| Author | : Geraldine Heng |
| Publisher | : |
| Total Pages | : 509 |
| Release | : 2018-03-08 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 1108422780 |
This book challenges the common belief that race and racisms are phenomena that began only in the modern era.
Empire of Magic
| Author | : Geraldine Heng |
| Publisher | : Columbia University Press |
| Total Pages | : 550 |
| Release | : 2003 |
| Genre | : Education |
| ISBN | : 9780231125260 |
Empire of Magic offers a genesis and genealogy for medieval romance and the King Arthur legend through the history of Europe's encounters with the East in crusades, travel, missionizing, and empire formation. It also produces definitions of "race" and "nation" for the medieval period and posits that the Middle Ages and medieval fantasies of race and religion have recently returned. Drawing on feminist and gender theory, as well as cultural analyses of race, class, and colonialism, this provocative book revises our understanding of the beginnings of the nine hundred-year-old cultural genre we call romance, as well as the King Arthur legend. Geraldine Heng argues that romance arose in the twelfth century as a cultural response to the trauma and horror of taboo acts--in particular the cannibalism committed by crusaders on the bodies of Muslim enemies in Syria during the First Crusade. From such encounters with the East, Heng suggests, sprang the fantastical episodes featuring King Arthur in Geoffrey of Monmouth's chronicle The History of the Kings of England, a work where history and fantasy collide and merge, each into the other, inventing crucial new examples and models for romances to come. After locating the rise of romance and Arthurian legend in the contact zones of East and West, Heng demonstrates the adaptability of romance and its key role in the genesis of an English national identity. Discussing Jews, women, children, and sexuality in works like the romance of Richard Lionheart, stories of the saintly Constance, Arthurian chivralic literature, the legend of Prester John, and travel narratives, Heng shows how fantasy enabled audiences to work through issues of communal identity, race, color, class and alternative sexualities in socially sanctioned and safe modes of cultural discussion in which pleasure, not anxiety, was paramount. Romance also engaged with the threat of modernity in the late medieval period, as economic, social, and technological transformations occurred and awareness grew of a vastly enlarged world beyond Europe, one encompassing India, China, and Africa. Finally, Heng posits, romance locates England and Europe within an empire of magic and knowledge that surveys the world and makes it intelligible--usable--for the future. Empire of Magic is expansive in scope, spanning the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries, and detailed in coverage, examining various types of romance--historical, national, popular, chivalric, family, and travel romances, among others--to see how cultural fantasy responds to changing crises, pressures, and demands in a number of different ways. Boldly controversial, theoretically sophisticated, and historically rooted, Empire of Magic is a dramatic restaging of the role romance played in the culture of a period and world in ways that suggest how cultural fantasy still functions for us today.
England and the Jews
| Author | : Geraldine Heng |
| Publisher | : Cambridge University Press |
| Total Pages | : 193 |
| Release | : 2018-11-29 |
| Genre | : Religion |
| ISBN | : 1108698182 |
For three centuries, a mixture of religion, violence, and economic conditions created a fertile matrix in Western Europe that racialized an entire diasporic population who lived in the urban centers of the Latin West: Jews. This Element explores how religion and violence, visited on Jewish bodies and Jewish lives, coalesced to create the first racial state in the history of the West. It is an example of how the methods and conceptual frames of postcolonial and race studies, when applied to the study of religion, can be productive of scholarship that rewrites the foundational history of the past.
Black Metaphors
| Author | : Cord J. Whitaker |
| Publisher | : University of Pennsylvania Press |
| Total Pages | : 256 |
| Release | : 2019-10-25 |
| Genre | : Literary Criticism |
| ISBN | : 081225158X |
In the late Middle Ages, Christian conversion could wash a black person's skin white—or at least that is what happens when a black sultan converts to Christianity in the English romance King of Tars. In Black Metaphors, Cord J. Whitaker examines the rhetorical and theological moves through which blackness and whiteness became metaphors for sin and purity in the English and European Middle Ages—metaphors that guided the development of notions of race in the centuries that followed. From a modern perspective, moments like the sultan's transformation present blackness and whiteness as opposites in which each condition is forever marked as a negative or positive attribute; medieval readers were instead encouraged to remember that things that are ostensibly and strikingly different are not so separate after all, but mutually construct one another. Indeed, Whitaker observes, for medieval scholars and writers, blackness and whiteness, and the sin and salvation they represent, were held in tension, forming a unified whole. Whitaker asks not so much whether race mattered to the Middle Ages as how the Middle Ages matters to the study of race in our fraught times. Looking to the treatment of color and difference in works of rhetoric such as John of Garland's Synonyma, as well as in a range of vernacular theological and imaginative texts, including Robert Manning's Handlyng Synne, and such lesser known romances as The Turke and Sir Gawain, he illuminates the process by which one interpretation among many became established as the truth, and demonstrates how modern movements—from Black Lives Matter to the alt-right—are animated by the medieval origins of the black-white divide.
The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought
| Author | : John Block Friedman |
| Publisher | : Syracuse University Press |
| Total Pages | : 332 |
| Release | : 2000-06-01 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 9780815628262 |
Beyond the boundaries of the known Christian world during the Middle Ages, there were alien cultures that intrigued, puzzled, and sometimes frightened the people of Europe. The reports of travelers in Africa and Asia revealed that "monstrous" races of men lived there, whose appearance and customs were quite different from the European norm. This book examines the impact of these races upon Western art, literature, and philosophy, from their earliest mention until the age of exploration. Friedman furnishes a descriptive catalog of the races, most of which were real, geographically remote peoples, some of which were fabled creatures that served as symbols. He traces the evolution of European attitudes toward them, with particular emphasis on the high Middle Ages, when they seem most strongly to have captured the Western imagination. Ranging through literature, the arts, cartography, canon law, and theology, he considers the widely varying ways in which Christians viewed and depicted strange races of men. Finally, he examines transformations in European consciousness brought about by the discoveries of the exotic peoples of the Americas. Whatever their form—pygmy, giant, hirsute cave—dweller, cyclops, or Amazon-the monstrous races clearly challenged the traditional concept of man in the Christian world scheme. It is the medieval thinking about this challenge that Mr. Friedman addresses in this revealing account.
Race and Ethnicity in the Classical World
| Author | : |
| Publisher | : Hackett Publishing |
| Total Pages | : 434 |
| Release | : 2013-09-15 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 1624660894 |
By offering fluent, accurate translations of extracts and fragments from a wide assortment of ancient texts, this volume allows a comprehensive overview of ancient Greek and Roman concepts of otherness, as well as Greek and Roman views of non-Greeks and non-Romans. A general introduction, thorough annotation, maps, a select bibliography, and an index are also included.
Neighboring Faiths
| Author | : David Nirenberg |
| Publisher | : University of Chicago Press |
| Total Pages | : 348 |
| Release | : 2014-10-20 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 022616893X |
This book represents the culmination of David Nirenberg s ongoing project; namely, how Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived with and thought about each other in the Middle Ages, and what the medieval past can tell us about how they do so today. There have been scripture based studies of the three religions of the book that claim descent from Abraham, but Nirenberg goes beyond those to pay close attention to how the three religious neighbors loved, tolerated, massacred, and expelled each otherall in the name of Godin periods and places both long ago and far away. Whether Christian Crusaders and settlers in Islamic-ruled lands, or Jewish-Muslim relations in Christian-controlled Iberia, for Nirenberg, the three religions need to be studied in terms of how each affected the development of the other over time, their proximity of religious and philosophical thought as well as their overlapping geographies, and how the three neighbors define (and continue to define) themselves and their place in the here-and-nowand the here-afterin terms of one another. Arguing against exemplary histories, static models of tolerance versus prosecution, or so-called Golden Ages and Black Legends, Nirenberg offers here instead a story that is more dynamic and interdependent, one where Muslim, Jewish, and Christian communities have re-imagined themselves, not only as abstractions of categories in each other s theologies and ideologies, but by living with each other every day as neighbors jostling each other on the street. From dangerous attractions leading to interfaith marriage, to interreligious conflicts leading to segregation, violence, and sometimes extermination, to strategies of bridging the interfaith gap through language, vocabulary, and poetryNirenberg aims to understand the intertwined past of the three faiths as a way for their heirs to coproduce the future."
Rereading the Black Legend
| Author | : Margaret R. Greer |
| Publisher | : University of Chicago Press |
| Total Pages | : 487 |
| Release | : 2008-09-15 |
| Genre | : Literary Criticism |
| ISBN | : 0226307247 |
The phrase “The Black Legend” was coined in 1912 by a Spanish journalist in protest of the characterization of Spain by other Europeans as a backward country defined by ignorance, superstition, and religious fanaticism, whose history could never recover from the black mark of its violent conquest of the Americas. Challenging this stereotype, Rereading the Black Legend contextualizes Spain’s uniquely tarnished reputation by exposing the colonial efforts of other nations whose interests were served by propagating the “Black Legend.” A distinguished group of contributors here examine early modern imperialisms including the Ottomans in Eastern Europe, the Portuguese in East India, and the cases of Mughal India and China, to historicize the charge of unique Spanish brutality in encounters with indigenous peoples during the Age of Exploration. The geographic reach and linguistic breadth of this ambitious collection will make it a valuable resource for any discussion of race, national identity, and religious belief in the European Renaissance.
Black Legacies
| Author | : Lynn T. Ramey |
| Publisher | : University Press of Florida |
| Total Pages | : 191 |
| Release | : 2014-09-02 |
| Genre | : Literary Criticism |
| ISBN | : 0813055040 |
Black Legacies looks at color-based prejudice in medieval and modern texts in order to reveal key similarities. Bringing far-removed time periods into startling conversation, this book argues that certain attitudes and practices present in Europe’s Middle Ages were foundational in the development of the western concept of race. Using historical, literary, and artistic sources, Lynn Ramey shows that twelfth- and thirteenth-century discourse was preoccupied with skin color and the coding of black as “evil” and white as “good.” Ramey demonstrates that fears of miscegenation show up in all medieval European societies. She pinpoints these same ideas in the rhetoric of later centuries. Mapmakers and travel writers of the colonial era used medieval lore of “monstrous peoples” to question the humanity of indigenous New World populations, and medieval arguments about humanness were employed to justify the slave trade. Ramey even analyzes how race is explored in films set in medieval Europe, revealing an enduring fascination with the Middle Ages as a touchstone for processing and coping with racial conflict in the West today.
