The Black Middle Ages Race and the Construction of the Middle Ages

The Black Middle Ages examines the influence of medieval studies on African-American thought. Matthew X. Vernon focuses on nineteenth century uses of medieval texts to structure racial identity, but also considers the flexibility of medieval narratives more broadly in the medieval period, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This book engages disparate discourses to reassess African-American positionalities in time and space. Utilizing a transhistorical framework, Vernon reflects on medieval studies as a discipline built upon a contended set of ideologies and acts of imaginative appropriation visible within source texts and their later mobilizations. 

1. Introduction- Reading Out of Time: Genealogy, African-American Literature, and the Middle Ages.- 2. Medieval Self-Fashioning: The Middle Ages in Early African-American Scholarship and Curricula.- 3. Failed Knights and Broken Narratives: Mark Twain and Charles Chesnutt’s Black Romance.- 4. History, Genealogy, and Gerald of Wales: Medieval Theories of Ethnicity and their Afterlives.- 5. Other Families: Dryden’s Theory of Congeniality in Dante, Chaucer, and Naylor.- 6. Coda- True and Imaginary History in Django Unchained.

Matthew X. Vernon is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Davis, USA.