White before whiteness in the late Middle Ages
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A01=Wan-Chuan Kao
aesthetics
affect studies
Author_Wan-Chuan Kao
capitalism
Category=DSA
Category=DSBB
Category=JBSL1
critical race studies
critical whiteness studies
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
fragility
medieval Christianity
periodisation
precarity
subjectivity
Product details
- ISBN 9781526145802
- Weight: 674g
- Dimensions: 138 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 09 Jan 2024
- Publisher: Manchester University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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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.
Wan-Chuan Kao is Associate Professor of English at Washington and Lee University
