Modern Black Lives and the Medieval Right: Rhetoric and the Making of Modernity

This talk considers both Black Lives Matter and the Alt-right movements in the contexts of the modern black-white racial dyad and the medieval rhetorical theories and practices that have informed it. Dr. Cord Whitaker (Wellesley College) investigate the appeal of the Middle Ages to the Alt-right and other white nationalist and supremacist groups by exploring their understandings of feudalism, caste systems, and racial homogeny in medieval Europe. Putting these into conversation with critical race theoretical concepts that explain the construction of whiteness, and with his own theories for medieval rhetoric's role in the construction of modern blackness, this talk exposes the integral role of the Middle Ages in the development of modern racial ideology.