Heng, Geraldine. "Premodern race as a critical canon." Throughlines. www.throughlines.org/suite-content/premodern-race-as-a-critical-canon. [Date accessed].
Geraldine Heng is an influential, field-crossing scholar and one of the founding theorists of premodern critical race studies. Her classes on premodern European literature offer a critical understanding of the histories of race-making, all while supporting students to conduct interdisciplinary research that interrogates the social and cultural mechanisms of race in their everyday lives. Here, Heng offers a glimpse into the texts she teaches and her collaborative approach to student assignments. She identifies a new path forward for premodern European literature—one that is a provocation for our world today.
Further learning
Recommended
"Merciless Beauty" and carceral justice
“Merciless Beauty” is a poem written in a late 14th-century English that may or may not be Chaucer’s but is highly comparable to Chaucer’s usage. Reading the poem alongside the film The Prison in 12 Landscapes, students are asked to make connections between the poem and the film and their formal examinations of time, incarceration, and repetition.
.jpg)
Titus Andronicus as the gateway drug
Students believe they know what Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet or Macbeth mean, but rarely do those “meanings” stem from the students’ close engagements with the texts. Using Titus Andronicus at the beginning of any Shakespeare class forces students to experience Shakespeare anew.
