Black Metaphors: How Modern Racism Emerged from Medieval Race-Thinking by Cord J. Whitaker (review)

Cord Whitaker's timely study pinpointing the roots of modern Western racial thinking in medieval rhetorical practice is a deeply important book not just for medieval studies but for a general audience in these times of increased racial violence. Whitaker has already put forth considerable effort to make this book accessible, from his opening anecdotes addressing motorcycle rallies and lyrics to popular songs to his insightful readings of Chaucer, Mandeville, Julian of Norwich, and W. E. B. Dubois, among others. Underlying and connecting these readings are two concepts: rhetorical mirage, which, like its physical counterpart, "has its genesis in material reality but quickly moves into the realms of imagination and interpretation," and an associated shimmer (5). Drawing on Michelle R. Warren's idea of "shimmering philology," the shimmer Whitaker identifies in his texts, "allows whiteness to be invisible sometimes and visible at others" (4–5). As he deftly navigates ancient and modern philosophers, medieval rhetoricians, and Middle English poets, the mirage, and the shifting truths behind it, come into view, illuminating the whiteness that has always been at the heart of medieval studies.

A book to which Black Metaphors is already being compared in terms of both subject matter and methodology is Geraldine Heng's The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge 2018), which has garnered both praise and censure for its ambitious scope. Among the objections raised regarding Heng's book is that her focus on case studies from England privileges the very Eurocentric voices and approaches she aims to deconstruct. Black Metaphors similarly focuses on England, but Whitaker's analysis privileges depth over breadth, offering a terrific wealth of material for future scholars to build on, just as he has built on Heng's work and that of other scholars at the intersection of medieval studies and critical race theory.

Black Metaphors sets forth an initial series of parameters for rhetorical mirage and shimmer before proceeding to a series of case studies, some individual and some comparative, that complicate those parameters and delineate their connections to modern racist ideology. The first chapter focuses on the anonymous Middle English poem The King of Tars, whose climactic conversion scene is complicated by its use of rhetorical mirage. The titular sultan is literally washed white at the time of his conversion, but his violent behavior persists in spite of his change of religion and his physical transformation, thus indicating "the permeability of the boundaries between the metaphorical whiteness associated with Christian purity and the metaphorical blackness associated with non-Christian sinfulness" (40). Whitaker then takes a step back to explain the rhetorical backdrop underpinning both the poem analyzed in the first chapter and those that follow. Drawing not just on the classical theories of Aristotle and Cicero but on their medieval interlocutors (Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Bernard of Clairvaux, and others), Whitaker demonstrates "how rhetoric manipulates the people, places, things, and actions that words signify in order to constructs more expansive meanings out of otherwise incommensurate concepts" (50).

The third and fourth chapters approach the spiritual implications of black metaphors, first in Chaucer's "Miller's Tale," where they appear in the ambivalent figure of Alisoun; and, next, across three disparate texts—a pseudo-Aristotelian treatise on color theory, the Middle English romance The Three Kings of Cologne, and an early fourteenth-century spiritual manual. Drawing on the work of Henry Louis Gates, among others, Whitaker observes that, "while blackness is, in the material realm, a particular condition, in the realm of its metaphorical and spiritual ramifications, it is at once a changeable and a universal condition" (103).

The fifth chapter stands out even within these compelling arguments, tracing rhetorical, theological, and philosophical connections between the Shewings of Julian of Norwich (ca. 1373), G. W. F. Hegel's Phenomenology of Sprit (1807), and W. E. B. DuBois's Souls of Black Folk (1903). Through a close-reading of each writer's evocation of the...