White Before Whiteness in the Late Middle Ages - Hardcover
White Before Whiteness in the Late Middle Ages - Hardcover
by Wan-Chuan Kao (Author)
This groundbreaking book analyses premodern whiteness as operations of fragility, precarity and racialicity across bodily and nonsomatic figurations. It argues that while whiteness participates in the history of racialisation in the late medieval West, it does not denote skin tone alone. The 'before' of whiteness, presupposing essence and teleology, is less a retro-futuristic temporisation - one that simultaneously looks backward and faces forward - than a discursive figuration of how white becomes whiteness. Fragility delineates the limits of ruling ideologies in performances of mourning as self-defence against perceived threats to subjectivity and desire; precarity registers the ruptures within normative values by foregrounding the unmarked vulnerability of the body politic and the violence of cultural aestheticisation; and racialicity attends to the politics of recognition and the technologies of enfleshment at the systemic edge of life and nonlife.
Back Jacket
'An innovative and timely book that makes a genuinely thought-provoking intervention in both medieval studies and the study of the long history of race and racism.'
Marion Turner, J. R. R. Tolkien Professor of English Literature and Language, University of Oxford
Seeta Chaganti, Professor of English, University of California, Davis 'A must read for anyone interested in medieval literature, critical whiteness studies, premodern critical race studies, theory, and literature. Smart, lucid, and challenging, Kao's nuanced analyses expertly model the next wave of literary studies.'
Ayanna Thompson, Regents Professor, Arizona State University What difference does temporality make in the recognition politics of whiteness? If whiteness has hardened into a modern identity politics defined by skin tone, it has not always been so. Resisting a reflexive, biopolitical understanding of whiteness, White before whiteness interrogates how whiteness as a representational trope produces and delimits a range of medieval ideological regimes: love, aesthetics, subjectivity, salvation, chivalry, labour, materiality and sociality. The book analyses works such as Chaucer's Book of the Duchess, Pearl, The King of Tars and others, rethinking premodern whiteness as operations of fragility, precarity and racialicity across bodily and nonbodily figurations. Deploying diverse methodologies, this ground-breaking book offers a series of provocative diagnoses and original readings that reconceive whiteness as a systemic edge generating operative differences that are never transparent, stable or permanent.
Author Biography
Wan-Chuan Kao is Associate Professor of English at Washington and Lee University