White Before Whiteness in the Late Middle Ages , Kao+-

White before whiteness in the late Middle AgesAuthor(s): Wan-Chuan Kao\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: Manchester University Press, United Kingdom\nImprint: Manchester University Press\nISBN-13: 9781526145802, 978-1526145802\nSynopsis\nThis groundbreaking book analyses premodern whiteness as operations of fragility, precarity and racialicity across bodily and nonsomatic figurations. It 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. Fragility delineates the limits of ruling ideologies in performances of mourning as self-defence against perceived threats to subjectivity and desire; precarity registers the ruptures within normative values by foregrounding the unmarked vulnerability o.