Abstract
This essay explores the issue's topic, “The ‘Medieval’ Undone: Imagining a New Global Past,” by asking what it has meant, and what it could yet mean, to be postmedieval. It does so by telling a specific institutional history, that of postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, which launched in 2010 and continues to the present. The article adopts a decidedly embedded perspective, from the point of view of a current coeditor of postmedieval, previously an author and book reviews editor. Ultimately, the article argues that postmedieval's attachment to the “medieval” works to keep its readers in conflicted contact with the Eurocentrism, global flows of capital, dominance of English, and politics of time that cannot be escaped merely through critique or shifts in representation.
