White Before Whiteness in the Late Middle Ages (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781526145802)

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.

Author: Wan-Chuan Kao
ISBN-10: 1526145804
ISBN-13: 9781526145802
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Language: English
Published: 01/09/2024
Pages: 456
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.48lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.50w x 1.00d