THIS CHAPTER EXPLORES how the genre of the ethnic minority Bildungsroman, or story of intellectual growth, was crafted in the nineteenth-century United States in conjunction with traditions of travel narrative and contemporaneous forms of medievalism (especially historical romance). If the phrase “medieval romance” usually conjures visions of chivalric knights in armor and fair damsels in distress, what space could people of color create for themselves within such expectations? This book's explorations of medievalism by people of color starts by tracing how medieval romance and conversion narratives offered a vital scaffolding for accounts of intellectual development. African American abolitionist and orator Frederick Douglass (ca. 1818–1895), Chinese American journalist and public speaker Wong Chin Foo (1847–1898), and Arab American author Ameen Rihani (1876–1940) repurposed the masculine Bildungsroman to reject medievalizing white fantasies of the past and to critique gendered Western imperial ideologies of progress and expansion. In their writings, they challenged stereotypes portraying Africans as “savage” and Asians as stagnant “Orientals.” Conversations among African American and Asian American thinkers generated nuanced forms of racial belonging in lieu of white Eurocentric models.

As discussed in the introduction to this book, my analysis of early ethnic minority writing explores what José Esteban Muñoz calls strategies of disidentification. The authors discussed in this chapter who find themselves positioned in the “minority” (in respect to white Christian masculinity) devise varied methods for disidentifying with European medieval pasts, and they seek to transform gendered notions of racial belonging through references to a Western Middle Ages that is not typically coded as properly “belonging” to them. Such gendered and politicized acts of disidentifying with the European medieval past—or openly refusing to engage with such a past—shape these authors’ arguments for new forms of cultural and national belonging.

Frederick Douglass: Disenchanting Medieval Pasts

In the final chapter of The Narrative of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written By Himself (1845), internationally renowned African American orator and abolitionist Frederick Douglass (ca. 1818–1895), originally named Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, has achieved freedom and chooses a new surname (retaining his first name “Frederick,” which he has held from birth). His white benefactor Nathan Johnson, who has just been reading Sir Walter Scott's historical romance The Lady of the Lake, suggests “Douglass” (derived from a character in Scott's narrative), a name which Frederick adopts.