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BLACK METAPHORS How Modern Racism Emerged from Medieval Race-Thinking
Cord J. Whitaker
u n i v e r si t y of pe n ns y lva n i a pr ess ph i l a de l ph i a
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contents
Introduction. Moving Backward: Blackness in Modernity, Early Modernity, and the Middle Ages
1
Chapter 1. Black Metaphors in the King of Tars
20
Chapter 2. Shimmering Contraries: Medieval Grammar and the Distortion of Difference
48
Chapter 3. Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale and the Spiritual Side of Race
68
Chapter 4. Black Metaphors Inside and Out in Their Narrative and Spiritual Contexts
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Chapter 5. Separate and Together: Strife, Contrariety, and the Lords and Bondsmen of Julian of Norwich, G. W. F. Hegel, and W. E. B. Du Bois
123
Chapter 6. Enthymematic Interpretation: Mandeville and Racial Rhetorical Mirage
153
Conclusion. Race, Rhetorical Closure, and the Misuses of the Middle Ages
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Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments
199 223 235 000
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Moving Backward Blackness in Modernity, Early Modernity, and the Middle Ages
The evidence is overwhelming: race matters. And it has mattered for far longer than is generally recognized. Many studies consider race an exclusively modern phenomenon: what we understand as racial ideology, predicated on the notion of an insurmountable difference between black and white, has been traced to the seventeenth century, to the increased economic expediency of chattel slavery in the Americas. This book seeks to push the timeline back much further, to at least the European Middle Ages, with roots in the medieval reception of classical antiquity. This book’s aim is to investigate the relationship between the idea of blackness and the notion of sinfulness in the literature and culture of the English Middle Ages, with influences from continental European texts as well. Though the main target of Black Metaphors is the Middle Ages, the book also asserts the profound implications of the historical nexus of blackness and sinfulness for modern life and culture. Indeed, I argue that this conceptual intersection is behind current controversies over racialized policing and the resultant Black Lives Matter movement: these have significantly impacted media and politics since the movement’s founding in 2012 in response to the shooting death of seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin; the movement rose to further prominence in response to the police-involved shooting death of eighteen-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. In response, scholars in criminal justice have taken up the call to investigate any connections between blackness and the perception of criminality; their conclusions represent a modern moment in the long history of the
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association of blackness with deficiency. When Jason Eastman studied 8,592 online posts in reaction to forty-six newspaper articles in 2009 about two motorcycle rallies—one mostly white and the other mostly black—that occur nearly simultaneously each year in the vicinity of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, he found a stark difference in posters’ perceptions of white and black participants: despite the fact that “both rallies are moral holidays or periods of carnival . . . where attendees temporarily suspend social norms as they encourage each other to be publically deviant with actions such as binge drinking and public nudity,” online posters regularly attribute deviance among whites to the need for a moral holiday among otherwise “good hard working Americans” who are in their normal lives “doctors, police officers, teachers, lawyers, and even mayors.”1 On the other hand, black participants, for the same behavior, in the same place, and at the same time, are “prejudicially frame[d] . . . as dangerous criminals” who “go into restaurants and [do] not pay. They steal out of the stores, they threaten people.”2 One poster claims, “[I] went ONE TIME [to the Myrtle Beach area] during [Black Bike Week] and I really FEARED for my LIFE!”3 Eastman identifies a “white innocence” or “positive prejudices” of whiteness “that means white bikers are framed as having a charitable nature that the local community could benefit from” even while they engage in perfectly excusable, even if unpleasant, bacchanal behavior.4 He concludes that, due to a general U.S. social and psychological frame of white innocence, “posters frame black deviance as more threatening than the white bikers who are framed as temporarily suspending their moral convictions and are therefore unpleasant but not dangerous.” While posters come to the defense of white bikers, claiming that any problems with the mostly white rally are caused by a “few troublemakers,” a “few bad apples,” no posters come to the defense of black bikers “because many assume all black bikers (and maybe all blacks more generally) lack moral fortitude and are therefore innately criminal.”5 This might seem like an example that is so modern that it has no place in a book on race and the Middle Ages, but it is only a recent and particularly explicit iteration of the long history of “the cultural shared, symbolic meanings of race” that “inform the framing of . . . whites and blacks more generally.”6 Whiteness means innocence. Blackness means criminality or, to put it in a way that is more germane to the majority of this book’s medieval subject materials, blackness indicates unrepentant sinfulness. The relevance of the Middle Ages to current racial politics in the United States does not end with Black Lives Matter. It extends to the alt-right movement. Born of the same trends in U.S. culture as Black Lives Matter,
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especially the political correctness that has dominated mainstream politics since the 1990s, the alt-right movement is diametrically opposed to Black Lives Matter in its white supremacist objectives.7 The alt-right is also heavily invested in an idyllic notion of the Middle Ages that is little more than a “cultural fantasy . . . instantiated in order that the indiscussible, what is unthinkable and unsayable by other means, might surface into discussion.”8 While Geraldine Heng devises the term “cultural fantasy” in order to address textual manipulation of cannibalism and other “violation[s] of horrific taboos” in which crusaders took part, the term is equally well suited to address alt-right violations of cultural taboos: namely, the movement’s commitments to white supremacy and violence, both digital and physical. For the alt-right, the European Middle Ages is a golden age of white racial homogeny. It is an age to whose mores the movement regularly argues U.S. and European societies ought to return. It is also a fantasy era organized around the notion of white innocence—from the social innocence of an era in which feudalism amounted to a system of inviolable castes in which everyone knew their place and was happy with it to a prevailing sense of victimhood in which all nonwhites are aggressors and all whites are blameless victims. This age is a fantasy; an entire historical period has been coopted into the mirages of white innocence and black criminality that comprise the mirage of racial difference. This book investigates the relationship between black and white, the notion that blackness indicates sin, or moral deficiency, and that whiteness indicates the opposite, through the notion that blackness, whiteness, and racial difference more generally are mirages created and maintained through rhetoric. The example of the two motorcycle rallies has already laid bare the power of preconceived notions, of racial frameworks, to influence perception: the same behaviors undertaken in the same place, at essentially the same time, are interpreted by the majority of respondents to produce precisely opposite results. Studying the notion, now commonplace among critical race scholars, that whiteness in the United States and in the Eurocentric West more broadly is invisible, the unmarked norm by which divergent racial, ethnic, and other forms of identity are judged, Ruth Frankenberg asserts that “the notion of whiteness as unmarked norm is revealed to be a mirage . . . a white delusion.”9 Frankenberg characterizes the “mirage” of whiteness as epitomized by “a kind of ‘now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t’ articulation of whiteness and its relationships to power and privilege.”10 She concludes by asking, “Is the unmarkedness of whiteness a mirage?” and responding, “Certainly.”11
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The racial mirage is not merely visual; this book builds on Frankenberg’s work by examining the mirage as primarily constructed through rhetoric. Indeed, her examples bear it out. She reports the responses of white subjects to several of her fellow sociologists’ questions about whiteness. These white interviewees overwhelmingly demonstrated a cognitive disconnect between their white race and their working-class economic status. They associated themselves with “Americans who had arrived and thrived by means of hard work and no ‘handouts’ ” as opposed to African Americans, Latinos, and other persons of color whom they perceive as having received handouts. Yet, at the same time, stammering, hesitation, and prevarication in interviewees’ responses suggest that “at least some white interviewees sensed a call (from whom is not clear) that they should act, live, and behave in racial formation in ways different from those in which they were willing or able to do.”12 The discrepancies between interviewees’ beliefs about whiteness and their economic realities and between perceptions of racial others and a sense of acceptable discourse demonstrate how whiteness and the racial ideology to which it is integral shift in and out of focus, becoming alternately invisible and visible. Whiteness, as Frankenberg puts it, can engender its beneficiaries’ “striving not to be aware of the racialization of their daily lives and subjectivities.”13 The efforts are sometimes successful and sometimes subtler than at other times; they affect those who run into them like a mirage, inspiring belief and only occasionally being discovered for their disappointing reality. A mirage is visual, like blackness and whiteness, and is therefore an apt metaphor for this study. But race is also a matter of assertions, ironies, antitheses, conclusions, and, on a grander scale, of metaphors and even entire genres—and this study proceeds from the perspective that race is a matter of language and literature at least as much as, if not more than, it is a matter of the visual. Writing about early modern English rhetoric, Ian Smith treats “language as a marker for race” and “properly situated within rhetoric, for it is a purposive, persuasive invention or discourse on the structuration of human relationships aimed at achieving, in principle, a bloodless but no less violent instauration of group supremacy.”14 In order to recognize and keep at hand the continual conversation between the visual and the literary, I call on Michelle R. Warren’s notion of “shimmering philology.” In this formulation, philology is used to “define the genesis of interpretation” or, in other words, to explore the space between material reality, imagination, and signification: in matters of race, this is the nexus of relations that allows whiteness to be invisible sometimes and visible at others, which supports the existence of
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frameworks that read white and black behavior of the same kind, in the same place, and at the same time with categorically contraposed results. Indeed, Warren defines the task of “shimmering philology” as “to capture the ‘shimmer’—somehow render its motions despite the graphic and semiotic limits of [text]”:15 to capture the essence of that which appears alternately and continually present and nonpresent. The concept of shimmering philology—to which I would add my own term for its primary element: rhetorical mirage—in fact has its genesis in the visual mirage. Warren goes on, “Mirage is the metaphor for this philology poised between reality and fiction.”16 Rhetorical mirage, as well as its shimmer, is the visual mirage’s linguistic extension. Mirage, whether visual or rhetorical, has its genesis in material reality but quickly moves into the realms of imagination and interpretation. Indeed, visual mirage occurs when light rays bend and cause “an image from above to appear inverted below”; it is physical though it is not what it appears to be. As Warren points out, “Since the mirage is physical, it can be photographed.”17 Of course, it depicts what is real as if it were where and in conditions that it is not. The mirage funnels material reality through a set of material conditions (bending light rays, hot and turbulent air) that produce illusions that engage the imagination. The classic and oft-cited mirage is one of the blue sky projected onto the desert sands in order to make the thirsty wanderer believe that there is an oasis of life-giving water before him. “Mirage thus captures the nexus of reality and projection that defines interpretation.”18 The study of the rhetorical mirage and its literary uses reveals that philology, too, “constructs meaning out of materiality and imagination.”19 The intersections of material reality, imagination, and signification are very much the spaces that the investigation of race calls us to explore. The exploration of these spaces is what leads Eastman to the refrain that echoes throughout his essay: “the exact same thing, in the exact same place, at the exact same time.” He mentions this phrase, or a version of it, six times.20 It is only imagination that leads from the material reality of biker behavior in North Myrtle Beach and Atlantic Beach to the conclusion that the behaviors of white and black bikers are born of different impulses—to relax, to plunder. It is imagination that leads to the interpretation that white biker behavior signifies differently: white bikers are essentially good, hard-working people out to have a good time while black bikers are essentially criminals come to wreak havoc on the area. The value of examining the intersections of reality, imagination, and interpretation has also been underscored by work that
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explicitly addresses race and the Middle Ages, such as that by Lynn T. Ramey. Ramey convincingly argues that blackness in the Middle Ages was an unstable referent, “so abstract as to have no meaning” and having “ceased to signify a corporeal existence, laying the necessary groundwork for the rapidly approaching Middle Passage slave trade.”21 Though Black Metaphors strives to keep in the foreground the material ramifications of medieval racethinking and modern racial ideology, with their implications for real bodies, Ramey’s study quite successfully demonstrates the extent to which blackness in the Middle Ages was a metaphorical vehicle whose engagements with imagination and interpretation were exceedingly flexible. The spaces between reality, imagination, interpretation, and signification are recognized by Toni Morrison when she describes race as a fiction that has very real material consequences: “There is no such thing as race. None. Scientifically, Anthropologically. Race-ism is a construct, a social construct. And it has benefits. It has . . . money can be made off of it. And people who don’t like themselves can feel better because of it. It can describe certain kinds of behavior that are wrong or misleading. So it has a social function, racism.”22 In a later interview, published on April 19, 2015, upon the release of her novel God Help the Child, Morrison elaborates, “Race is the classification of a species. And we are the human race, period. But the other thing— the hostility, the racism—is the money-maker. And it also has some emotional satisfaction for people who need it.”23 Both iterations of Morrison’s view on race recognize the space between the material reality of a singular, anthropological, scientific, human race and the construct of racism, the imagination of racial difference. This imagination is interpreted until it manifests in material and emotional realities: wealth for some and poverty for others, high self-esteem for some and low self-esteem for others. Though a mirage both visual and rhetorical, race issues forth from and creates in the material world. Racism is an interpretive process, and as such it inherently involves the possibility of multiple outcomes. Interpretations are not predetermined, though it might appear that they are when subsequent significations adhere to the frameworks set in motion by earlier interpretations. This is why another key term in many of the readings I offer in the pages that follow, especially my first chapter, will be “polysemy,” or “the possession of multiple meanings”:24 metaphors are inherently polysemous in that each points toward something else. As I discuss in the chapters that follow, black often paradoxically calls forth white, damnation calls forth redemption, the present often
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calls forth the past, and so on. What’s more, metaphors often call forth ostensibly opposed ideas at the same time: black can serve as a metaphor for sin or salvation, for lack or presence; white for presence or absence, for purity or loss. It is not a foregone conclusion that bystanders will interpret the two motorcycle rallies in the ways that they do: it is only the effect of preexisting frameworks. Indeed, a viewer without entrenched racial frameworks would likely interpret the behaviors of white and black rally attendees in the exact same ways. Someone with racial frameworks in the reverse of the dominant white-black paradigm—and it is notable that few of the comments Eastman analyzed were written by self-identified black respondents—would likely interpret the white rally-goers’ behavior as morally deficient and black rallygoers’ behavior as a moral holiday.25 The brilliance of Eastman’s study is that it exposes the interpretive process and polysemy involved in racial judgments by isolating race as the only differentiating factor, with behavior, place, and time being equal. The flexibility of interpretation, the polysemy of the figure of the white and black biker, may surprise some; indeed, it was considered newsworthy enough to escape the pages of a scholarly journal in order to receive U.S. national news coverage via National Public Radio, where an online article about it had garnered 279 comments as of June 18, 2015.26 But the polysemy of race, the multiplicity of interpretations that can be ascribed to black and white figures as metaphors, can only be surprising in a world where dominant frameworks for interpreting them have become entrenched: they have expected meanings. It is this study’s aim to examine the uses and treatments of racial metaphors—black metaphors, or the literary and rhetorical presentation of black humans and inanimate objects, as well as the white metaphors they call forth—in the medieval period often, though erroneously, thought to be preracial. The racial frameworks so dominant today were not as fully entrenched, though they were extant in formative stages. The Middle Ages allows us to examine the social construct of race during its construction, to see the foundation and frame without their obscuring facades of brick and siding. Black Metaphors’s efforts necessarily involve temporal play: to examine the construction of something so often thought to be an exclusively modern phenomenon during its nascent stages in premodernity will at times feel like an anachronistic move. It will feel like foisting the present onto the past unjustly. This is not my aim, and such anxiety should be quelled by the understanding that the past and the present are far from exclusive of one
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another, nor does the relationship flow only in a linear, chronologically progressive direction from past to present. In order to understand the relation between medieval race-thinking and modern racial ideology, one must understand that past and present exert mutual influence on one another.
* * * Every fortnight [the students] must present verses . . . displaying metaphors . . . and then on the following day . . . they must recite them by heart to the Master. —Faculty of Grammar at Oxford between 1306 and 134427 ’Cause you told me I would find a hole, Within the fragile substance of my soul. And I have filled this void with things unreal, And all the while my character it steals. Darkness is a harsh term, don’t you think? —“Roll Away Your Stone,” Mumford & Sons
In the vein of moving backward toward the Middle Ages from the very modern example of dual motorcycle rallies, the examination of another modern example of productive anachronism demonstrates just what intellectually useful temporal play—and in a popular media context, no less—can do with black and white metaphors. The bluegrass-influenced British folk rock band Mumford & Sons is known for making “old-time sounds . . . new again.” By “old-time,” music critics have meant the music of 1970s folk musicians such as John Martyn, Nick Drake, and Pentangle. Critics have, in their most extreme historicism, linked the band with the bluegrass, country, and jazz music of the early twentieth century. Less attention has been paid to the fact that the band’s choices signal interests in things much older. The band directly engages early modernity and its literature. When Mumford & Sons released their debut album Sigh No More in October 2009 in the United Kingdom and in March 2010 in the United States, they took their title from Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing.28 In Leonato’s orchard in Act II, Scene 3, Balthasar sings a song that captures the heart and the disingenuousness of Claudio’s recently developed lovesickness: Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more, Men were deceivers ever,
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One foot in the sea and one on shore, To one thing constant never. Mumford’s album title makes much of Balthasar’s admonition to avoid love play and recognize dissimulation and dishonesty, even when its perpetrator, an inconstant man, believes himself truly in love. In Shakespeare’s hands, Balthasar’s song is at once an exposition of and a metaphor for loves like Claudio’s—male loves that claim to be true and, in accord with chivalric romance tradition, would quickly blame inconstancy on the female beloved. Mumford’s title track is an exposition of and a metaphor for the inconstancy that is inherent in the march of time. Though Shakespeare’s ladies were advised to “sigh no more” long ago, they are, in the present time of the band, still sighing. Sighing with them—and here perhaps is evidence of temporal change—are the band’s unmistakably male voices. Mumford’s male voices sigh and pine for something that ought to be more stable than romance love, which is steeped in a fin amour tradition that has inconstancy at its heart. The singers evoke an age sometimes felt to have receded even further into history than late medieval and early modern romance: the “age of faith,” to use a now outmoded term, a fantastical hegemonically Christian age in which pining for the soul’s fulfillment and salvation is a common and universal sentiment.29 The song begins “Serve God, love me” and goes on to describe a “love that will not betray you, dismay, or enslave you” and will “set you free” before coming to rest with “the beauty of love as it was made to be.” This is divine and perfect love. A man, the song’s speaker, quotes Balthasar’s song in admitting to having “one foot in sea, one on shore” and a heart that “was never pure.” Men may be deceivers, the lyrics suggest, but God is not. In binding together romantic with spiritual love, Mumford’s lyrics rely on metaphor as well as the alternating presence and nonpresence of the present and past, the secular and the divine, the male and the female. The lyrics make use of rhetorical shimmer. What shimmers exactly, as in many of the medieval examples I will treat in the pages that follow, is a black metaphor. Surely the band, all four of whose members are credited with composing each of its songs, did not know the importance of metaphor to grammatical instruction in early fourteenth-century Oxford—their knowledge of Shakespeare is laudable enough—but their verses nonetheless offer a use of metaphor to describe spiritual states that is worthy of fourteenth-century clerical students who had to “present verses . . . displaying metaphors.” “Darkness”
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is used as a black metaphor for spiritual unease and, as it so often is, emptiness. The dark “hole” in the speaker’s soul is at once present and not present, a void that is filled and therefore no longer a void. What fills it, however, is unreal and perhaps should not be taken seriously as a filler. The emptiness of the speaker’s soul shifts in and out of focus. Its darkness-as-emptiness is no longer certain, and darkness is characterized instead by the vacillation of presence and nonpresence. Darkness is a metaphor for the shimmer of a love that is at once present and absent, romantic and spiritual, certain and uncertain. The black metaphor’s shimmer, the extent to which it is a rhetorical mirage, is easy to miss. In “Roll Away Your Stone,” the hole, the void, the character-stealing entity is called dark as if it can be described in no other way. But Mumford troubles the term. The singer asks—and suggests in the asking that the answer is yes—whether “darkness” is a harsh term for these things. In the lyric’s most benevolent reading, it suggests the hole, void, and loss of character are not all that bad and that there is at least some good, conventionally represented by light, in them. In the lyric’s most damning reading, darkness is harsher than these horrible losses—too harsh to describe even the loss of the lyrical speaker’s soul and his all-important (to the modern listener) sense of self. The vacillation between bad and good, darkness and light conveys another of Mumford’s profound and perhaps unwitting engagements with English early modernity: the period’s literature and rhetoric were beset with anxieties that, compared to Latin and French, English was “barbarous” and “rude” (i.e., dark); these anxieties ironically fueled the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’ “collective enterprise toward English rhetorical eloquence” that “export[ed] and project[ed] the discarded barbarisms of a newly imagined past” onto the “barbarous African [inviting] the formulation of a racial idiom.” In early modernity, the “barbarous” black African became a metaphor for England and its language’s benighted past as well as the glory of its interminable tack toward perfection—its darkness and its light.30 Herein lay the problem with metaphors: a given metaphor can and often does mean its exact opposite. Indeed, it defines that opposite and that opposite defines it, until the two, bound to one another inextricably, become one entity whose divisibility is only superficial. The metaphor’s meaning lay in the eye, or more properly the perspective, of the beholder. What is present at one moment, in one iteration, is not present in the next. A thing is replaced by its opposite only to resurface in the next moment. Shifting. Trading places. When the lyrics’ speaker questions the status of “darkness”—whether it is a
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fitting term or not—he draws attention to the shimmer, to the dynamic shifts in meaning, that the black metaphor as rhetorical mirage seeks to cover over and to arrest. Treating the shimmer of the black metaphor might seem to lend itself to studying blackness as an abstraction rather than as a material condition with real-world consequences, but it has not been enough for me to consider blackness and whiteness, darkness and light, in their abstract forms only. It has long been apparent to me that these abstract notions have very real and concrete consequences for the vast majority—perhaps all—of the 7.5 billion people on the planet. The belief in a strict dichotomy between black and white persists in the social, political, and economic landscapes that pervade in the United States, the British Isles, and, to differing extents, globally. That persistence regularly shows through anecdotally in the United States when immigrants, especially black immigrants, from majority-black countries find themselves thrust into a racial world they do not readily understand. Take, for instance, the experience of Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie during her undergraduate studies in the United States. During a classroom discussion, an African American student became offended when a white student brought up watermelon, a food associated with stereotypes and caricatures of African Americans. Adichie recalls, “I remember sitting there thinking, ‘But what’s so bad about watermelons? Because I quite like watermelons.’ ” Adichie did not know the racist association of watermelons with African Americans, yet she felt the African American student was angry with her because she did not share her anger. “Race is such a strange construct,” says Adichie, “because you have to learn what it means to be black in America. So you have to learn that watermelon is supposed to be offensive.”31 Despite Adichie’s observable material blackness, the conditions for her to share the experience of her African American colleague were not present. Yet the fellow student expected them to be present. Adichie’s experience is an example of blackness’s shimmer, its simultaneous presence and nonpresence, its polysemy, even as it has real emotional and material consequences for Adichie and her colleague in the classroom. For a black person, such as Adichie, to have to learn what it is to be black in an unfamiliar context is part and parcel of blackness’s status as a racial rhetorical mirage. When I was in college, a good friend who had come to the United States from Costa Rica when she was fourteen years old shared her story with me. She thought her biggest problem would be language—she arrived in New York without knowing English—but it turned out it was race.
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Clerks followed her around in stores, classmates assumed that she was poor, and young men expected that she would be sexually promiscuous. She found that even lighter skinned Latinos treated her in a way she never expected. It was not at all uncommon for U.S.-born Latinos to expect that she was not Latina because she was black. When she would open her mouth and speak to them in fluent Spanish, they were often shocked. She realized she had inherited a racial history for which she had no preparation—one that ignored the subtleties of actual skin tone in favor of the hard and fast distinction between white and black (i.e., everything not white) at its core. The meanings blackness is supposed to bring with it, in the American context in this case, are visible from some angles, but they are invisible from others. They color differently the views of those who see them: producing anger from the perspective of one who expects racial solidarity in taking offense at a stereotype, surprise for one who is unaware of the stereotype, surprise and then anger for the one who is mistreated because of a mirage of which she was entirely unaware. The black metaphor’s consequences are very real, but its condition and constituents can hardly be pinned down.
* * * In this introduction, I have spent a good deal of time discussing modernity— Myrtle Beach motorcycle rallies, a popular British rock band, a twenty-firstcentury Nigerian novelist—for a book whose main purpose is to explore the English Middle Ages’ implications for the development of race. This is because modernity is where we expect to find race. It has been a long-held view that racial ideology has its beginnings in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. George Kelsey, theologian and influential teacher to Martin Luther King Jr., was one of the first scholars to explicitly explore the relationship between race, practiced Christianity, and history. He locates race’s origins in the seventeenth century. Before then, “medieval religious sanctions” permitted Christian conquerors to enslave non-Christians but only in order to convert them to Christianity, after which they had to be manumitted. In the seventeenth century—Kelsey cites a 1602 memorial of the Archbishop of Valencia—Christian motives ceded to economic motives: “as the techniques of human and natural exploitation became more effective, and the European nations competed for colonial power, the conversion and manumission of the slaves became a pattern of behavior contrary to the political and economic interests of the exploiters.” In order to buoy up their economic advantages,
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the exploiters went out of their way to explain their efforts in terms of “superior human endowment,” reading backward from their current situation to assert a prior, natural cause. Thus, Kelsey explains, “modern racism emerged as a sort of afterthought, a by-product of the ideological justification of European political and economic power arrangements over colored peoples.”32 Even more commonly, we find the development of race located in the eighteenth century. See, for instance, Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze’s eminently teachable Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader. Eze’s claim that “Enlightenment philosophy was instrumental in codifying and institutionalizing both the scientific and popular European perceptions of the human race” has become somewhat of a commonplace even if the philosophical importance of racial writings by Hume, Kant, Hegel, and others of their time is often downplayed.33 Even studies that locate the origin of racial thinking in the seventeenth century, such as Nina Jablonski’s when she mentions that the naturalist François Bernier was the first to use the term “race” to refer to people in his 1684 New Division of the Earth, locate its maturity in the eighteenth century: Jablonski cites the tenth edition of Swedish naturalist Carl von Linné’s (or Linnaeus) Systema Naturae, published in 1758, as the earliest taxonomic and very widely known text to describe humans’ appearance and temperament with value judgments. The text offers, for example, “obstinate, content, free” to characterize Native Americans and “crafty, indolent, negligent” for Africans. The decades that followed von Linné’s death in 1778 saw an increase in the extent to which treatises classifying humans “were filled with value judgments and exaggerations.” It was Kant who, according to Jablonski, was the first to “define race as a fixed natural entity.”34 The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, did not derive their treatments of race from nothing. As Kelsey recognizes, the early modern development of race has roots in the Middle Ages. The medieval roots of modern race are not to be pigeonholed by examining only premodern narratives’ end goals of Christian conversion. What is far more important to the history of race is how medieval narratives go about asserting and achieving their objectives. This book is about exploring the imaginative space between stimulus and interpretation—the space between witnessing two nearly identical motorcycle rallies and judging one as a moral holiday and the other as indicative of innate criminality, for instance. Take for this book’s first examination of the medieval imaginative space in which racial frameworks take hold and in which black metaphors shimmer the case of the late fifteenth-century chivalric romance The Turke and Sir Gawain.
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The Turke has textual relationships, however diffuse, to the better known depictions of King Arthur’s nephew Gawain in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by the Pearl Poet and Le Morte d’Arthur by Thomas Malory. In it, the peace of Arthur’s court is disrupted, much as it is in the Pearl Poet’s work, by an unexpected visitor. The “Turke” enters the hall and demands to know if anyone will be so “hardy” as to give a blow and receive one in return. As in the Green Knight, Sir Kay the Seneschal is the first to speak up, but Gawain steps in to take the challenge instead. The rest of the text consists of Gawain traveling with the Turk to the Isle of Man, where they enter into contests with the “King of Man” and his force of giants. The Turk and Gawain prevail. The comically overblown contests, which include a game of tennis with giants that includes use of a brass ball so heavy that “noe man in all England” can carry it (188–89) and a fireplace lifting challenge (210–23), are spectacular. What is even more spectacular is the Turk’s quite literal conversion. In the end, the Turk turns into a Christian, English member of King Arthur’s court identified as Sir Gromer (320).35 Christian conversion is certainly the text’s end goal, but it is equally certainly not its most interesting element. The supposed Turk’s identity exhibits the major element of rhetorical mirage: the uncertainty that attends vacillation between presence and nonpresence. Terms identifying Middle Eastern people of dark complexion who practiced Islam were in some flux in the late fifteenth century. By the late fifteenth century, the term “Saracen” had in large part shifted to “Turk” or “Moor.” “Turk” mainly took on the religious connotation of Muslim, while “Moor” took on the ethnic connotation of “Arab.”36 The very status of Saracens was becoming bifurcated as it moved from a single religious and ethnic moniker to a set of terms in which there was some distinction between religion and ethnicity. Yet it remained that neither term was entirely divorced from the other. Despite the development of a mainly religious term and a mainly ethnic and cultural term, neither was immune from being used to connote the other sense. Religion and ethnicity shift in and out of focus in the text’s presentation of the Turk. The text exploits the philological shift in order to expose the shimmer of the Turk’s identity. Far from restricting the term “Turk” to religious difference, the Turk’s foreignness is emphasized in his physical description: “He was not hye, but he was broad” [He was not tall, but he was broad] (13). Yet the first identification of him as a Turk is less than certain: “like a Turke he was made / Both legg and thye” [like a Turk he was made / both leg and
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thigh] (14–15).37 That he is “like” a Turk suggests that he is not one. Nonetheless, in line 34, the next time he speaks, he is identified simply as “the Turke.” This continues throughout the text: appearing “like” a Turk is, on one hand, enough to erase any doubt. On the other hand, it casts a pall of doubt over every subsequent mention of his identity. The Turk’s shimmer should not be taken as a wholesale reversal of the Turk-Moor lexical split. The term “Turk” is not entirely given over to ethnic difference, and religious difference remains relevant to the text’s depiction of the Turk. As Thomas Hahn puts it in his introduction to the TEAMS edition, the Turk is “apparently not Christian.” The Turk’s conversion is effected when Gawain, at the Turk’s request, strikes off his head. Hahn identifies it as a conversion: “This event clearly constitutes a kind of death and rebirth, by means of which the ‘Turk’ undergoes a conversion, becoming in the process a Christian knight.”38 At the same time, the Turk’s non-Christian identity is always under the pressure of Christianity’s normativity, even before the Turk’s conversion and the revelation of Sir Gromer’s presence. In his notes, Hahn makes the salient observations that the Turk’s knowledge of and adherence to certain Christian practices is assumed. In lines 130 to 133, the Turk refers to the “King of [the Isle of] Man” as “A heathen soldan” [a heathen sultan] before describing his “hideous rout / Of giants strong and stout / And uglie” [hideous company / of giants strong and stout / And ugly]. In warning Gawain about the dangerous “adventures” they will have together, the Turk offers a concession: “Wee shall be assayled ere we goe” [We shall be absolved before we go] (144). Hahn glosses “assayled” as “absolved.” He notes that “the Turk’s concern for Christian absolution suggests the superficiality of his role as exotic stereotype within the narrative.”39 What’s more, in lines 260 to 264, the Turk kills the King of Man when he refuses to convert to Christianity, though it is somewhat unclear whether the Turk’s attack is primarily in response to the King’s rejection of Christianity or to the fact that he spits on Gawain as a part of his refusal. Finally, the Turk attributes their victories as well as his physical conversion, before the fact, to the Virgin Mary (283–84). The Turk is “covertly allied” with “the conventional Christian ethos of the poem.”40 The Turk’s religious identity shimmers like sunlight on a calm sea: the reflection of light and the absorption of light, presence and nonpresence, chase one another interminably. The Turk is ethnically and phenotypically different. The Turk is ethnically and phenotypically the same. The Turk is not Christian. The Turk is Christian. The Turk’s Turkness, his otherness, belies the often assumed limits of the body and reveals the shimmering mirage of race for what it is. There is
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humor in The Turke and Sir Gawain, effected through the bigger-than-life exploits of the Turk: tennis with giants who imagine using their heavy brass ball to “strike out Sir Gawain’s brain” (185) rather than to play a serious game, that the Turk picks up the fireplace and comically swings it around his head three times (221–22), and even that the Turk picks up the King of Man and hurls him into a cauldron of molten lead (263–64). Jeffrey Jerome Cohen writes of humor in The Turke and Sir Gawain as an integral part of a “structure of embodiment, a closed system that converts its own excess into more energy to strengthen its hold over bodies and desires.” Citing Bakhtin, Cohen asserts that humor in the form of laughter “can also escape a particular body and form a circuit with a larger, unbounded world.” The Turke therefore suggests “that there is more to the body than the narrow confines of the human frame.”41 The Turke and Sir Gawain asserts the body’s unboundedness through more than humor alone: this revelation is the effect of the philological uncertainty that attends a “Turk” at the end of the fifteenth century, the physical uncertainty that initially surrounds this Turk-like character, and the multiplicity of his overlapping identities later in the text. Even his Christian conversion shimmers as a mirage: from one angle, it is effected in the end of the romance, but from another, there was no Christian conversion needed as the Christian chivalric Sir Gromer was already present though disguised. The Turk and Sir Gromer’s alternating presence and absence demonstrates the unboundedness of the body that is used as a black metaphor. The black metaphor’s unboundedness is made clearer in that Sir Gromer’s name carries within it the notion of limitlessness: Karen Hunter Trimnell has shown rather convincingly that Sir Gromer, who appears as Sir Gromer Somer Joure in the mid-fifteenth-century Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle for the Helping of King Arthur and Grummor, Grummorsom, and Gromore somer Joure in Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, likely takes his name from the thirteenth-century French romance L’Âtre périlleux. In that romance appears a knight named Goumerés sans Mesure. Gromer Somer Joure, who nowhere appears to have any particular connection to a summer’s day, likely developed as a misapprehension and mispronunciation of the French character’s name.42 “Sans Mesure” suggests that the character is so large physically that he resists measurement or that he is without title and therefore not tied to any one place. In any case, the character’s very name suggests that he defies material limits. The variance in his names suggests that he defies philological limits, too. The Turke and Sir Gawain demonstrates that the body necessarily shimmers, producing naught else but vacillations between presence, absence,
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and the presence of other things whose movements can be arrested only by force. The body, when interpreted through a lens such as that of race, which would seek to arrest meaning but remains subject to the distortions inherent in its object, is necessarily polysemous.
* * * In order to begin to establish the contours of the black metaphor as constituent of racial rhetorical mirage and whose power derives from the dynamic of rhetorical shimmer, this introduction has moved backward in time from contemporary Myrtle Beach’s motorcycle rallies to a contemporary rock band’s use of Shakespeare to explore the black metaphor’s imbrication with the romantic love tradition to the Turk’s role in conveying the unboundedness of the body in the Arthurian Turke and Sir Gawain. Following the introduction, chapters are arranged roughly, though not entirely, in the chronological order of their main subject texts, from thirteenth-century texts indebted to the twelfth-century renaissance through fifteenth-century texts and into modernity. The chapters proceed from the first chapter on the late thirteenth- or early fourteenth-century crusades romance King of Tars and its spectacular and revealing use of the black metaphor to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries’ preceptive movement in which the ars poetriae of Matthew of Vendôme, Geoffrey of Vinsauf, and John of Garland, along with such standard medieval rhetorical texts as the Rhetorica ad herennium, transform classical rhetoric in order to set the stage for blackness and whiteness’s successful functioning as metaphors in the second chapter. Chapters 1 and 2 establish the centrality of the black metaphor and the degree to which its place in the history of race is indebted to late medieval developments in the reception of classical rhetoric. This study’s next chapters continue the work begun in Chapter 1 by further considering the spiritual implications of the black metaphor. My third chapter moves toward the later fourteenth century with a study of propositional logic and black-white contrariety in Chaucer’s “Miller’s Tale.” The study of the tale also introduces the primacy in the medieval experience of a symbiotic relationship between the physical and spiritual worlds. The fourth chapter continues to take up the intersection of the spiritual and the material by using the natural philosophy and color theory of the pseudoAristotelian De coloribus to contextualize contrasts between genres in which spiritual concerns are primary such as the didactic spiritual manual Handlyng
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Synne and those with primarily secular concerns such as the later fourteenthcentury chronicle-romance Three Kings of Cologne. The chapter also explores the complexity of whiteness in John of Garland’s Synonyma in order to investigate the reliance of black and white metaphors on the semiotics of spiritual didacticism and chronicle romance. The chapter limns out black and white’s functions as signs and their dependence on the systems of meaning in which they are deployed. Chapters 3 and 4 understand the spiritual implications of the black metaphor through the logic and sign systems that direct the making of meaning. The fifth chapter of Black Metaphors builds on the second chapter’s establishment of a shift in the preference for metaphors based in similitude to one for metaphors based in strife in order to reveal the extreme importance of the Middle Ages to modern racial ideology’s system of categorization. The chapter brings together the unlikely trio of the late fourteenth-century Shewings of Julian of Norwich with the early nineteenth-century phenomenological philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel and with the early twentieth-century sociology of W. E. B. Du Bois. Each text contains a version of the masterand-slave dialectic or, as I will call it, the lord-bondsman narrative, that is most famous in Hegel’s iteration. Through comparison of these “dramas of alterity,” I trace a trajectory in the relationship between strife and wholeness that helps explain how an obdurate racial ideology developed out of the striking fluidity of the black metaphor in the Middle Ages. The latter portion of the book locates the rhetorical shimmer of the black metaphor within the rhetorical and logical device passed down from antiquity to the Middle Ages known as enthymeme. In enthymemes, a logic chain’s major premise is hidden and omitted in order that it must be supplied by its hearer; the hearer’s participation in the inductive logical process makes enthymematic conclusions supremely persuasive and durable. My sixth chapter digs deep into the inner workings of the rhetoric that comprises black metaphors, their shimmer, and racial rhetorical mirage by examining the deployment of enthymemes in one of the most modern of all late medieval texts. The Book of John Mandeville is one of the texts with the most direct influence on New World exploration and colonialism. Comparing the depiction of black-white contrariety in several versions of Mandeville makes it clear that enthymemes have an integral role in transitioning a conclusion that was once recognizable as an interpretation, highly dependent on context and with multiple valences, to appearing as a fact. The black metaphors’ construction, with the enthymemes of which it consists
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and which appears as the rhetorical shimmer that attends racial rhetorical mirage, recedes ever farther from view. Finally, in its seventh and concluding chapter, Black Metaphors continues to consider enthymeme’s role in the crystallization of racial ideology in modernity. Enthymematic interpretation features logical loops that result in what I call semantic closure in order to make an interpretation appear as an established truth. Continuing in the vein of Mandeville and approaching the New World and modernity, the chapter examines Zurara’s account of the arrival of 235 African captives at Lagos, Portugal, in 1444. The shipment is considered the beginning of widespread African slavery on the European continent and eventually in the Americas—in short, the beginning of modernity—but Zurara’s account continues to show a peculiarly medieval approach to the captives’ situation. The semantic closure and its rhetorical deployment that in modernity will conclude that black people are inferior and depraved has not yet occurred, and Zurara’s account allows the reader to see rhetorical shimmer in action as it strives to project racial rhetorical mirage. The conclusion considers the effects of semantic closure on the uses of the Middle Ages in modernity, from the September 11 terrorist attacks to the rise of the political collective known as the alt-right with its increasingly public and vehement white supremacy in the United States sixteen years later. Finally, the conclusion returns to the concept of white innocence and considers the ancillary notion of white victimhood in order to expose to view the process of semantic closure in action, with the arrest of the black metaphor’s rhetorical shimmer and the reification of the racial rhetorical mirage.
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