representation of Muslims in the Middle Ages.” This article, while making a focused and specific argument about the use of a specific term in particular contexts, lends itself to broader conversations on several themes that we have visited over the course of the semester: the negotiation of personal and professional identity, the politics of terminology, and the responsibility of scholars of the premodern past for confronting the legacies of the pasts we study in present violences.
 

Some questions that we might use to frame the discussion:

    How might the problems and ethical positions Rajabzadeh lays out around the use of ‘Saracen’ apply similarly to other debated terms for ethnic or religious groups used in our primary sources? Some other terms we might consider discussing are ‘converso’, ‘Berber’, ‘Frank’ (each of course, with their own specific contexts, origins, and histories of use).
    How does Rajabzadeh’s argument for how to use the term ‘Saracen’ resonate with, or differ from, the other arguments around terminology that we have seen used in some of our other readings, particularly in Sarah Derbew’s Untangling Blackness in Late Antiquity?
    Influenced by a critical genealogy from Black feminist writers including Audre Lorde and bell hooks, Rajabzadeh addresses – and breaks – conventions of academic prose and professional self-presentation in premodern fields. When we read Dan-el Padilla Peralta’s piece earlier in the year, we talked about the rhetorical impact of his choices, the personal stakes, and the effect on his argument. When we read Rajabzadeh’s, we may want to revisit this conversation, but perhaps framed differently: how might our own research and teaching be transformed if we wrote this way? What are the pragmatic and intellectual considerations, for both early career and later career scholars? What spaces can we use to experiment with making explicit our personal investments and experiences?