My Presentation for the "Tolkien and Medieval Constructions of Race" Roundtable
At the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University
CFP: Tolkien and Medieval Constructions of Race roundtable at Kalamazoo 2023.
This virtual session is sponsored by the University of Glasgow’s Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic.
This roundtable will bring these discussions to the forefront, with special consideration towards the ground-breaking, critical inputs by medievalists of colour and the field’s intersection with postcolonial theory. We welcome contributions from all scholarly approaches, and these may include but are not limited to critical race theory, fan studies, gender studies, history, literary theory, medieval studies, philology, philosophy, postcolonial theory, and source studies. Focus will be placed Tolkien’s Middle-earth narratives – The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion – as well as texts from the author’s legendarium and adaptations.
Only those who have paid to attend the conference can access the virtual roundtable, but I decided to post my full draft I wrote for those interested, and for future reference. A roundtable presentation is shorter than paper presentations, so my reading draft for the event is about half the length of this post (all the fun specifics/evidence compressed down to high-level summaries)!
I would like to thank Kris and Mariana for organizing this roundtable. I second their call to foreground work by medievalists of colour and to expand scholarship on Tolkien that draws on critical race, intersectional, postcolonial, and neo-colonial theories. However, my focus today is not on what Tolkien wrote. Instead, I argue that Tolkien studies is dominated by white scholars who too often defend their beloved author with the shield of authorial intentionality, and that we need to turn an analytical gaze on ourselves and the systemic racism that is the foundation of our field (and of Anglophone academia). What follows is an overview of that process in my own work.
My 2017 bibliographic essay on “Race and Tolkien” in Christopher Vaccaro and Yvette Kisor’s Tolkien and Alterity analyzes twenty-three essays and two books on the topic that were published between 2003-2013. The essays include a handful of entries in Michael Drout’s Tolkien Encyclopedia, but most are peer-reviewed publications. The conflict between those who defend what are held to be the author’s personal beliefs and those who analyze the texts is clear. My conclusion is that it is futile to frame the research question as “Is Tolkien racist or not?” as opposed to the question of “how does Tolkien’s work criticize and reproduce the racist/imperialistic/colonialist systems of the world in which he lived?” My bibliographic essay is the only one of the eleven chapters in the first collection on “Alterity” that engages with the topic of race and racisms as opposed to the other types of alterity which, by the unstated default, are primarily White: queerness; women; femininity; language, and identities.
In 2019, I participated in two of the Tolkien at Kalamazoo sponsored sessions on the topic of race and Tolkien. My presentations were titled: “Medievalist, Modernist & Postmodernist Readings of Tolkien’s Constructions of Race,” and “Why White Supremacy Can No Longer Provide Cover for White Academia.” However, two events preceding the 2019 conference make it difficult to consider the 2019 sessions on race, whether in the Tolkien area or the other sponsored areas, as signaling significant change.
Like all other academic conferences, proposals for presentations are submitted months earlier. In a statement posted in July 2018, on the Public Discourse Page, of the Medievalists of Color website, Dr. Seeta Chaganty, posted a statement about her decision to no longer support the International Congress on Medieval Studies. The statement, which I would encourage all those unfamiliar with the events of 2018-19 to read, details two major events. The first is the Congress’ inaction over the online harassment of a scholar of color by an attendee at the conference. The second is the Congress’ program committee’s rejection of four of five sessions proposed by the Medievalists of Color (MOC) group. The one accepted session (a workshop on whiteness) stands in contrast to the rejected four co-sponsored paper sessions on “specialized topics concerning the interests and expertise of medievalists of color and their organizational collaborators” (Chaganty).
Sessions on race proposed by majority white organizations such as Tolkien at Kalamazoo were accepted, but if our sessions were typical, there were few if any scholars of color presenting on those sessions. As a result of the Congress’ actions, a number of medievalists of color boycotted the 2019 conference and collaborated with scholars of color in Shakespeare studies to create “Race B4 Race” now housed at the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. This initiative consists of a creating of symposia, conferences, publishing opportunities, and mentoring networks for scholars of color in the fields.
I debated at the time whether or not to boycott the 2019 conference in support of the MOC, but decided that it is important to work from within organizations as well as from without. I believe it is also important for white scholars drawing from anti-racist work for the teaching and scholarship to engage with other white scholars. One of the major complications in such work is that there are at least two significantly different definitions of “racism.” Those who believe that racism is limited to individual hatred/bigotry are rarely prepared to accept the sociological definition of color-blind, unconscious or aversive or systemic racisms.1
I also decided, as a result of writing the bibliographic essay and later presenting at the Congress in 2019, to try to create a themed collection on race, racisms and Tolkien. That collection is under contract at McFarland and is scheduled to be published in late 2024/early 2025.
I am not a medievalist, but Tolkien studies has historically been and is currently in close proximity to medieval studies where medievalists of color and anti-racist white medievalists have been actively challenging the increasing fascist appropriations of medieval imagery and medievalist texts for their ideological and political project of creating their imagined White Middle Ages. Fascist fans have appropriated Tolkien’s legendarium and its adaptations as Craig Franson and Dani Holz have documented in their American ID podcast.
Now to the current state of Tolkien scholarship. The first monograph on race and Tolkien, Tolkien, Race, and Racism in Middle-earth by Robert Stuart, was published in 2022. Stuart analyzes how Manichean racism, Blood and Soil racism, Aristocratic racism, and Antisemitism shaped Europe and influenced Tolkien’s legendarium.2 However Stuart’s opening and closing chapters develop a typical, and extended, defense of Tolkien the human being: “[t]he point of this study, however, has been to demonstrate that Tolkien's racist moments . . . . in no way implicate the great author in the British fascism and imperialism of his time, and that they certainly do not indicate any affinity with today’s Neo-Nazis or White Supremacists” (“Conclusion,” p. 341). Stuart, a white Australian academic, relies on the authorial intentionality and attempts to dismiss the reality of fascist Tolkien fans (then and now) by saying they do not understand Tolkien's work (that is, they do not agree with Stuart's interpretation).
Later in 2022, those of us working on racisms and Tolkien were amazed to discover a newly-published essay in The Southern Journal of Philosophy: Charles W. Mills’ “The Wretched of Middle-earth: An Orkish Manifesto.”3 I am grateful to Robert Tally who sent me links to the essay and to the accompanying introduction by Chike Jeffers & David Miguel Gray. Jeffers is Mills’ literary executor, and Gray is one of the editors of the journal. Mills’ 2022 publication was written decades ago: he wrote it at some point during the late 1980s but could not get it published. He then went on to teach, lecture, and write on Blackness, class, race, as an Afro-Jamaican philosopher born in the United Kingdom, raised in Jamaica, and a faculty member in the United States. As he notes in the introduction to one of his books, he was one of the 1% of philosophers (in the United States, I assume) who were Black. A list of his publications can be found a memorial page set up in his honor.
But none of Mills’ later numerous, prize-winning, and popular books was about Tolkien. As Jeffers and Gray note in their introductory essay, the extent to which Mills’ critical exploration of a fictional racial hierarchy strikingly illuminates the ongoing influence of certain old racist ideas on our present-day social realities. When I wrote the bibliographic essay on race and Tolkien, I identified the first academic publication on the topic as appearing in 2003, and that is technically correct. It was the first academic piece to appear I print (as far as I know). But it was not the first written.
Had the editor of the unnamed academic journal Mills submitted to had accepted and published the essay, the first essay on race and racisms in Middle-earth would have appeared in the early 1990s. In his discussion of the history of the essay, Jeffers describes finding “a letter that Mills wrote to a cultural studies journal, in which he complained that it had been ten months since he had submitted ‘The Wretched of Middle-Earth’ and yet he still had not received a decision on its publication. The letter is dated April 12, 1990.” Jeffers did not find a rejection letter – which, if it existed, Mills may not have saved. And perhaps, as no doubt a number of us can attest, the editor may have never responded at all. Nobody can know.
We can know that we are incredibly lucky that Mills saved his work, and that his literary executor found and has brought the work to publication. Despite being written over three decades earlier, Mills’ essay not only anticipates but transcends the majority, if not the totality, of the scholarship on Tolkien and race which has been published since 2003! Mills uses Frederic Jameson’s concept of the “‘political unconscious’ of the white bourgeois Western psyche” (p. 23), a theoretical concept which seems similar to the sociological concept of systemic racism. And much of what I thought was original in Robert Stuart's Tolkien, Race, and Racism in Middle-earth, which I had read before Robert sent me Mills’ essay, is present in Mills’ essay, absent the need to defend Tolkien the author. Not only is Mills’ essay well worth reading, so are his other publications, especially The Racial Contract, the 2nd edition of which was published on its 25th anniversary.
Jeffers and Gray argue that scholars in philosophy and related fields familiar with Mills’ work will recognize how the early and unpublished essay’s ideas about race were part of the development of his later work. I would add that Tolkien scholars who read Mills – and I think everybody who is writing or wishes to write about Tolkien’s work should read Mills – might well find out that engaging with his later work will change how we write about Tolkien's legendarium, its adaptations, and its reception.
Before closing I’d like to draw attention to an intersection that supports the need for Tolkien scholars (even those of us who are not medievalists) to pay careful attention to the current work by medievalists, including those white scholars who are doing anti-racist work. In “Whiteness, medievalism, immigration: rethinking Tolkien through Stuart Hall,” published in 2021, in postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, Kathy Lavezzo, describes how Stuart Hall, one of the founders of the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies, an originating point for the theory/methodology/discipline known as cultural studies, originally intended to do graduate work at Oxford on medieval literature. However, Hall reports that “‘when I tried to apply contemporary literary criticism to [medieval] texts, my ascetic South African language professor told me in a pained tone that this was not the point of the exercise’” (Hall, 2017a, 156) (Lavezzo, 4). Lavezzo analyzes the context and implications of this incident, reported by Hall decades later, as an example of what Sara Ahmed calls the “blockage” created by white people for people of color (see review of her book)
I would call what the unnamed editor (whose name was presumably on the carbon copy of the letter of inquiry Mills sent but was understandably redacted by Jeffers) did to Mills’ essay is also a blockage, an example of systemic racism. But just as Stuart Hall left Oxford, and Tolkien, behind to create a radical new approach to studying texts and culture that has, if not totally supplanting, at least has come to co-exist with, theories of “pure” literary studies that tried to abstract texts from their socio-historical contexts, so too Mills went on to create a significant body of published works (books and essays), as well as serving as inspiration and mentor for to students as a teacher, especially his Black students, as Tommie Shelby describes in the foreword to the 25th Anniversary edition of what is widely considered as Mills’ most significant work, The Racial Contract.
Mills was well aware of Stuart Hall’s work, writing a chapter, “Stuart Hall’s Changing Representations of ‘Race,’” for an anthology dedicated to Stuart Hall, Culture, Politics, Race and the Diaspora: The Thought of Stuart Hall which was published in 2007. Stuart Hall’s autobiographical essay which includes the incident with his South African professor was published in 2017: I have no way of knowing if Mills read it or not, or if he would have recognized that that professor in question was Tolkien.
But I like to imagine he did.
And just as the attempts to block Hall, and Mills, failed, the Medieval Congress’ blocking of the Medievalists of Color failed to stop their work. A decades-long systemic pattern of White academics blocking scholars of color and their work is clear, as is their refusal to stop doing their work and their resulting creation of anti-racist theories, scholarship, and academic spaces. What the blockages did succeed at was impoverishing our field(s).
I am not saying that academia, or academics are all White Supremacists. I am saying that, as a number of scholars of color have argued, neoliberal attempts at using colorblind racism to diversify academic spaces and their false neutrality of academic freedom has failed to decolonize racist structures.4
I know that during 2019 the Medieval Congress began to discuss structural changes of the Congress, but I do not know what happened to those attempts during Covid.5 Due to my own retirement and health issues, I will not be attending many f2f conferences in future. I will only attend hybrid conferences that do not treat those of us attending virtually as second-class participants. I am not a medievalist, so I have always come to Kalamazoo for the Tolkien sessions (though if a medieval session featured a friend oof mine or sounded interesting, I might drop in on it). This year, I cannot attend any of the Tolkien at Kalamazoo sessions which means I paid $275.00 US to present at this roundtable. This model of a hybrid conference clearly privileges those who can attend in person. I do not anticipate attending this conference in future.
I want to end with questions for all white Tolkienists: do we want to see the field ignore the topic of racisms and Tolkien, as did the unnamed editor Mills submitted his essay to?
Or do we want to be content to argue that Tolkien, and, presumably we as readers and scholars of his legendarium, are not as bad as the Nazis?
Or shall more of us start to engage with the work done by medievalists of color, anti-racist white medievalists, and contemporary theorists of color, in in ways that will lead to changes in our individual scholarship and begin to seek coalitions with others to remove the blockages.
Thank you!
Note: the ever-expanding bibliography on “Racisms and Tolkien” can be found on this early Substack page. I need to update it, but it originated with the research I did for the bibliographic essay.
The first definition used to be the “dictionary definition,” but language changes, and dictionaries change as well. Here is the story of why Merriam Webster decided to revise its definition of racism to include the sociological definition. I was happy to see this change because too many debates about racisms in fandom degenerate into “this is what the dictionary says, so I/Tolkien am not racist.”
You can read Dimitra Fimi’s and Robert Tally’s reviews of Stuart’s monograph at these links.
The two essays were originally open-access (but unpaginated), but do not seem to be available any more.
I will never forget a white male administrator at the university where I taught that had a primarily white faculty, staff, and administration, explaining to me that “diversity of ideas” was more important than “diversity of skin color,” by which he meant, I think, more hiring of white conservative men.
I know from researching for my bibliographic essay that there were earlier attempts to challenge the Whiteness of the International Congress/Medieval studies as I discuss in my bibliographic essay:
Thomas Hahn, in "The Difference the Middle Ages Makes: Color and Race Before the Modern World," describes a paper session on "Race in the Middle Ages" that was held at the Kalamazoo conference in 1996. Michael Awkward, the Director of an African-American Studies Institute rather than a medievalist, was invited to present as a specialist in race studies. Hahn notes how Awkward’s presentation highlighted the whiteness of the conference, arguing that:
“his visible presence as a lone black man in an overwhelmingly white milieu, his announced interest in racial discourse, and his status as an outsider/nonmedievalist did more to make difference an issue among these historically engaged scholars than did any of the evidence or argument he offered in his talk (Hahn, p. 2).”
Awkward’s presentation led to a themed issue on “Concepts of Race and Ethnicity in the Middle Ages” with Hahn’s essay as the introduction. Hahn identifies as a white academic, a rare moment of identification in academic discourse that foregrounds instead of makes invisible the whiteness of academia as an institution, a whiteness that is the result of socio-historical and institutional practices (Reid pp. 35-36).