THIS BOOK TELLS stories of collective struggle against racism, from campaigns against xenophobia during the global era of anti-Asian “Yellow Peril” in the late nineteenth century to the transnational Black Lives Matter movement today. In this study, I use medievalism—which I define as a critical analysis of the Middle Ages, as well as the artistic reinvention of medieval pasts in literature and culture—to trace efforts by communities of color to critique longstanding systems of white supremacy and to advance new forms of social justice.

As I discuss in this book's introduction, the coopting of medieval imagery and rhetoric by modern extremist groups for racist, antisemitic, and Islamophobic aims has been carefully contextualized and resoundingly denounced by scholars of color in recent years. Antiracist Medievalisms shows that people of color have been addressing the relationship between white supremacy and the historical or imagined Middle Ages for a very long time, and nuanced intellectual and artistic forms of antiracist critique by people of color date as far back as the very emergence of medieval studies as a discipline.

When I first set out to write this book, I had assumed that academics in the pre-dominantly white field of medieval studies would comprise my primary audience. I did, after all, write this book in English, the lingua franca of my disciplinary training in medieval British literature and the cultural reception of medieval traditions—and the conventional centers of power and prestige in medieval studies are still located within predominantly white anglophone countries. Over time, my sense of the book's audience began to shift. What would happen if I wrote a book about antiracism in my discipline that directly addressed people of color and racialized communities more broadly, wherever such readers are situated? Could I bring my academic and cultural background as a queer Asian American not only to the professional field of medieval studies in which I happen to work, but also to the concurrent marginalized communities in which I belong? This book, which draws upon the writings of queer scholars of color and intersectional feminist scholarship, has become an effort to reshape the field of medieval studies from how it is conventionally configured by bringing academic and activist communities together. My work tells a range of stories of communities of color working collectively to advance racial justice.