1. Inventions/Reinventions; 2. State/Nation; 3. War/Empire; 4. Color; 5. World I; 6. World II; 7. World III.
This book challenges the common belief that race and racisms are phenomena that began only in the modern era.
Geraldine Heng is Perceval Fellow and Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Texas, Austin. She is the author of Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (2012), and England and the Jews: How Religion and Violence Created the First Racial State in the West (Cambridge, 2018). Originally from Singapore, Heng has held the Winton Chair (for 'paradigm-shifting scholarship') at the University of Minnesota. She has received a number of fellowships and grants, and currently holds an ACLS fellowship to begin a new book, Early Globalities: The Interconnected World, 500-1500 CE. Heng is also Founder and Director of the Global Middle Ages Project: www.globalmiddleages.org.
'For more than two decades scholars have been hotly debating the
appropriateness of the term 'race' and its derivatives in the
analysis of medieval European societies. Now, with this book,
Geraldine Heng provides the most comprehensive and persuasive
validation of race as a way into the medieval cultural 'imaginary'.
Race, she acknowledges, was a concept that varied from place to
place and changed in multiple ways over time. It was complexly
intertwined with religious ideas, and although medieval notions of
race shared content with some modern somatic notions (allowing for
comparability), its specifically medieval distinctiveness owes much
to the various faith communities within which it attained
significance. This is not a book about blaming the Middle Ages or
the West for racism; it is an erudite plea to pursue the study of
racialisms, for truth's sake. No one interested in the vexing and
tragic history of racial thought and the practices that it informed
can afford to ignore this magisterial intervention into the
scholarly conversation.' William Chester Jordan, Dayton-Stockton
Professor of History, Princeton University, New Jersey
'[One cannot overstate the importance of The Invention of Race in
the European Middle Ages.] Writing with astounding force and
clarity, Heng accomplishes what has eluded literary scholars and
historians: a breakthrough demonstration of how religion, as both
sociocultural and biopolitical technology, produced 'race'. Heng
shows that race is a name for an apparatus that structures and
deploys human differences across the globe and time. Race would
thus be the only adequate name for the process of
difference-making. Heng renews the impetus for the global study of
the Middle Ages and, in racial terms, shows what we have always
known: that modernity is merely the effect of the Middle Ages.'
Zrinka Stahuljak, University of California, Los Angeles
'... The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, provides a
series of ... studies that demonstrate the flexibility of this
central thesis, with chapters functioning as densely textured
sketches that articulate the mechanisms of racial logic at several
geographically and culturally disparate local sites. ... The
Invention of Race is intended for a broad audience, whose expertise
in the field of medieval studies is not assumed: for most of the
book, this results in clear prose and translated source material.'
Shoshana Adler, EuropeNow
'In The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge),
Geraldine Heng shows repeated cases which would unambiguously be
classified as racially motivated hate crimes today, grounded in
religion. This book is field-defining and vital in the current
climate.' Kate Wiles, History Today
'... Heng does an impressive job weaving together various strands
of scholarly conversation from a range of academic disciplines, in
order to provide a multidimensional picture of how the concept of
'race' defined and redefined social realities in a period that has
been habitually excluded from histories of racial categorization.
While The Invention of Race may not seek to provide all the
answers, it is a clarion call to continue to theorize and
retheorize race in the premodern world.' Shyama Rajendran, Studies
in the Age of Chaucer
'Straddling the complicated line between medieval studies and
critical race theory, The Invention of Race in the European Middle
Ages is a comprehensive volume that will change the ways in which
medieval history is understood. ... The debates raised and
addressed in this work will challenge scholars to radically rethink
how they approach the social histories with which they work, and
for scholars who consider social context to be an essential aspect
of their research, The Invention of Race is a must-read.'
Jacqueline Lombard, Contemporaneity
'The book as a whole is finely produced, and its chapters are
thoughtfully self-contained, each followed by its own
endnotes-allowing for easy excerpting.' Julie Orlemanski, Modern
Philology
'It is rich, learned, and thought-provoking, and it triggers
important methodological and historiographic questions that bear on
the essence of our discipline ...' Joseph Ziegler, Speculum
'If anyone still doubts the conceptual validity of religious race,
this is the book to convince them. At every turn, readers will be
confronted with fascinating evidence - some of it familiar, some
startlingly new, illumining surveys of scholarly debates, and rich
interpretive work ... [The Invention of Race in the European Middle
Ages] will have a significant impact on scholarly paradigms in
medieval studies and critical race studies alike for a long time to
come.' Cord J. Whitaker, Critical Inquiry
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