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  • Black Metaphors: How Modern Racism Emerged from Medieval Race-Thinking by Cord J. Whitaker
  • Shirin A. Khanmohamadi
Cord J. Whitaker. Black Metaphors: How Modern Racism Emerged from Medieval Race-Thinking. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. Pp. 247. $49.95.

Cord J. Whitaker's fascinating new study, Black Metaphors: How Modern Racism Emerged from Medieval Race-Thinking, connects the field of medieval rhetoric to the history of racial thinking even as it probes fundamental questions such as the meaning of blackness in the Middle Ages. As such, it acts as an important contribution not only to the intellectual history of race, but also to the emerging field of premodern race studies.

"Race," which, as Whitaker writes, "sets one group of people identifiable by some distinctive trait and sets them beside another group with a different iteration of that trait … in order to make a point about hierarchy" (50), works as much through language as it does through visual apprehension. Medieval rhetoric and grammar give us access to the race-thinking, or ways of thinking about blackness and whiteness—broadly, [End Page 461] black metaphors—in the Middle Ages. As Whitaker shows throughout the book:

blackness's meaning is not in the end as simple as a "black is damned, white is saved" dichotomy; texts often present the simple dichotomy as an assumed truth and then manipulate it in order to make more sophisticated points about spiritual identity. Blackness often functions as a vexing metaphor, signifying sameness and otherness, purity and sinfulness, salvation and damnation at once.

(82)

A second central metaphor for the book is the "shimmering" rhetorical mirage of racial thinking, a yoking of appearance and truth that tends to dissolve upon deeper scrutiny but that, like race itself, bears profound material consequences nonetheless.

The book's second chapter probes racial thinking in late medieval rhetoric and in the reception of Aristotelian philosophy while setting up the central terms of the study, namely contrariety and strife. Medieval thought is given to embracing the multivalence of "contrariety," the mutual constitution and interdependence of apparently opposing terms. This is apparent in Aristotle's Physics and Metaphysics, both translated in the high medieval period, which view black and white as both the "building blocks of nature" and an apparent(or "shimmering") antithesis whose parts actually "mix and mingle with one another until their conjunction, in an infinite variety of degrees, has created all other colors" (53–54). Late medieval grammar and rhetoric show a preference for metaphors built on "strife" rather than likeness or similitude as found in classical texts; Geoffrey of Vinsauf, for example, judged "'strife' between words, their unexpected pairing and superficial clashing" to be even more effective than metaphors based on similitude (64). For Whitaker, "Geoffrey's deep engagement with 'strife' represents the late medieval impulse towards dynamic binarism—an impulse central to the development of race-thinking" connecting the premodern to modernity (65). At the same time, the medieval period's tendency to embrace the unity of apparent contraries such as black and white distinguishes it from a modernity in which strife will instead assume primacyand the once capacious, multivalent and shimmering meanings of blackness will harden and arrest into simple sin and depravity. Whitaker connects the emergence of strife to the crusades and its continuation in early modern imperialism (183–84). [End Page 462]

Chapters 1 and 3 offer innovative close readings of two well-known Middle English texts that we might well treat as "contraries" themselves: the King of Tars, a central text in the analysis of premodern race to date, and Chaucer's Miller's Tale, an ostensibly race-free text. In his chapter on the King of Tars, Whitaker argues that the lag between the Sultan's physical transformation and spiritual conversion signals a lack of full alignment between spiritual and bodily sin and purity; otherwise put, "blackness and whiteness, of the internal and external varieties, can simultaneously cohere in a single being." Moreover the Sultan's ongoing violence toward his brethren after his Christian conversion suggests a "stable sinful character" from which critics have been distracted by his transformation and its "shimmering interplay of blackness and whiteness" (43)—in...

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