American Dark Age: Racial Feudalism and the Rise of Black Liberalism -- a Lecture by Keidrick Roy (Dartmouth College)

Learn how Black thinkers in early America challenged ideas of racial feudalism inspired by the medieval past.

Keidrick Roy is associate professor of Government at Dartmouth College and author of American Dark Age: Racial Feudalism and the Rise of Black Liberalism (Princeton, 2024), a prize-winning study of how medieval legacies of feudalism haunt liberal democracy in the United States. In this lecture, he shows how the intellectual and political roots of medieval studies are entwined with modern colonial projects, emerging racial categories, and narratives of American exceptionalism and white nationalism: what Professor Roy has termed racial feudalism. This was the language and set of ideas shared by abolitionists and proslavery thinkers alike, in the antebellum period, to interpret what they saw as the remnants of the medieval world that persisted in American color-based hierarchies. The necessity of critiquing racial feudalism then inspired generations of Black intellectuals into the twentieth century. Understanding this topic's renewed relevance today is of crucial importance, not only for scholars of medievalism and the medieval past, but for all Americans and anyone committed to the ideals of liberal democracy now and in the future.

Join us for this special event, and stay for the reception following!