With his thoughtful, learned, subtle, and lucidly written study, Black Metaphors: How Modern Racism Emerged from Medieval Race-Thinking, Cord Whitaker brings a rhetorical bent to recent conversations on race and race thinking in the English Middle Ages. He tracks the polysemous black metaphor, linking blackness with sin and whiteness with innocence, across a range of premodern texts, including Chaucer's Miller's Tale, The Turke and Sir Gawain, the King of Tars, Handlyng Synne, the Three Kings of Cologne, Julian of Norwich's Showings, and the Book of John Mandeville. Whitaker's black metaphor, in its medieval flexibilities, is not simply a racially divisive hierarchy but rather an interpretive process that pursues interplays of black and white to reveal them as mutually constitutive. The medieval black metaphor gains power and persuasive force from its instability, which draws readers into surprising identifications. While the black metaphor can foster and solidify racist divisions of black and white and thus create racial mirages, it can also de-universalize whiteness, enticing readers to identify with blackness as they acknowledge their own internal sinfulness. Whitaker thus shows how medieval texts can solicit blackness as a powerful, universal foundation for spiritual transformation.
In this medieval metaphorical shimmer, Whitaker locates the black and white contrarieties that modern forms of racism will ossify into white supremacy. At the same time, he underscores medieval race thinking's flexibility and capacity for readerly self-implication by historicizing its interplays as functions of classical and medieval rhetorical theories. Whitaker's book, like that of its near contemporary, Geraldine Heng's Invention of Race in the Middle Ages (2016), thus traces a medieval etiology for post-medieval white supremacy. However, Whitaker also distinguishes medieval race thinking as fluid and sometimes surprisingly oppositional to white supremacy, effectively rebuking those who lionize medieval European cultures as white supremacy's pristine origin.
Whitaker begins with an introduction that draws on Ruth Frankenburn's notion of racial “mirage” (3) and Michelle Warren's notion of “shimmering philology’ (4–5), to approach the polysemic shimmer of the black metaphor as an interpretive process that foregrounds the perspective of the viewer. Chapter 1 takes The King of Tars as a hard-case exhibit of black metaphorical shimmer. Whitaker focuses on three under-read moments: (1) the moment of the Sultan's conversion, which is remarkably difficult to pin down; (2) the color fudging of the hounds that pursue the princess; (3) the persistence of violence beyond conversion/conquest, which gives violence a Christian face. Whitaker argues that blackness is universalized as the poem invites readers to identify with the Sultan as a human sinner, harnessing the black metaphor to spiritual self-examination.
In chapter 2, Whitaker gets into the weeds of late medieval rhetorical treatises, including Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Quintillian, Jean de Meun, John of Garland, and Matthew's Ars versificatoria to track a growing reliance on argument by contrary proposition and tropes such as irony. Whitaker argues that recourse to contrarieties not only bolsters propositional argumentation but gains the world-creating force. Key contrarieties— black and white, lack and presence, and moral deficiency and innocence—are increasingly deployed as the building blocks of nature itself. Accordingly, in chapter 3, Whitaker reads Chaucer's enigmatic Alisoun (in the Miller's Tale) who becomes an ethical touchstone through the shimmering contrarieties of black and white besetting her description. Whitaker's argument is threefold: (1) racial dynamics are present even where race is not usually seen; (2) shimmering entanglements of black and white in Alisoun's description not only produce worlds but create beauty; and (3) dynamic interplays of black and white enable writers to situate literary characters along more complex ethical spectrums. Alisoun ultimately should be read not as a character among others, but rather as incarnating an ethical metric by which all the other characters can be assessed.
In chapter 4, Whitaker probes further into the way different sign systems complicate unitary readings of the black metaphor because different semiotic frameworks (such as literary genres) yield different readings of blackness. Whitaker surveys other treatments of contraries in Aristotle's Metaphysics and Aquinas's Quaestiones de anima, including unity and distinction. Black can be seen as similar to white in that both are primary and mutually constitutive, but where black is distinguished and seen as irreconcilable with white, black becomes more of a unique and stable location for sin and deficiency. In the second part of the chapter, Whitaker explores how different literary genres create different frames for universalizing black metaphors. He contrasts metaphor-complicating penitential treatises, such as Handlyng Synne, to romances that do racial work, such as the Three Kings of Cologne.
In chapter 5, Whitaker shifts from logical contrariety to logical contradiction, as he traces an ambitious ethical genealogy. He begins with biblical and medieval theodicies of the problem of evil (such as those surrounding Job), and extends through Julian of Norwich's parable of the suffering servant, and Hegel's politics of recognition in Hegel, to culminate in W. E. B. Du Bois's double consciousness. Central is Julian's parable of the suffering servant, which forces her to hold two contradictory propositions in unsynthesized suspensions: a loving God and a servant who suffers in his full sight and approval. Julian's parable is then analogized and contrasted to the master-slave dialectic in Hegel, which achieves a sinister synthesis that conscripts the servant to serve a dominating perspective; Du Bois's double consciousness critiques the costs of this synthesis. Ultimately, Julian demonstrates the kinds of generative and meditative universalism that can arise from refusing synthesis of contradictions. By contrast modern racism results from a delusive synthesis with political consequences.
In chapter 6, Whitaker shifts from rhetorical contrariety and contradiction to the pinnacle of ancient and medieval persuasion, the enthymeme. After describing Aristotelian and medieval theories of the enthymeme, he goes hunting for how enthymemes do double work in the Book of John Mandeville. He argues, on the one hand, that enthymemes can work racially to cast other races as subrational according to certain unspoken Eurocentric norms, which lays groundwork for subsequent colonialisms. On the other hand, Whitaker draws on the work of Shirin Khanmohamadi to show how enthymemes can work dialogically to foreground cultural interpretation as open-ended.
In a cogent conclusion, Whitaker draws together the threads of the book as he critiques white innocence as a form of unseeing in early modern texts by slavers describing the onset of the European slave trade. Whitaker ultimately leverages medieval race thinking to undo the delusively factual mirage of modern racism, in a way that both charts a genealogy and opens a new resource for acknowledging the metaphority of race in the present.
Black Metaphors will be of interest to literary and cultural studies scholars and those interested in the longer durées of both race and rhetoric. Whitaker is a powerful and often surprising reader of texts, using moments of ambivalence to unlock a usefully unfamiliar and unparadigmatic Middle Ages.
