Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: When The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages was published in 2018-and, before that, when I published a two-part article of the same title in Literature Compass in 2011-race theorists and premodernists had to be actively persuaded that phenomena and practices identified today as race and racialization were palpable in the European Middle Ages, long before the modern eras.To begin the conversation, I offered a simple, stripped-down working hypothesis: that race is one of the primary names we have-a name we retain for the epistemological, ethical, and political commitments it recognizes-for a repeating tendency, of the gravest import, to demarcate human beings through differences among humans that are selectively essentialized as absolute and fundamental, in order to distribute positions and powers differentially to human groups.Racial formation thus occurs as specific historical occasions where strategic essentialisms are posited and assigned, through a variety of practices and pressures, so as to construct a hierarchy of peoples for differential treatment.GERALDINE HENG is the Vacek Chair in English at the University of Texas, Austin, and the author of Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (Columbia UP, 2003), The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge UP, 2018), England and the Jews: How Religion and Violence Created the First Racial State in the West (Cambridge UP, 2019), The Global Middle Ages: An Introduction (Cambridge UP, 2021), and Teaching Early Global Literatures and Cultures (Cambridge UP, 2025), as well as the editor of The Global Middle Ages (Modern Language Association of America, 2022).She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.She founded and directs the Global Middle Ages Project (G-MAP: www.globalmiddleages.org) and coedits the Cambridge University Press series Elements in the Global Middle Ages and the University of Pennsylvania Press series RaceB4Race: Critical Studies of the Premodern.To understand race as a structural relationship-a mechanism of sorting-for the articulation and management of human differences rather than a substantive content meant understanding that the differences selected for essentialism would, of course, vary in the longue durée of human history, from nonmodern eras well into the twentyfirst century, fastening perhaps on bodies, physiognomy, and somatic differences in one instance; perhaps on religion, social practices, economic conditions, war, or political culture in another; and perhaps a multiplicity of interlocking discourses elsewhere.One reason we might want a long history of race rather than the abbreviated, truncated histories of racial time we had that only began
Author: Geraldine Heng
Language: English
Subfield: Classics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W7129190473