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.
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
%20(early%20XV%20century)-Fragmentretableformer-Ca%201425.jpg)
Recommended
Chaucer adaptations in the classroom
Modern adaptations can transform the way students read Chaucer. These classroom activities pair The Canterbury Tales with contemporary poetry, performance, and translation to help students explore how race, language, identity, and belonging shape both medieval texts and their modern reinterpretations.
Language, race, and Chaucer adaptations
A reading list for teaching Chaucer through modern adaptations. This list focuses on scholarship for reading and understanding Chaucer from a premodern critical race studies lens, including global Chaucer adaptations to help students explore how medieval texts continue to inform questions of identity, power, and belonging.
.jpg)
Ham and the rationale for colonization
The Hamitic myth was used as a justification for the colonial endeavors of European countries in the late medieval period. This rhetoric traveled to the Americas and became a theological reasoning for the institution of American chattel slavery.
