Latest / New Books in Critical Theory
Wan-Chuan Kao, "White before Whiteness in the Late Middle Ages" (Manchester UP, 2024)
White before Whiteness in the Late Middle Ages (Manchester University Press, 2024) by Dr. Wan-Chuan Kao analyses premodern whiteness as operations of fragility, precarity and racialicity across bodily and nonsomatic figurations.
The book argues that while whiteness participates in the history of racialisation in the late medieval West, it does not denote skin tone alone. The 'before' of whiteness, presupposing essence and teleology, is less a retro-futuristic temporisation - one that simultaneously looks backward and faces forward - than a discursive figuration of how white becomes whiteness…
The skinny
The skinny isn't ready yet — notes appear once the transcript is processed.