Whitaker, Cord J. "Blackness as metaphor." Throughlines. www.throughlines.org/suite-content/blackness-as-metaphor. [Date accessed].
Blackness as metaphor
The metaphor of Blackness deployed in medieval epics was a rhetorical tool that aided early racial formation.
Many medieval epics regale their audiences with the phenomenon of skin color change, often in the context of religious conversion. The metaphor of Blackness at play in these epics offers a way to understand how phenotypic traits were used as markers of good or evil in the literature and culture of medieval Europe. The long history of racial construction has its roots in how Blackness is leveraged as a metaphor over hundreds of years.
Further learning
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"Merciless Beauty" and carceral justice
“Merciless Beauty” is a poem written in a late 14th-century English that may or may not be Chaucer’s but is highly comparable to Chaucer’s usage. Reading the poem alongside the film The Prison in 12 Landscapes, students are asked to make connections between the poem and the film and their formal examinations of time, incarceration, and repetition.
