White before Whiteness in the Late Middle Ages (Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture)

Kao, Wan-Chuan

Manchester University Press（2024/01発売）

• 製本 Hardcover:ハードカバー版／ページ数 456 p.
• 言語 ENG
• 商品コード 9781526145802
• DDC分類 809.02

Full Description

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.

Contents

Introduction: Operational whiteness

Part I: Fragility
1 Memorialisation in white
2 Desiring white object

Part II: Precarity
3 Stretched white leather
4 Flat white

Part III: Racialicity
5 White dorsality
6 In the lap of whiteness

Conclusion: White environmentality
Bibliography
Index