Black Knights: Arabic Epic and the Making of Medieval Race
By Rachel Schine
The University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226836171
Medieval Arabic literature frequently included Black African characters, offering valuable insight into contemporary ideas about race and race relations. This book examines those sources to uncover how such concepts developed in the Middle Ages and how they have continued to influence perceptions of race up to the present day.
Excerpt:
This book asks: why these Black heroes? What did their blackness do within the worlds built through storytelling among Arabic-speaking Muslims in the Middle Ages? What possible futures did it conjure and delimit, what present orders did it explain, and what pasts did it help to index morally, geographically, and culturally? I am less interested in the intellectual history of Arabic epics as such than in what this corpus of thousands of pages of lore that, uniquely among Arabic prose-works of their time, extensively narrativizes the lives of legendary people raced as Black in predominantly non-Black spaces, can allow us to see if treated as part of the social-historical archive.
Who is this book for?
This book will find interested readers in the fields of medieval Arabic literature. social history, and race relations. Paired with Nader Kadhem’s book, Africanism: Blacks in the Medieval Arab Imaginary, it makes an important contribution to ideas about race in the Middle Ages.
The Author
Rachel Schine is a member of the Institute for Advanced Studies. Her research focuses on literature and social history in the premodern Islamic world. You can also follow her on Bluesky @rachelschine.bsky.social
Black Knights: Arabic Epic and the Making of Medieval Race
By Rachel Schine
The University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226836171
Medieval Arabic literature frequently included Black African characters, offering valuable insight into contemporary ideas about race and race relations. This book examines those sources to uncover how such concepts developed in the Middle Ages and how they have continued to influence perceptions of race up to the present day.
Excerpt:
This book asks: why these Black heroes? What did their blackness do within the worlds built through storytelling among Arabic-speaking Muslims in the Middle Ages? What possible futures did it conjure and delimit, what present orders did it explain, and what pasts did it help to index morally, geographically, and culturally? I am less interested in the intellectual history of Arabic epics as such than in what this corpus of thousands of pages of lore that, uniquely among Arabic prose-works of their time, extensively narrativizes the lives of legendary people raced as Black in predominantly non-Black spaces, can allow us to see if treated as part of the social-historical archive.
Who is this book for?
This book will find interested readers in the fields of medieval Arabic literature. social history, and race relations. Paired with Nader Kadhem’s book, Africanism: Blacks in the Medieval Arab Imaginary, it makes an important contribution to ideas about race in the Middle Ages.
The Author
Rachel Schine is a member of the Institute for Advanced Studies. Her research focuses on literature and social history in the premodern Islamic world. You can also follow her on Bluesky @rachelschine.bsky.social
You can learn more about this book from the publisher’s website.
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