Antiracist Pasts and Futures: An Interview with Jonathan Hsy

I have been a grateful reader of Dr. Jonathan Hsy’s groundbreaking contributions to the fields of Medieval Studies, Disability Studies, and Queer Theory since first encountering his 2013 <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/book/27530" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Trading Tongues: Merchants, Multilingualism and Medieval Literature</a>. This earlier work remained very much on my mind when I first read his 2021 <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1p6hqh8" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Antiracist Medievalisms: From ‘Yellow Peril’ to Black Lives Matter</a> as well. Much like the “polyglot milieu,” the “fluidity” and dynamic linguistic diversity of the Middle Ages that Hsy studies in Trading Tongues, in Antiracist Medievalisms he argues for the spatial, linguistic, and geotemporal “flexibility of the ‘medieval’” (19). Moving deftly from the medieval period to the present, Hsy’s analysis covers: medieval romance and ethnic minority Bildungsromane; 19th-century theaters that forged alliances between Chinese Americans and Jewish Americans;  <a href="https://medium.com/the-sundial-acmrs/antiracist-pasts-and-futures-an-interview-with-jonathan-hsy-bce2dc019558">Website</a>