Wan-Chuan Kao, "White before Whiteness in the Late Middle Ages" (Manchester UP, 2024)
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Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Wan-Tuan Cao about his book titled White Before Whiteness in the Late Middle Ages, published by Manchester University Press in 2024. This is a really interesting book that's doing a bunch of things, a bunch of things that I'm very excited for us to talk about, analysing pre-modern whiteness

through a whole bunch of different lenses. We're going to be talking about fragility. We're going to be talking about precarity. We're going to be talking about racialicity. We're going to be talking about this in a whole bunch of different ways, showing up in literary culture and art. I don't want to give too much away, really, because there's a lot for us to get into here. Juan Juan, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast to tell us about your book.

Hi, thank you. Thank you, Miranda. And thanks to the New Books Network for this really generous invitation. Yeah, so I am a trained medievalist. My primary area of interest is the late Middle Ages, late Middle English literature, mostly guys like Chaucer and Sir Grant Green Knight, a poet.

I also work on gender and sexuality and also pre-modern critical race studies. So this book, as I guess typical of many first monographs for academics, grew out of my graduate school experience.

So while I was in graduate school initially, I was taking lots of American Studies courses and also lots of medieval courses. And this was during the so-called first wave of critical whiteness studies in the 2000s or IDOs. So, you know, scholars like David Roediger, Mike Hill, etc.,

And it was also around the same period that within medieval studies, there was a deliberate turn toward thinking about questions of post-colonial studies, what that would look like within the Middle Ages, but also questions about race, sexuality, etc.

I think, you know, it was really a very first or one of the earlier periods of thinking about intersectionality, as we would call it now. And the mentors I work with at a graduate school, Stephen Kruger, David Berger, Sylvia Tamash, and Pamela Sheingorn, have all kind of worked on various aspects of this intersectional nature of identities, right?

in the Middle Ages. So my dissertation began as my wondering, you know, what would critical whiteness studies look like in the Middle Ages? And I was primarily thinking about or kind of challenging and pushing against two things.

intellectual or academic assumptions. One is, and this is something that Geraldine Hayne has pointed out in her book on the invention of race in the European Middle Ages, that for decades there has been this persistent assumption that race is a modern invention, so therefore there was no race in the pre-modern period. So that's the first one. And number two was also responding to

critical whiteness studies, which has always been the default, right? It's always that it's about race, that is biological race, something that's a skin phenomenon. So those were the two primary kind of drives for the dissertation. And between the dissertation and the book's publication, a lot happened, I think, you know, culturally, historically, and

I think the most important things historically would be Charlottesville 2017, when there was the United, the right rally. Within academia, we have the kind of blossoming of trans studies, that is trans with an asterisk. Now, you know, we can get to that in a little bit. Also, the more kind of formalizing and engaging.

of this field of what Margot Hendricks called pre-modern critical race studies. And, you know, I think, you know, I also started to work in academia full-time and kind of that kind of had...

has led to a variety of experiences. Yeah, and then of course the pandemic. So I think out of those experiences, there was an evolution of my thinking and revision of the project.

And three key words emerge, right? That's very kind of in the Raymond Williams style of thinking. One has to do with the wife fragility. The other one is wife precarity. And then the final one has to do with race or racial thinking.

So I think for me, whiteness, at least in its pre-modern iterations, yes, obviously there are instances where it had to do with the bodily, the somatic, and the racial issues.

But I think, you know, something else is also working, you know, in different registers, right? So, for example, there are multiple terms for white, right? You know, if we're thinking about the medieval vernaculars and also later modern languages, right, we have to work candor or candidates, right? In the French, we have blanc.

Within the philosophical tradition, the word albus, which is Latin for white, is quite important, actually, in a very different tradition in thinking about the nature of language, the nature of knowledge.

So I think, you know, thinking about critical whiteness within those registers will be productive, right, in pushing back against a reflexive thinking about what it means. Yeah.

This is a very helpful introduction to the book, the literatures it's speaking to, the concerns, the questions you're raising. Very, very helpful start to our conversation. And as you flagged in that answer, the development of trans with an asterisk studies. Can you tell us a bit more about how these questions you're asking can be usefully answered or at least answered in part by looking at this developed area?

Thank you so much for the question. Yeah, so I think the developments within the field of trans studies has been quite formative in my thinking of the project in the last decade or so. So within trans studies and research,

you know, I'm standing on the shoulders of scholars like Jack Holberstam, Eva Hayward, and Jamie Weinstein and others. What they want to emphasize with the addition of the asterisk to the word trans is to register a

a kind of resistance to, first of all, you know, the kind of binary, binarism in gender perception, right, male, female, but also whether, you know, the assumption that there's any kind of abrupt transition with, with,

trans identities. So the asterisk opens up the possibility of identities and different forms of embodiment, right, across a spectrum, a continuum, rather than just kind of switch. And as Halberstam and Hayward and Weinstein have pointed out, the asterisk has this kind of wild card function, right?

And it highlights the suffixial space, right? The suffix, right? Of attachment that we culture, you know, we attach particular identity and ideologies to particular identity, right? For example, or the conception of trans here. So the asterisk very much is functioning as a splitter and a joiner, right?

And for me, you know, in thinking about whiteness, it kind of, I had this kind of eureka moment of thinking like, what if we think about whiteness not so much as a fixed thing, right? Because that was something I was kind of,

thinking through about the fixity or the kind of biological basis for that so that the word or the idea or the color white becomes a pre-fix your space, right? Rather than something that's stable.

So therefore, you know, in my book's title, right, White Before Whiteness, I think for me that the word before means a few things, right? One is it is a kind of temporal antecedent, right? The pre-modern period. But it also really registers for me the power of the word or the idea or the color white, as well as the kinds of ideological attachments and the work that

right, that goes into the constructions and congealing, if we will, of whiteness as a form of power or as a set of norms. So I think, you know, for me, the project is driven by, my question is not so much what is or what was pre-modern medieval whiteness, but

what are the things and practices and objects and identities and bodies, right? What are the things that are recognized as white or more interestingly, misrecognized as white? So that I think in claiming white or whiteness, right, we need to be kind of self-aware of its artificial construction, right? But also the ramification of the claiming and possession, right?

So the asterisk for me is, in that sense, both a link, right, but also a possible way to split the attachment here. I do want to emphasize that they're not quite analogous or the same, that is, white with the asterisk and trans with the asterisk. And that, you know, trans with an asterisk starts out, you know, the scholarship acknowledges the non-hegemonic or the

the anti-hegemonic position of trans. Whereas I think, you know, for white without the asterisk, right, it's already occupying a particular kind of hegemonic position in the West. And,

So, yeah. So for me, I think the interesting question is about this technology of recognition, if you will, and to investigate what I call the operational difference in pre-modern whiteness. I guess I can give an example. A more modern example would be, you know, within the U.S. context, right, white

critical race scholars have often spoken of the hyphenated identity, right? Like Asian American, African American, right? So that, you know, if we put an asterisk, you know, between Asian and American, you know, it does a very different kind of work, right? About what are the assumptions, right? Because it is a kind of a strange category if you think about it, right? It's kind of geographical rather than

even racial or ethnic or linguistic. And I think there is a difference between the asterisk and the hyphen in which the asterisk is doing a very, you know, critical, liberating and rigorous work, I think. Yeah, thanks.

That's helpful to understand the kind of ways in which you're thinking this through and the pieces you're bringing together in order to do it. The next thing I'd love to pick up from your introduction is the idea of

that you're, as you said, pushing back on, that whiteness didn't exist before the pre-modern period, that that's not relevant to talk about. Of course, everything you've told us so far suggests that there very much is a lot to think about in this period. But I'm wondering if we can talk even within whiteness to something sort of more specific that I find fascinating to think about, not just in general, but particularly in the context of the medieval period, white fragility. What did that look like at this time?

Oh, thank you so much. So I borrowed the term from the scholar Robin DiAngelo, who has published articles and a book on white fragility within the primarily U.S. 2021st century context. So in DiAngelo's formulation, white fragility is very much reactionary politics, right?

And it's a form of self-defense in which the white space or white privilege, if we will, white identity, perceive itself to be under attack. So there's a kind of siege mentality and to a perceived threat from the white

non-white entity or practices or threats and hostility. So I guess one way would be kind of thinking about this as kind of microaggression or passive aggression in the workplace, for example, that's linked to particular demographic identities.

So the performance of grievance, I think, you know, and mourning mark white fragility because it presents itself as delicate and vulnerable to attack.

So that's the kind of the perception or formulation by D'Angelo. And since her book and article have been published, there have been some criticism of D'Angelo and her idea of white fragility. Much of it has to do with her identity and also perhaps this is another way of kind of corporatization, right, of DEI or HR, right?

So I don't want to throw out the baby with the bath water. I think there is something quite...

powerful in thinking about a pre-modern or even modern whiteness through white virginity. Primarily two things. One has to do with the aesthetics, right? Aesthetic force that's linked to white or perception of the whiteness. The other one is affective, right? That is kind of bodily emotional response.

So for me, white fragility or pre-modern white fragility marks, I think, limits of particular kinds of ruling ideology. And in that section of my book, I am primarily interested in what will later be called in the 19th century onward, courtly love.

in medieval romances and other treatises, right? In which you have a lady on a pedestal and mostly, most of the time, a male lover pursuing,

this woman. But sometimes the woman, the lady, has passed away. So part of the courtly love tradition has to do with the male lover grieving and mourning the loss of lady. And so there is a kind of really self-conscious act of memorialization that takes place. So the

two texts that I'm looking at in this section. The first one is Chaucer's The Bucket of Duchess, and the other one is a Middle English poem called Pearl. So in The Bucket of Duchess, Chaucer has a character who's nameless, but is known as the Black Knight because his armor and his clothes are entirely in black.

who is grieving the death of his lady, who is named White. And in Pearl, we have a dreamer, a male dreamer narrator character who's mourning the loss of a pearl girl.

that later we find out, right, it's linked, it's both a literal pearl, but it's also a stand-in for a girl or possibly daughter, right, that he has lost. So for me, I think this act of self-conscious grieving by the male dreamer, the male lover, right, the male subject, marks a particular kind of, I think, what I would,

would think of as this aristocratic self-fashioning right through um a kind of what i call white fragiliac right these are so if white fragiliac will be a male subject um who is grieving right and and a little loss of a particular form of whiteness so it's very much about this this um

shaping or self-fashioning by male characters, male lovers in these poems, but also the male authors in claiming a particular place of their literary work within the canon. So this fragility is both universalizing because Chaucer is deploying conventions of cordial love

but at the same time it's quite particularizing or localizing, um,

that the poem possibly alludes to specific places, right, in England, and possibly referring to John of Gaunt and the loss of his wife. Yeah, so for me, I think wife fragility within the Middle Ages has a lot to do with shaping of this erotic or kind of

quarterly identity for aristocratic man. Thanks.

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But it's not just people. I mean, all of that can in some ways apply to other aspects as well. That's what's so fascinating about this. As you have described for us, it shows up in courtly romances, which were a really big deal in this period, but also in material objects as well. I wonder if you could maybe tell us about pearls and help us understand the physicality, I suppose, of some of these objects and the ways this relates to wider things happening socioeconomically, religiously at this time.

Oh, thank you. Yeah, so in the poem Pearl, what I've noticed is that the poem makes no mention at all of the artificial whitening of pearls. So, you know,

I think we're living in an age where artificial pearls are so readily accessible and cheaper to buy, so that we forget the kind of difficulty or the artifice that goes into production of this object. So that became a really interesting...

or absence in the poem for me. And socioculturally, with the reality of medieval hygiene and the difficulty really of keeping things white, right, on a kind of literal level, that absence, right, or the omission is quite glaring to me.

And I'm thinking about this kind of the absence of this description of history of labor in the context of some socioeconomic changes in the late Middle Ages. So, for example, the scholar Lester Little has written about a shift in really the, depending on the area, I think, the Mediterranean kind of

has the process began a little bit earlier than Northern Europe, is what he calls this kind of emergence. And other scholars have also pointed to this of what we today would call the middle class or middle classes. One of the terms to describe this group would be the middling sorts. So these are...

merchants, sometimes craftsmen, right? They are making money but without titles necessarily. So with the kind of greater wealth, Lester Little has argued that

We began to see a different form of religious practice, what's called late piety. Within this kind of proto-capitalist moment, it's not quite the Industrial Revolution and Adam Smith, but we really see the beginning of those things happening. So these merchants and craftsmen and artisans have more...

money and ability to purchase things. So the logic of accumulation kicks in. If we will, we can kind of think about it's a way to kind of early form of flexing, as some young people call it today, the bling-bling to demonstrate their class. So luxury items and objects then, as is now, becomes one of these class markers that

So I think the erasure of the artificial whitening of pearls in the poem Pearl is part of this tradition in which the objects are meant to display the wealth of a particular group of people. And so the erasure of labor has the effect of naturalizing, I think, the

the formation of these objects, right? But it's also a kind of roundabout way of saying, you know, that they have always been

bestow with the power to buy things. So it's a, it's a wealth of omission, I think. And, and, and whiteness, I think has to do in the poem, right? Signals a particular kind of virginity of the, the pearl maiden, the purity and, and link to the iconography of Christ as the lamb of God and,

in which these intentional moments of whiteness are signaling this willful erasure of production and assertion of particular kinds of sensibility and identity. It's definitely interesting to see what's not there, as you've pointed out. But what's unsettling or troubling about this erasure?

Thank you. Yeah, I think, you know, the unsettling thing for me would be the denial, really. So I've been thinking about this, and I think the equivalence would be how we're kind of cut out by the kind of supermarket phenomenon where,

all these things, right, like an emporium, are accessible and convenient. And we often forget about the fact that almost everything comes from elsewhere, right? And is actually processed and carefully produced. So for me, that erasure is quite, quite

of this, it's almost like a hiding, right? It's hiding away the origin and the source and the acts of labor. And I'm thinking about, you know, scholars like Sarah Ahmed, who has written about whiteness within the kind of contemporary moment, how for her, whiteness is almost, you know, she calls it like an affective concealment

right um so that the the assumption is that you know it is always ready right it's ready-made it's you know if you will it's born this way right it's found this way uh so there there is a kind of um you know um self um concealment if you will right that that takes place here uh the other thing that's kind of interesting for me and and this is kind of me looking through um

right? Studies of color perception. And as the psychologist, Mark Bornstein has pointed out, uh, this really interesting phenomenon, what he calls, uh, brightness confound. And that, you know, uh,

we are often our perceptions of color is often linked to a particular intensity or luster but also sometimes and I'm also thinking about another psychologist David Katz in matching right so that colors become stand in for objects right for

identities and bodies, right? So this is where the asterisks happen, right? With the attachment of particular identities to objects. That's quite fascinating for me. Yeah.

Yeah, I found this absolutely intriguing to see what's not there and think about why. And especially given that, you know, in some ways, these chivalric romances are less part of our everyday lives now. But questions about pearls and labor and, as you said, the supermarket are still very relevant to where we're at today.

Now that we've discussed pearls, the next thing I'd love to turn to is in some ways related. Maybe it's just me, but I often think of pearls as being not just fragile. We've talked about white fragility, but precarious.

precarious, I suppose, in a way. And of course, that's also a term that is very much part of conversations today around whiteness. So how was medieval whiteness precarious? How was this performed? Thank you so much. So for me, I think I want to make a distinction between white

fragility and white precarity, they're not the same things. For me, and I'm drawing on scholarship on precarity studies, and precarity really is a

It's signaling a rupture within normative values and practices. And it has more to do with, I think, the social aspect of interactions, right? It's the body politic aspect.

and the vulnerability and violence that are attached to particular groups or identities. So in precarity studies, scholars, and I'm thinking about Judith Butler and

and Isabel Lowry here, that they have argued their distinction between precarity, precariousness, and also the act or the process of precaritization. So, for example, Butler would say precariousness is a shared condition that we all participate in.

But however, I think precarity, and this is really the important point, is unevenly distributed, right? So that some people are in a more precarious condition than others, right? Or like a better term, you know, we all have privileges and there are those who are less privileged.

And the third piece of the puzzle is precaritization, the act of turning someone or a group into a perceived threat and render them precarious within the body politic. So there is within the medieval theatrical tradition, and this is kind of a serendipitous example,

for me in my studies is I was looking at medieval dramatic practices and I noticed that there was something called the white leather suit. So it's basically a piece of body, skin suit, right? That actors who play the Christ figure or sometimes Adam and Eve wore, right? As a

for modesty reasons, to represent a naked body during performances or passion plays. So in a way, these bodybuilders

body suits are like props, but we can also think of them, I think it might be useful to think of them as prosthetic, right? As a form of prosthetic whiteness. So these body suits are made from animal skin and that as theater historians have pointed out, right, the actual color of these white leather suits

were not almost never white. It could be off-white, creamy, tawny, right? So the question for me is then, you know, if it's not actually a white, right, in the kind of technical sense, why is it still called white leather?

And I kind of think about this within a chapter, thinking about Pierce Plowman, this long dream vision poem in the late Middle Ages by William Langland, and also the contemporary theatrical practices. So in the late Middle Ages, there was this tradition in which the figure of Christ was often compared to a book,

or a charter so that the Crucified Christ is literally this charter or book that's the book of salvation.

or the charter of redemption. So there's that kind of linkage between Christ's body, right, books, right, and of course in the Middle Ages, you know, before the 15th century and Caxton, for example, in England, right, much of the kind of lower reproduction was skin-based, right, that is parchment. So we have Christ's body, right, we have parchment, right,

And then we have this leather skin suit worn by actors. These things are connected somehow, right? And I think, you know, for me, the useful way of thinking about what's going on here is not so much through the metaphor of the social fabric, right, but rather the social skin, right?

And within these drama, you know, dramatic tradition, even in Pierce Plowman and elsewhere, right, what we see is often that the representations of the passion, the crucifixion of Christ, it's almost impossible to separate that from anti-Semitism, right?

So we have a link or couple to the tradition of this kind of Christian salvation, the precaracterization of Jews. So the Jewish body, in fact, I would say is a precarious body.

And so another thing I think is important for me is that the white precarity here is also moving away from the body itself, right? But to objects, right? A skin suit, right? So it's this kind of formerly living animate thing, but now is inanimate, but it's still meant to represent life.

of embodiment. And finally, Judith Butler has made this really interesting observation in which she says, precarity emerges when interpolation fails. So interpolation is something that Louis Astucer, the French Marxist philosopher, has made really famous in which he argues that

ideology calls its subject into formation through the act of hailing. So, for example, the law calls us, and if we respond, then we become a subject. So for Butler, she's pointing out that all these addresses by the state or the law, it's not always successful. In fact, often it fails. And it's in those moments of

failures in which precarity emerged. So in the example, I think, of the white leather skin suit, I think what it highlights is that, you know, the interpolation or the calling of a Christian identity, right, is sometimes really is a form of insecurity and failure, right? Because

As I think, you know, religion scholars, historians will remind us, right? Christ was Jewish, right? Jesus was Jewish. So there is that kind of, you know, weird doubleness, right? In which the...

letter skin suit as Christ, right? It's meant to be a different identity or different kinds of whiteness than a Jewish identity, but it is still there, right? The haunting, the spectrality of the Jewish body.

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Hmm.

I wonder if we can expand this and talk about precarity in some of the ways we talked about fragility earlier. I mean, you talked about fragility in terms of aesthetics. You talked about it in terms of material objects. Can we talk about precarity impacting whiteness in those ways as well? Oh, thank you. And I really also want to, you know, was very interested in moments where whiteness is not just an ideal, right? It's, you know, there is a kind of defect

to thinking of, of course, you know, there's like a tradition of thinking the white as the standard, right? But I'm really also interested in moments where, you know, perhaps, you know, whiteness here is cringeworthy, right? Or it's not working or it's minor or perhaps it's embarrassing or shameful, right?

And the text I'm kind of thinking through is through another Chaucerian text within the Canterbury Tale, a very short one called Sertopes. That's allegedly written by the Chaucer persona within the pilgrimage. So within that poem, we have a toy-like knight who has a face like a piece of white bread.

And the genre of the poem is part of this popular Middle English romance tradition. So for me, there's something weird going on with kind of representing the chivalric knight as toy-like and cuddly with a brat-like face. And a useful way for me to kind of think about this is through...

the studies from someone like, you know, Sion Noi, uh, who has written about aesthetic categories and affect, especially her really famous book on ugly feelings. Um, so, so in one of her books, she examines, uh, cuteness, right. As, as, uh,

as a very problematic set of category in which the cutification of an object, of a person, is often a way to hide and suppress trauma and violence.

And the example that she and other scholars have pointed to will be, for example, Japan post-World War II. So within the pop cultural realm, we have on the one hand, Godzilla, right? On the other hand, you know, Hello Kitty. And so Hello Kitty becomes this paradigm of Japanese cute culture. And scholars have pointed out, you know, this is really a kind of a

a denial, right, or suppression of trauma of World War II or even, you know, Japan's own involvement, right, complicity and crimes within the war period. Thinking about the context of Chaucer's text, it is not, of course, the same as Japan post-World War II. But I think, you know, there are weird resonances in which this cutification of

of a knight or a character of a knight hides particular forms of violence.

that's taking place within late medieval England. And another very interesting thing that happens here, and this is where the linkage to, for example, Pearl and the erasure of production of labor, the erasure of labor history, is linked to the erasure of violence. I think the two kind of go hand in hand. It's that in Sir Topaz, we have references to...

armors and objects made by Jewish artisans, right? But there are no Jewish presence, real presence. And there are also allusions to Muslims, but in the kind of very strange and false understanding of Islam in which you have Muslim deities, right?

presenting Islam as polytheistic when it's not. So this kind of reduction, I think, or simplification of the other into cute objects is part of this, what I think of as a flattening of whiteness in which it becomes a way to

distort itself really but it still is kind of doing a lot of cultural work of hiding the violence, the trauma so the embarrassment of the link to cuteness what scholars have called cute shame I think it's linked to what I call white shame scholars often point to Sertokvás as this kind of

terrible piece of art, right? That's intentionally bad. So for me, you know, this intentional failure of art, I think it's partaking, right? And playing out this thinking through whiteness as precarity in this social context.

I want to pick up on that idea of the kind of social work that this is doing. Can we maybe expand that a little bit and probably add in a bit of what you're saying about hiding violence? Can you tell us how medieval whiteness was participating in racialization processes and tactics? Oh, thank you so much. I really appreciate your question and thinking through racial formation through processes and tactics. And absolutely, I think they are.

processes and tactics involved in this. I think, well, let me start with a kind of more cultural context. So I'm drawing on the work of our historians, for example, Madeline Cavaness, who has published this really influential article in which she argues that within the visual arts, there was a

important and radical shift in representations of European identities post-Crusade.

So she argues that before the Crusades, the color white was used primarily to represent courtly heroines, right? The ladies, aristocratic women. However, she argues that post-Crusade, right? During a post-Crusade, you know, there is a deliberate shift, right? Where the color white is now...

starting, you know, by the mid 14th century is meant to signal white identity for all Europeans, right? So instead of this kind of ruddy, fleshy tone used to represent Europeans, they now look, you know, in the visual arts as white.

as, as pure white. So there's that kind of art historian, uh, and our, our history angle of this racialization, right? Encounter with, um, the, the religious other in, in the Holy land. Um,

And alongside that, there was the real threat and possibility of Mongol conquest in the 13th century and fantasies of that in the 14th. And

There was great anxiety about, you know, would the Mongols really sweep their way all the way through Europe, right? Or would they not? And who are these people from the Far East? So in going back to someone like Chaucer, I think what's fascinating is that, yeah, we do see this kind of whiteness as...

participating in a kind of dermal racialization, right? Especially kind of thinking about our history. But within, you know, something like Chaucer's Squire's Tale in the Canterbury Tales or in travel narratives like the Mandeville's Travel, it's not quite exactly doing the same things, right?

So, for example, in Mandeville's Travels, there's a really interesting episode. Actually, it repeats itself twice, the dream. So this Genghis Khan figure has a dream in which in the original source, in the Eastern source, he sees a shaman riding a horse into the sky who then proclaims the

the prophecy that, you know, of the Mongol empire to come. Um, what's interesting about the stories as it traveled West, uh, details began to shift. Uh, so the shaman, uh, uh, becomes a knight,

And in one of the sources, this is by an Armenian chronicler named Hatun, this white knight, right? Excuse me. Actually, this is a knight who is riding on a white horse. And by the time we get to Mandeville's travels, right, it becomes explicitly a white knight, right, in a white armor, right?

riding a white horse. So what's interesting there for me, I think, is that, huh, so the stress is no longer like, you know, the knight looks European, you know, there, in fact, there's very little or no description of the face or skin tone of the knight. But these objects, right, and non-human creatures like the horse are

are now participating in this whitening, right? So racialization, I think, is not just about the human body, but through objects and non-human creatures. And in The Squire's Tale run by Chaucer, what's fascinating, I think lots of historians have pointed out, is that the representations of the Mongols, at least the Mongol court, right, is that they're

quite European-like, right? So we have the Mongol princess behaving like a European lady, right? The aristocratic women and the great Khan who is a figure, a stand-in from Genghis Khan, right? He's a chivalric knight and warrior king, right?

um and i i think it's often easy to forget that by the way this this mongol princess her name is canasa is not white right and you know they are the mongols are represented as a white adjacent um so there's that that proximity becomes really interesting for me um i think for me um

and pre-modern racialization has very much to do with, I think, the technologies and politics of recognition and misrecognition. And what I mean by that is, you know, going back to the Squire's Tale, right? If we're kind of

Thinking about the Mongol court, the Mongol princess, right, Genghis Khan as European, right, or white behaving or white presenting even in some of the travel events.

manuscripts illuminations right I think it's a very willful misrecognition right and a kind of a really important eureka moment for me in thinking about how to approach this is through a piece of art by the contemporary artist her name is Lin Yang Hong and

and she has created this piece of art that's also a pen. It says, you know, the pen says, Wrong Asian.

But, okay. And it's quite funny because there is that kind of, for many Asians in the West, often we are misrecognized, right, by others for someone else, like they misidentify us, right? So what's going on there, right? It's, you know, on the one hand, we can say, oh, you know, there's a kind of, you know,

if you will, right? That, you know, we all look alike, right? But in fact, we don't. But that misrecognition, I think, is also doing lots of work about, you know, what is perceived to be the non-white, the non-European

um and i think you know um this technology of recognition is then linked to the technology of embodiment um and thinking about these objects right not just skin tone i think it's really useful and i'm kind of borrowing work um i am borrowing work from uh thinkers like elizabeth povinelli and mel chen uh so povinelli has argued that um

much of kind of thinking about difference within the kind of academic setting has been dominated by Foucaultian biopolitics. And she wants to move away from thinking just in terms of the body, right? Rather, or the human, but to think about

the distinction for her is not so much life versus death, but rather life versus non-life. And I think this is really quite important in thinking about the white armor, right, of the knights on horse and the whiteness of the horse.

where the emphasis is no longer just on the body. So there are ways in which I think white racialization work in quite different way than the post-middle passage, post-modernity moment where it hardened into a more dermal skin-based phenomenon.

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I know you've told us about a whole bunch of things already, but I wonder if we can throw something else into the conversation. What do you mean by the dorsality of medieval whiteness? Oh, thank you. Thank you so much. So that meditation and reflection...

grew out of my my thinking about um the beforeness right of of whiteness and uh so so i i think one of the things um that's important is that uh before or beforeness is not just in terms of time the antecedent but it's also a space right both a literal space but also perhaps a

cultural and ideological space. So thinking about beforeness, right? And I'm now thinking about, well, what about the back, right? The dorsal side. And I am

you know, indebted to work of someone like David Wells, who has written a lot about what he calls the dorsality of, of being. And, and what he means by that is that he makes this really interesting argument that a human civilization would not be possible without human

the dorsal gesture of the posture of human beings. In other words, our ability to stand upright, right? It's in fact part of that. But when we walk, and this is quite fascinating, I don't know, but it's like every time we walk forward, we actually also move backward, right?

a little bit so that you know the the idea of progress right the idea that forward motion is is entirely forward it's not quite true right so that there's always this kind of backward uh formation right retrospection um both um

in terms of space, in terms of body, but also in terms of time. The other piece of puzzle I kind of am thinking through would be through gender and queer and trans studies, right? Someone like Susan Stryker and the terminology that she coined on what she calls soma technique, right? The technology of forming the body, right?

So I do return to thinking about racial formulation through the body, but I want to think about it not in a kind of more literal sense, right? But the kind of orientation, both before and after. And the third piece of this puzzle is coming out of critical race studies, especially Black feminist studies and racism.

and someone like Horton Spillers who laid the foundation of that. So she made this really important distinction between flesh and body in thinking about what happened with the Middle Passage. And so she argues in this kind of way

summary way, right? I think, you know, that the flesh exists before the body and body, in fact, is a construction, right? By modernity, right? Body is property. It's chattel. So the flesh stands before the body, right?

Right. And this beforeness. Right. So if we think about before and behind, right, the antecedent and what's dorsal, right, what's behind you, right, in terms of time, but it's also a form of beforeness. Right. So there's a kind of slippage in which the before is the behind that happens here. Right.

And interestingly, I was kind of looking through and asking my colleagues who work on medical science and medical history. In the 14th century, there was a Dominican friar named Henry Daniel. In one of his medical treatises, he claims, he makes this argument that the color, the original color of flesh is white.

So that kind of complicates our conception of how racialization works. If the flesh is white, then what's going on with racialized whiteness? So I think what's important in thinking about someone like Henry Daniel and the idea that the flesh is white before it becomes ruddy or red through blood is

is that there is a distinction, I think, you know, it's very important to think about somatic whiteness or body whiteness as not necessarily the same thing as racialized whiteness. And another textual example of this is in the

Middle English romance called The King of Tars. And in this romance, a Christian princess is forced to marry the Sultan of Damascus. And their union produces a monstrous baby who appears as a lump of flesh.

And after the sultan converts, the sultan's skin turns white, but the baby, the lump also transformed into a healthy white male baby. So I think what's fascinating for me is that if it's a lump of flesh, right, where is the front and where is the back?

And I think that the particular romance, it is a fantasy, points to this artificiality of constructing racialized whiteness and also challenges us to think about or to rethink the

flesh before the body right and also the interconnections right between thinking about bodily representations but also how much of that is linked to a particular investment right or willful attachment right again going back to the asterisk thanks

Yeah, going very much back to the asterisks, it brings a whole bunch of things we've talked about together. And something else that's been threaded through our conversation is the ways that this medieval, this examination of whiteness in the medieval period has a bunch of links to today, has a bunch of relevance to conversations we're currently having. So is there anything further you want to tell us about in terms of your thinking on how whiteness intersects with what we now talk about today in terms of identity politics?

Oh, thank you so much. Yeah. And I mentioned at the start, right, part of the project was reflection and thinking about the shift toward the rights, right, that we are witnessing now on a global scale, right? And yeah, identity politics is very much part of that. And the

the primary example in there in the conclusion of my book, I think about Charlottesville 2017 in this context. The irony of identity politics, I think, is often we have the assumption that the non-whites, the minorities, the minoritarians are the ones who need identity or what

conservative politicians mock as the alphabet. They have identity to ridicule this claim, resistance to hegemony. So the assumption is that so-called white people do not have an identity, but only the non-white do.

But in fact, if we think about identity politics, going back to Althusser's idea of interpolation, that it's impossible. We all have an identity because politics calls us into particular formations and subject areas.

So that identity is a self-fashioning as much as it's a collective fashioning, if we will. It's often, I think, reactionary and retrospective. It's both nostalgic and future-oriented. And

Thinking about Charlottesville 2017, one of the things I was interested in was this alt-right movement, a branch of that called the Identitarians. That's both in Europe and in the U.S. The groups include Identity Europa in the U.S., where they're now or sometimes are known as the American Identity Movement. So there is a kind of co-opting

some of the rhetorics and critique from the center left or the left-wing

And, you know, in claiming of a particular fragility, if you will, right, that happens in the reaction to identity politics. And especially, you know, if we think about the, within the US context now, right, the anti-DEI movement sweeping across our government and institutions, right?

So that whiteness, I think, you know, going thinking about it as not so much just like politics, but what Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has argued as an identity machine. Right. It's a really important way of thinking about how that's intersecting with today's world. Yeah, definitely some important things to keep in mind. Is there anything else you want readers to especially take away from the book?

Oh, thank you for that. I think for me, one of the things I hope the readers would take away would be to kind of really think about the difference or differences between readings of whiteness and reading as whiteness, right? Or reading as white adjacent reading.

And to kind of think about specific kind of attachments, right, that we often assume to be naturalized to particular identities and norms and really consider something, for example, whiteness as an operation. Right.

that it's actually a process rather than something that's naturalized. And also, I hope to kind of bring out and highlight not just the historical differences between the medieval and the contemporary, but also I hope we can kind of think about the afterlives, if not continuities, because things are never the same, I don't think.

but the afterlives of history in the present moment.

Lots to think about from this whole conversation. And obviously, this is something you've been thinking about for quite a period of time, as you mentioned at the beginning. So what are you working on now that this book is done? Is there anything you want to give us a brief sneak preview of? Oh, thank you. Yeah. So I am working on two projects. One has to do with thinking about the historiography of racial capitalism in

especially what that was in the pre-modern period. The genesis of that project has to do with my interest in considering the figure of the hold in Black studies and critical race studies, in which the hold refers to the hold in the slave ship.

uh, that ship the bodies, uh, across the, the Atlantic. Um, and I, I wonder, you know, I want to think about what, what, what would the whole look like, uh, before this particular period? Um, the second project, um, has to do with my interest in logistics studies. Um, you know, how, um,

how our contemporary moment, our lives are very much dictated, if you will, by supply chain logistics, right? But before this industrialization and advanced technology, what did that look like in the pre-modern period, especially in thinking about queer and gender identities in the pre-modern age? Yeah, thanks.

Thank you for giving us that sneak preview. And of course, for listeners who want to engage with everything we've been discussing, they can, of course, read the book published by Manchester University Press in 2024 and titled White Before Whiteness in the Late Middle Ages. Wan-Chuan, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast to tell us about your work. Thank you for having me.