Forbidden Love: Medieval Romance as Critical Race Studies Archive
Paper by Cord Whitaker
Given at the Paradigms of Racialization: Alternative Sources conference on April 18, 2024
Excerpt: My goal here is to talk a bit about why medieval romance, and especially medieval English romance, is such a useful archive for the critical study of race.
So when it comes to race and love, we tend to think of their intersection as a deeply modern thing. What’s more, we tend to think of it as deeply American. When Werner Solers released his big edited collection on the history of interracial coupling in 2000, he makes the case for its tabooization, being particularly American. He writes as follows: ‘Few people around the world have shared the peculiar ways in which black-white marital relations were prohibited in several English colonies on the American continent. In a great number of American states, often the majority, such prohibitions survived the revolution, the Civil War, two world wars, the League of Nations, and the first few presidencies of the United Nations.’
And then to drive the point home, he goes on, even the word used to describe interracial sexual and marital relations is an Americanism, coined by two New York journalists in an 1863 pamphlet. His point is that nowhere else has interracial marriage been as widely prohibited and legislated as it has been in the United States. So it might come then as some surprise that I posit that one of the best archives for understanding the dynamics of such prohibition and taboo is in fact medieval European, perhaps especially English, and also its close cousin French, medieval romance.
Cord Whitaker is Associate Professor of English at Wellesley College, where he researches and teaches late medieval English literature, the history of race, religious and cultural conflict in the Middle Ages, and the modern literary and political uses of medievalism. You can also follow him on X/Twitter @ProfCWhit
Top Image: BnF. Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal. Ms-664 réserve fol. 51v
Forbidden Love: Medieval Romance as Critical Race Studies Archive
Paper by Cord Whitaker
Given at the Paradigms of Racialization: Alternative Sources conference on April 18, 2024
Excerpt: My goal here is to talk a bit about why medieval romance, and especially medieval English romance, is such a useful archive for the critical study of race.
So when it comes to race and love, we tend to think of their intersection as a deeply modern thing. What’s more, we tend to think of it as deeply American. When Werner Solers released his big edited collection on the history of interracial coupling in 2000, he makes the case for its tabooization, being particularly American. He writes as follows: ‘Few people around the world have shared the peculiar ways in which black-white marital relations were prohibited in several English colonies on the American continent. In a great number of American states, often the majority, such prohibitions survived the revolution, the Civil War, two world wars, the League of Nations, and the first few presidencies of the United Nations.’
And then to drive the point home, he goes on, even the word used to describe interracial sexual and marital relations is an Americanism, coined by two New York journalists in an 1863 pamphlet. His point is that nowhere else has interracial marriage been as widely prohibited and legislated as it has been in the United States. So it might come then as some surprise that I posit that one of the best archives for understanding the dynamics of such prohibition and taboo is in fact medieval European, perhaps especially English, and also its close cousin French, medieval romance.
Cord Whitaker is Associate Professor of English at Wellesley College, where he researches and teaches late medieval English literature, the history of race, religious and cultural conflict in the Middle Ages, and the modern literary and political uses of medievalism. You can also follow him on X/Twitter @ProfCWhit
Top Image: BnF. Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal. Ms-664 réserve fol. 51v
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