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4 - Color
Epidermal Race, Fantasmatic Race: Blackness and Africa in the Racial Sensorium
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 February 2018
Summary
Studies on premodern race have often focused on color as the paramount index of race – so that attitudes toward blackness are sought as the deciding factor adjudicating whether racial behavior and phenomena existed in antiquity and the Middle Ages. To complicate our views on medieval race, I have thus far emphasized multiple locations of race over a singular epidermal focus: fanning out attention to how religion, the state, economic interests, colonization, war, and international contests for hegemony, among other determinants, have materialized race and have configured racial attitudes, behavior, and phenomena across the centuries. But attention to color, and physiognomy characterized in tandem with color, are now the focus of this chapter.
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- The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages , pp. 181 - 256Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2018