Shaping Our (Medieval) Future through Nomadic Insurgency: A Radical Reading of Ywain and Gawain

Abstract

“Medieval futures” connotes not necessarily the next move for medieval studies but the reshaping of our future with the medieval in mind. Medieval texts can inform and offer novel approaches to direct action, social justice, as well as social libertarian, anticapitalist, anti-Statist movements. To this end, I advocate decontextualizing medieval literary texts so that their radical possibility can inform our own spaces and movement, particularly in terms of social justice, dissent, and protest. By decontextualizing the text, I mean the removal of the literary text from its temporal and regional political context in order to allow the text to reflect the radical possibilities applicable to our current and future political environments. Reading the late medieval English text Ywain and Gawain through a lens of contemporary radical politics demonstrates how a medieval literary artifact can help us better understand—and ultimately transform—our own political realities. The occupation of physical space has been and continues to be a tried and tested means of voicing opposition against oppressive power structures. In many cases, people take to the streets and inhabit a particular place with symbolic value in order to make their dissent visible. Although the general constitution of space appears static and unchanging, redefining space allows for the resistance to the status quo. Theorists such as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Henri Lefebvre, Edward Soja, and David Harvey, among others, discuss the ways in which social spaces (i.e., public squares, buildings, rooms, etc.) undergo change through use and social desire. Space is malleable and plastic; it never has a set use or meaning. Lefebvre puts a finer point on this idea: “There is no sense in which space can be treated solely as an a priori condition of these institutions and the