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Full Description
Against the grain of much contemporary scholarship within medieval studies, this work emphasizes the radical alterity and historical rupture that the Middle Ages represents in European history.
Through an engagement with three contentious debates in medieval studies - historiography, race and individuated subjectivity - Vanita Seth's work employs postcolonial and postmodern theorizing to explore questions of ontology, epistemology, facial privileging, and emotion and identity in the European Middle Ages and early modern period. While the subject matter of this book is historical, the stakes are contemporary and political. Seth's contention is that it is the very alterity that the medieval represents that enables contemporary scholars and activists to recognize as historical that which is so often posited as 'natural.' Writing a history of absence while also engaging radically different ways of being in the world, this book argues, helps to disrupt the self-evident naturalization of the face, to contest knee-jerk celebrations of individuality tethered to the human visage, and to recognize racism not as an age-old nemesis but as a distinctly modern form of organizing power.
This work is interdisciplinary, engaging scholarship in science studies, philosophy, feminist theory, anthropology, race studies and literature, and postmodern
and postcolonial theory. It presumes no prior specialized knowledge in medieval studies and/or history. This book is an essential reading for scholars and students in the fields of medieval and early modern history, race, historiography, identity and emotion studies.
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction: "A Different Slant"
Chapter 1: (Un)Doing History: Epistemological Alterity and the Middle Age
I. Continuity and Alterity
II. Conceits of History
III. Alterity, Again
Not a Conclusion
Chapter 2: Rethinking Race
I. An Old Debate: Critiquing History of Ideas
II. Race: A Unit-Idea
III. Other Ways of Being in the World
Conclusion
Chapter 3: The Faceless Premodern
I. Individuality: A Teleological History
II. Facing the Premodern
III. Identity and Emotion Without the Face
Conclusion
Conclusion: The Silence of the Past in the History of the Present
Index
Bibliography
