The Invention of Race and the Status of Blackness

Abstract

It is at this point a longstanding tradition that scholarly works investigating Black and African presences in premodernity, works that challenge accepted notions about the origins of and participants in Western civilization, meet with significant resistance in the marketplace of ideas. The scholarship in question has focused on a wide range of subjects—from the roots of Greco-Roman knowledge and culture to the presence of Africans in those established centers of classical antiquity to the role of Africans in the Old World’s exploration of the New. Yet, resistance arises at every turn. The case is no different for Geraldine Heng’s 2018 The Invention of Race in the EuropeanMiddle Ages—except that this time the focus is the European Middle Ages. The book deftly introduces and defines “race-making” to describe the very active process by which elements of what I have called “race-thinking” are coalesced in the Middle Ages as race proceeds toward the ideological status it achieves in modernity. Of the now six full-length monographs—including my own—that take as their primary inquiry the nature, development, and salience of race in the European Middle Ages, Invention is the most ambitious and proceeds from the “thoroughly interdisciplinary vantage required of a concept as ideologically powerful and multifaceted as race, one whose study defies disciplinary divisions between literature, history, biology, sociology, and anthropology, among other fields.”1 Praise has been swift. So has backlash. This article will consider the latter in order to understand the motivations and implications of criticisms against studies that similarly innovate within their fields.