I highly encourage my #medievaltwitter colleagues to read this thread, and to take the time to digest the difficult but important piece that @homophonous produced in response to Heng's Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. Some of us (myself included) were too quick 1/11 https://twitter.com/RachelSchine/status/1301613712952844288

to judge the article's tone and several "sound byte" paragraphs that circulated without context. I did exactly what I caution my students not to do; I responded quickly and without reflection. That is on me. But there is a larger, more important point threaded through 2/11

the article that my colleagues and friends in English Studies need to acknowledge and understand. Those of us doing work in #ShakeRace are aware of the primacy of English from a canonical and disciplinary perspective, and if we TRULY want to engage in interdisciplinary work, 3/11

we need to work HARDER outside our fields. The slippage the review identifies between the phenomena Heng is analyzing (representations of racial difference) and her own analytical language is striking, to say the least, and poses problems for scholars building on her work. 4/11

As someone whose research traces narratives across time and space, I am painfully aware of how challenging and intimidating entering other fields of scholarship can be. This is why everything I write takes so long. Because you start from scratch. And I, at least, am always 5/11

terrified that I will have missed something vital because I don't know the field. Some of the errors pointed out in the review are the kinds of errors that turn up in my nightmares (missing textual variants, assuming one version is 'correct' when there are several, etc). 6/11

And, as the review rightly states, we in medieval studies must acknowledge our own positionality and what that means to our research. We all have blind spots. We are all human. And many of us wanted Heng's book to be more than what Heng itself claims it is--the start of an 7/11

important conversation about racial thinking in medieval Europe. I still think Heng's book is field-changing scholarship, and the one part of the review I do not support is the implication that the entire book should be dismissed in order for these conversations to continue. 8/11

There has to be middle ground between claiming Heng's book IS the conversation and abandoning it altogether. I would love to see the kind of collection that @TheMedievalDrK and @Nahir_Otano suggest (even titled "Interdisciplinary Riffs?") that engages critically with Heng, 9/11

acknowledges errors she made, and uses them to start more fruitful discussions about racial representation in medieval Europe. I don't know @homophonous personally so I don't know if an apology would mean anything, but I want to apologize 10/11

for rushing to judgement rather than doing my due diligence and reading the review carefully, generously, and with the spirit of 'critical compassion' that she advocates. I can do better, and so can we all, especially now when we are all stretched so thin. 11/11