The intellectual body, the body intellectual

Medieval Studies is embodied through whiteness, limited by whiteness, and created by the white imagination. In this field, as it is, objectivity is white subjectivity. In this paper, I argue that unless we practice embodied criticism, there is no way to think about the time and space we define as “Medieval Studies” without inhabiting whiteness. Embodied criticism sanctions, if not requires, that we find entry points to history that are not historical. By valuing all of ourselves, by making our critical landscape all of us, we make it impossible to abandon, overlook, or forget the present as we engage with the past. The Middle Ages that I think about and write about is one that is processed through me. In this Middle Ages, nothing that affects how I am in the world is deemed anachronistic because the theoretical, political, social, and legal forces that govern how I operate in the world are the ones that affect how and what I know about history, how and what I think about space. In it, there is value for the questions grief yields. Any work I produce as I process history is radically transparent as a production by me of me, a Muslim, Iranian-American body in this place and time.