White Before Whiteness in the Late Middle Ages - Hardcover

by Wan-Chuan Kao (Author)

This ground-breaking book analyses premodern whiteness as operations of fragility, precarity and racialicity across bodily and nonsomatic figurations. It argues that the 'before' of whiteness is less a retro-futuristic temporisation than a set of strategies and discursive praxes that produce and yet delimit a range of medieval ideological regimes.

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

'Kao's ambitious readings integrate a range of theoretical influences - from psychoanalysis to biopolitics to cuteness studies -- into literary close reading, all to approach the complexities of medieval race.'
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