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.

Download the transcript
Cord J. Whitaker
Wellesley College

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

Video

Where were the Black people in the Middle Ages?

Records and texts from the period offer insight into a rich and cosmopolitan medieval Europe, where there were not only Black people, but they held positions of power and prestige.

Cord J. Whitaker

Recommended

Discussion questions

Race-making and the myth of Ham discussion questions

To begin a classroom discussion about the curse of Ham myth, undergraduates can consider what they know about stories and histories and what they understand as truth.

Chouki El Hamel
Video

Chaucer, Virgil, and erasure poetry

Teaching Chaucer's House of Fame alongside contemporary Nisga'a poet Jordan Abel's The Place of Scraps allows students to consider the issues of source, adaptation, colonization, and race in our literary lineage.

Seeta Chaganti
Video

Premodern race as a critical canon

Heng offers insight on approaches to teaching the traditional, canonized literature of premodern Europe through the lens of premodern critical race studies.

Geraldine Heng

Selected annotated bibliography