About

Matthew Vernon is an Associate Professor of English at UC Davis. He holds a Ph.D., M.Phil., and M.A. from Yale University, and a B.A. from Cornell University. His academic interests include Medieval Literature, Travel Narratives, Migration, Film, and Comic books. His work focuses on these areas within the broader field of English studies, contributing to the understanding of medieval texts and narratives, as well as contemporary cultural forms. He is part of the Department of English at UC Davis, where he engages in teaching and research related to his areas of expertise.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• History
• Classics
• Archaeology
• Art
• Law
• Literature
• Gender studies
• Philosophy
• Psychoanalysis
• Psychology
• Linguistics
• Epistemology
• Ancient history

Selected publications

• Of Saxons and spectres

  Journal of Medieval History · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Literature
  • Art

  This note speculates on the possibility of re-assessing the form of medieval studies by seeing the discipline through the intersection of race and spectrality. I posit that for much of its history, medieval studies has been informed by race in ways that are spectral: visible, but fleeting. This analogy illustrates the uncanny hold medievalisms and medieval imaginaries have over Western psyches. I propose a counter-history as a move towards understanding and subverting the demands of this version of a medieval past. This note offers a brief critical reading of W. E. B. Du Bois’ use of the language of the ghostly and the spectral in terms of national guilt about slavery. More importantly, I highlight the broader possibility of using the hard-won perspectives of Black authors to see past white innocence and white chivalry to construct a different epistemological apparatus around what the past might signify.

  PublisherDOI

• White Skin and the Black Mask™

  The Journal of Popular Culture · 2022-04-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Should the black man define himself in reaction to the white man thus confirming the white man as a measure of all things? Or should one strive unremittingly for a concrete and ever new understanding of man? Where is the true mode of resistance actually located? How should the black man speak for himself? Ziauddin Sardar, Foreword to Black Skin, White Masks The artist is no freer than the society in which he lives, and in the United States the writers who stereotype or ignore the Negro and other minorities in the final analysis stereotype and distort their own humanity. Mark Twain knew that in his America humanity masked its face with blackness. Ralph Ellison, “Twentieth-Century Fiction” Every lover of genre films, but particularly black genre film lovers, knows how this script is supposed to go. The black character enters a precarious situation early in the film: a trip to the middle-of-nowhere with some white friends. When things begin to go awry, they are reliably the first to die. This trope is familiar enough to be an enduring punchline famously lampooned by the comedian Eddie Murphy in 1983 and solemnly dissected in Esquire magazine in 2019 (Bruney). However, the 2019 hit horror Midsommar curiously flips the script on our expectations in a way that is indicative of a new trend within genre films that concern race. In Midsommar, a group of students, primarily anthropology graduate students, are invited to visit a once-in-a-generation midsummer ceremony in a secluded Swedish village. Among them is Josh, who is played by the African-American actor William Jackson Harper. While other visitors to the commune make a variety of foolish missteps ostensibly leading to their doom, Josh deftly navigates the community’s customs. He finally transgresses these unspoken rules when he learns of a book created by a child who is a product of incestuous relations among the villagers. Josh sneaks into the temple where the book is kept in order to photograph it and is killed. One of the last glimpses we get of him is of his foot, incongruously planted in a small garden of the commune, sprouting up like a grotesque plant. This strange end to the sole black character is striking in its belatedness and its irony. The rules of the horror genre and Harper’s conspicuous casting lend an outsized significance to his presence. The film takes pains to make visible and estrange whiteness through myriad obscure symbols: at times medieval runes, at other times shapes and rituals that hold some meaning only understood by the Swedish characters and the white Americans informed of the deeper plot. Josh as an “African-American man in a horror film” signifies beyond his character. He is not merely punished for his curiosity, which in the rules of the film would be a fitting end to a nosy anthropologist; he seemingly has died from gazing too long at whiteness. I begin with this vignette and with a quotation that alludes to Franz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks to frame what I posit to be a new iteration of racial expression on the screen that revises earlier formulations of the “African-American in a genre film” role. Sardar’s 2008 foreword strenuously argues for a reconsideration of Fanon in an updated context of Western civilization (vi). The questions of black expression that Fanon asks, particularly the conundrum he poses about how a black person can speak in tones other than ones structured around whiteness, Sadar argues (and I agree), need to be updated in view of a shifting historical landscape, lest his theoretical work lose it potency. Sadar is interested in a changing political world that has prompted a critical reappraisal of Black Skin, White Masks; I will focus on how the central metaphor of the mask has begun to slip in response to social changes. I will examine how this change has taken place as black creators, black actors, and black characters have begun to achieve greater prominence in genre films. Perhaps as a result of an acute awareness of genre tropes, this slippage has begun to upend genre’s “ways of building-in knowledge of the world” (Jerng 2). I build my argument from Mark Jerng’s ground-clearing work that explores how discursive strategies in nineteenth-century genre fiction were embedded with and instructed readers on habits of reading race. The present argument departs from Jerng’s in its temporal focus and through my examination of how the palimpsest of race/genre meaning making, which Jerng reads as being consolidated in the nineteenth century, are being reordered in ways that detach the meaning of racial masking from its expected signification. Race—for the purposes of this article, blackness—eludes or upends the meanings that genre creates. There is a long history of “passing” films, like Oscar Micheaux’s Veiled Aristocrats (1932) or Fred M. Wilcox’s I Passed for White (1960), which restages the classic “tragic mulatto” narrative; and there is a broader set of racial panic narratives, like Heart Condition (1990), starring Bob Hoskins and Denzel Washington, which tropes on essential racial differences wherein a white body houses a black soul for its comedy. The fundamental questions of racial expression and racial disguise that reify a notion of race as essential seem particularly antiquated, as a spate of films have been produced since the Obama presidency that have fundamentally reassessed the trajectory of black American life from slavery to the present. Ryan Poll, in his “Can Anyone ‘Get Out’ The Aesthetics of Afro-Pessimism,” notes that after 2012, the year in which both Quentin Tarantino’s Django: Unchained and Stephen Spielberg’s Lincoln were released, some seven prominent films about black history appeared in 2013, with more following throughout Obama’s presidency (71). Poll uses his accounting of these Obama-era and post-Obama films to suggest a turn in conceptualizing black progress; he then presents Get Out as an Afro-pessimist critique that departs from this wave of films. Countering the overwhelmingly positive critical reception of the film, which served, he argues, to gratify the white gaze and white consciences, Poll recenters blackness within the film to emphasize the “seeming historical fixity” of slavery as an elemental structuring institution of American life (73). The present article follows Poll’s fundamental argument about the need to reassess critical trends in depictions of blackness on screen; however, it will trace the interaction between the depictions of whiteness and blackness as they function generically. This was the case in Midsommar, wherein race operated not just as a concept to be explored through film but as a function interacting with audience expectations of films. This article will examine a small set of recent genre films—Jordan Peele’s Us (2019) and Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You (2018)—not as a definitive statement about a movement in how blackness is depicted on screen but as a proposition about an alternative to both the post-racial and Afro-pessimist critical moves made after the wave of Obama administration movies. Part of my contention is that these films make use of their generic conventions to destabilize the conception of race; more trenchantly, they linger over the notion of abhorrent whiteness, the horror of the sort that Josh sees before his death. The familiar tropes of their forms renegotiate old questions about racial essentialism, particularly how blackness speaks for itself. This poem is notorious for the ambiguity of its final line, which simultaneously bespeaks enforced restriction, necessary self-protection, anxiety, and a proprietary claim. The mask becomes a necessary defense against the appropriation of one’s innermost self while also, paradoxically, leaving the mask itself subject to white uses. The mask renders black subjectivity ambiguous and fugitive from the desires for fixity that serve white interests. Toni Morrison’s classic discussion of the interplay between blackness and whiteness in popular fiction, Playing in the Dark, theorizes “an Africanist character [that] is used to limn out and enforce the invention and implications of whiteness” (52). Pointedly, for the purposes of this discussion, she outlines the long history of white creators, particularly writers of popular fiction, who “make strategic use of black characters” to fulfill white fantasies or confirm white fears. To direct an attack upon Hollywood would indeed be to confuse portrayal with action, image with reality. In the beginning was not the shadow but the act, and the province of Hollywood is not action but illusion. (305) Nonetheless, the illusion is essential, Ellison argues, in how it gratifies white psyches; this illusion is fundamental to the social “ritual” that mediates “democratic beliefs and certain antidemocratic practices (“Twentieth-Century Fiction” 85). A key metaphor for Ellison, as noted in the second epigraph to this article, is the mask, particularly the mask of blackness that permits the misalignment between public and personal values. In terms of artistic creation, Ellison astutely notes that the unwillingness to address the mask “using ingenious devices for evading the full human rights of their Negroes” has resulted in art that fails both in terms of its style and its intellectual purchase (195). This article will follow Ellison’s prompting to consider films that take on the idea of the black mask to intervene in generic expectations while opening up social critique that speculates on the nature of blackness. As I have begun to demonstrate through the example of Midsommar, generic expectations and blackness continue to operate in tandem. Aster’s film demonstrates that these relationships are dynamic and dialectical. The character Josh inverts the expectations for the horror genre in terms of race to more directly gaze on the bewildering whiteness that pervades the film. Josh’s race is used instrumentally here, but points to the possibilities of thinking in novel directions about race in genre filmmaking that I will do in this article. The masking I examine disrupts the dialectic relationship between white attempts to capture blackness and black efforts at eluding that capture by introducing racial tropes in ways that defy genre expectations. Get Out has been celebrated as a genre masterpiece, albeit one that is hybrid in its approach. The critical lens that has been applied to it is has drawn scrutiny for gratifying the elitist white gaze that the film itself satirizes (Poll 71). While it is too early for there to be a critical mass of scholarship on Peele’s subsequent film Us, the tepid initial response to it suggests a possible misunderstanding of the film, if not a more pernicious distaste on the part of critics prompted by the film’s difficult attitude towards the centrality of whiteness. The predominant move Get Out encourages is to read the film on the grounds of white appropriation. The film does this quite literally; it rarely shifts its focus from the lush grounds of the upstate New York property. Simultaneously, while Get Out is ostensibly about white appropriation of blackness, it fixates on whiteness as a nearly incomprehensible power that blackness can merely evade or survive. In both respects, whiteness and property are the paramount issues of the film. Get Out’s situatedness and the focus on white possession of black bodies evokes Cheryl Harris’s conception of whiteness itself as property. As she argues in her seminal essay, “Whiteness as Property,” whiteness has become “a valuable asset that whites sought to protect and those who passed sought to attain” (1713). Indeed, the film’s conceit of white brains inhabiting black bodies is Afro-pessimism taken to its most fantastical extreme, wherein the resilience of white power resides in the literal control of black bodies. Us, a film that fittingly begins on the carnivalesque Santa Cruz boardwalk, offers a funhouse version of the root question about the relationship between race and property. Rather than occupying the well-appointed grounds of an upper-class white family, much of the film takes place in an unremarkable California bungalow in Santa Cruz that Adelaide Wilson (Lupita Nyong’o) has inherited from her mother. This shift in situation signals the broader allegorical shift towards black property as the grounds upon which the film will be contested. Indeed, doppelgängers called “the tethered” arrive at the doorstep of Wilson’s summer home. The tethered, the audience learns, are duplicates of the people living in America who live underground, performing pale imitations of the daily lives of those above them. The location of Us’s action drives home a fundamental difference between this film and Peele’s previous one. Get Out is premised on fugitivity, moments of fleeing. The main character, Chris, must get out of the white family’s house and away from their possession of his mind. Chris is thrown into an abyssal psychological void, called “the sunken place,” where he loses his ability to control his body while he is overwhelmed by traumatic memories; to get out, he must get control of his psyche. Us, on the other hand, suggests that there is nowhere to go. It is the personal spaces of the main characters that are being overtaken, and any modes of escape the film lays out are premised on abandoning one’s own possessions in the broad sense that Get Out presents. The film denies the audience one of the fundamental critical levers available to reckon with race: the language of appropriation falls short in the face of the problem of these doppelgangers. The tethered have impossible demands: to occupy Wilson’s home and be restituted for the comfortable lives they were denied. The easy reading of this film is about contemporary American inequality. Indeed, it is not difficult to see the motif of empty gestures (for example, the Hands Across America campaign that bookends the movie) and violence beneath them as a political critique of American politics linking Ronald Reagan’s administration to Donald Trump’s (Dargis C1). However, to enter this critical rabbit hole would reproduce the problems of decentering blackness noted above. Rather, I would argue that Peele challenges the audience to read through blackness by using a reliable thriller trope—the twist ending—to an improbable effect. After the family has killed their tethered doubles, they escape from Santa Cruz. Intercut between the moments of their relief at their escape are a set of flashbacks informing the viewer that “Adelaide” is in fact her doppelganger who swapped places with her double in the movie’s initial scene. At the end of each of these flashbacks, the younger version Adelaide’s doppelganger smiles ghoulishly towards the camera. These shots convert the seemingly reassuring smile Adelaide gives Jason into a further iteration of malice; this is a peek behind the mask that she has been wearing her whole life. Jason, who has been wearing a Chewbacca mask above his head, slowly lowers it over his face while he gazes at her with a frightened knowing look. Ostensibly what is truly horrific about the twist is what has been taken away from the audience; the viewer must recalibrate Adelaide’s anxiety about the encroaching threat of her tethered, seeing it not from the perspective of her innocence but through her culpability. Moreover, this twist complicates how racial appropriation was raised in Get Out. Jason gazing out of the mask recalls the appropriation that threatens Chris. In Get Out, a blind white man wishes to take over Chris’s body because he admires the way he sees the world; he wants Chris’s gaze. Us advances the problem of appropriating the black gaze by compounding its signification, asking what it means for a black person to appropriate the black gaze. (Indeed, this is what one of the posters for the movie alludes to in its image of Adelaide’s tethered peering out from behind an Adelaide mask.) This question is posed in a variety of self-evident ways throughout the film. For example, Adelaide’s husband, Gabe, initially confronts the tethered versions of using what be called his white When this he his He black to to the I I need to get my However, the film’s final the critical beyond familiar forms of appropriation. with the of racial analysis to a critical twist in to the of plot. The that should Us’s the audience into deeper It is if the that between and signals the of necessary to disguise one’s or if this is a of that the mask will be or if there is between the about the meaning passed between and by the shift in understanding the audience must to the questions about the of one’s racial argues in You to A of the of the that this is of contemporary horror have become in because of their of they to consider their own of what is I would take this argument a The meaning behind Adelaide’s smile and the of Jason masking himself the viewer into an of blackness of the sunken as it bespeaks psychological the characters and the in out the meaning of However, Get Out, at no can whiteness into this of appropriation. the audience is blackness as property in a sense that is much to that which to whiteness as the doppelganger version of Adelaide is to protect the terms of the that she has at all The implications of this move are as as they are in an about Get Out notes that he a in the horror movie genre around black and The that forms the of the between Adelaide and her indeed about but not in a way that is to gratify white Indeed, the main white characters are killed and nearly as an as black characters The for the possession of Adelaide’s family, and with the Adelaide’s the of blackness as property while simultaneously the of that it threatens to the by whites on black bodies. In order to hold on to her Adelaide a means of her that a world in which she her life with her As the tethered version of was have taken with she a statement which upends the of that the film Cheryl in her on whiteness as with what in be a After out the history of white of Americans as a of American she a that ways of of essential to the of the property in whiteness, property is to be no more than the to on that are on the to The end of Us one final that with Harris’s As the Adelaide’s family, it above the of to the of in the of the tethered the of Hands Across that the image that the This the movement is not merely a but a funhouse version of the initial what a of for an the audience with the of a society in which black to be premised on violence against black bodies and a of how to the out of its towards that Us if there is truly any way to get I white it You it not about all about like have a are and about and about to in when get this some in like need this like been only not what all white people There no white but what they they Sorry to Bother You it is to the that from the discussion of the white he which the of the when merely to Rather, the white is with a of his perspective on what whiteness and in he the who must be instructed in how the film whiteness. This that it is not enough to the notion of whiteness as a racial the white to be read as a of and it is through the it the spaces When he the of his as a he his white to power to purchase and to The white with of particularly his about the of the as and of into The of body and the the film in white When he uses the it is as an quite in the sense that it is by a One character, upon the white it as The of this is that like a racial mask, the illusion of the white a but one that can only work through a in which his body is The notion of the as while one’s whole has been by any of from Black However, Riley’s in a that whiteness a about through the tropes of the white spaces by the not the of whiteness. The is around the of racial to capture the of his and in other being in then the twist the genre out of In a that is for and horror than the social critique it been it is that the of to a of to have the and of The to become one of these and among them. new argues, would merely be a to continue the work he he to that while he his not would The between and to the what been in the film: the of work and mass would be by the of the The through the white and the meaning of to each with the while he the of more of of the film this shift in as of a not in control of his as one about the film’s final in which is into an the film more than critique has to this turn in genre into a generic move the film that it in with rights films For his has the notion that his work to any genre at in an the not a genre because there was that the way to make the the about the film’s genre is the between the and race in the of a move questions of the mask as a means to enforce racial The movie the racial to it strange new life that questions where blackness in the society it The film’s the viewer to their expectations for conceptualizing the as a means of bodies of through racial on The is with the a broader set of than those of race. The film presents the to enter his as a when speaks to one of the and as if to an he I up in I can if with his own of permits him to racial when he is on the and his him from expected social to a of as a means to to terms with the in which He is to a set of for himself and he the of those around The anxiety this film is broader than the of the white that becomes the in which they their Sorry to Bother You over the problem of the to which is produced and what when the terms of The their characters the of a new of that be into of The of new is at for much of the The are only and the main characters rarely with them. that he has been into the that will him into an however, he no of change for the of the film, leading the viewer to that the threat of him an is out merely as a metaphor for new in his against The film with moments of between and the that he has in his with However, the to is by a and the that has indeed become an The change is depicted with in his face beneath the that make his face and like those of a As was the case with the final of in Us, the is only by a final in which and other their way into the home of to their on In this final the that he has to and his as an is deeper and the final of the film is The ambiguity of the final the about particularly if he would to to human is a shift from the racial conventions that the notion of the in fiction and horror of Sorry to Bother The film the expectations of the other as other by the of blackness and it within the hybrid body of the

  PublisherDOI

• Antiracist Medievalisms: From "Yellow Peril" to Black Lives Matter by Jonathan Hsy

  Studies in the age of Chaucer · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • History

  Reviewed by: Antiracist Medievalisms: From "Yellow Peril" to Black Lives Matter by Jonathan Hsy Matthew X. Vernon Jonathan Hsy. Antiracist Medievalisms: From "Yellow Peril" to Black Lives Matter. Leeds: Arc Humanities Press, 2021. Pp. xvi, 163. $110 cloth. Antiracist Medievalisms: From "Yellow Peril" to Black Lives Matter arrives in the wake of a sea change in medieval studies. After years of the field coming to accept race as a worthy lens through which to read certain medieval texts and as a structuring apparatus that precedes scholarly engagement, discovery or justification are no longer the foremost critical interventions. Rather, what seems to have been missing from this conversation is the infrastructure upon which durable projects on race and the Middle Ages can be built for decades to come. This need echoes the succession of political events that helped expedite the racial turn in medieval studies: a resurgence of white nationalism, the concussive murders of unarmed Black people, and a rise in anti-Asian violence among other social and political crises. As the urgency of these events threatens to recede, so has the possibility held by the racial turn in medieval studies. Antiracist Medievalisms solidifies the gains of the initial wave of scholarship on race and the Middle Ages, while also expanding the theoretical terms upon which medievalists can draw to enrich the conversation about race. Hsy draws on sources as divergent as José Estaban Muñoz's theory of "disidentification," ecopoetics, queer studies, and Black feminism to move the field into the important and ongoing conversations within race and ethnic studies. As a result of its critical ambitions Antiracist Medievalisms both examines and occupies cusps and borders. The introduction's stated project—to ask "what is at stake when communities of color create things (texts, stories, objects) that 'feel' medieval"—belies Hsy's formal innovations and archival reach (9). While Antiracist Medievalisms indeed places its emphasis on [End Page 409] modern usages of medievalisms by specific communities of color, much of the strength of the project's intervention derives from its juxtapositions, particularly the author's adroit bridging between modern archival materials and medieval sources. To capture the sense of things that "feel" medieval, Hsy draws together both deep insights honed from a career as a medievalist and astutely chosen archival materials to craft a layered portrait of American appropriations of the Middle Ages. For example, his first chapter puts into conversation Frederick Douglass (c. 1818–95), Chinese-American journalist Wong Chin Foo (1847–98), and Arab-American author Ameen Rihani (1876–1940) as writers engaging with and critiquing "gendered Western imperial ideologies of progress and expansion" (23). The conjunction puts writers that are often part of divergent scholarly conversations into the same landscape. This initial move anticipates broader arguments about a global Middle Ages and solidarities across racial lines. Hsy configures these in two main ways. At times he draws correspondences between medieval texts or forms, and modern mobilizations of them. The most daring version of this comes in the third chapter, "Place: Indefinite Detention and Forms of Resistance in Angel Island Poetry," in which he reads poetic inscriptions that Chinese immigrants carved into the walls of Angel Island against medieval Tang dynasty poetic forms. This chapter is sustained by a sensitive and melancholy reading of physical and temporal distance as contemplated by the Chinese detainees who found solace in Tang poetry that was produced by poets struggling with displacement and a loss of meaning. In so doing, it advances a layered argument about the possibilities of connecting differing cultural frameworks for the Middle Ages. As Hsy frames it, Tang poetry quite literally is part of the landscape of western medievalism. He posits "a symbiotic relationship of built environment and organic matter" that results from how the detainees' literary production "transforms the meanings of a physical environment" (72). At other times, Hsy draws connections among his objects of study to put narratives into proximity to one another. In this way, the reader is led to see parallels and allegiances where they might not be apparent. His fourth chapter, "Passing: Crossing Color Lines in the Short Fiction of Alice Dunbar-Nelson and Sui Sin Far," for example, interlaces the...

  PublisherDOI

• Writing Arthur’s Shadow and Speaking Otherwise

  Arthuriana · 2021-01-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article argues that N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became can be read through several Arthurian intertexts to register her interventions into the fantasy fiction genre. The following considers writing in the shadow of Arthurian literature as a means to reject racial and colonial logics that have become fused with medievalist fantasy.

  PublisherDOI

• The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages by Geraldine Heng

  Arthuriana · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • History
  • Literature

  Reviewed by: The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages by Geraldine Heng Matthew X. Vernon geraldine heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. xiii, 493. isbn: 978–1–108–38171–0. $49.99. Geraldine Heng’s follow-up to her ground-clearing study Empire of Magic: Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (2003) shares two important things with her previous book. First, the book is timely. Empire of Magic contained a thoughtful and urgent meditation on how the cultural fantasies it examines intersect with the imagined cultural divisions framing responses to the tragedy of 9/11. Heng introduces The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages against a backdrop of efforts to decolonize the academy and reexamine the roots of medieval studies as they feed popular racial fantasies with a similarly pointed argument: medievalists should assume their responsibility to contend with the overlapping categories of difference that collude to racialize peoples across the globe. She refuses the field’s current state of affairs, which is impoverished by its reluctance to engage race meaningfully: ‘[A]t present, the discussion of premodern race continues to be handicapped by the invocation of axioms that reproduce a familiar story in which mature forms of race and racisms, arriving in modern political time, are heralded by a shadowplay of inauthentic rehearsals characterizing the prepolitical, premodern past’ (p. 23). Heng demonstrates care in supporting the polemics of her argument with a controlled definition of race that allows her to proceed through a world of medieval texts without losing the historical texture that marks them. For example, in her chapter ‘The Mongol Empire: Global Race as Absolute Power’ she adroitly moves among various sources—Matthew of Paris, John of Plano Carpini, William of Rubruck, Mandeville’s Travels—to chart the development of knowledge and the flexibility of racial sentiment. What results is a broad but intricate argument that holds in [End Page 140] tension structures of power, popular imagination, shifting cultural expectations, the peculiarities of individuals, and material culture. Cautious ambition is the book’s second resemblance to Empire of Magic; it is astoundingly far-reaching and tremendously fruitful. Heng includes an explanatory section for how the book is to be read, acknowledging that its chapter headings— ‘Beginnings,’ ‘Inventions,’ ‘State/Nation,’ ‘War/Empire,’ ‘Color,’ ‘World I,’ ‘World II,’ ‘World III’—do not conform to coordinates that are immediately legible to all readers. The first chapters allow her to define race and read it intersectionally, while the ‘World’ chapters restage discussions of race outside of the hegemonic confines of Western Europe. In addition to the vast amount of terrain she sets out to cover, she also states her intention to approach race interdisciplinarily rather than through a set of textual readings. She folds archaeology, art history, and critical race theory into the fabric of her argument. She does nonetheless rely on close readings to advance her claims. Fortunately, that is not a problem because she is a lucid close reader and great synthesizer of classic analyses of canonical texts. There are several difficulties that arise in reading The Invention of Race—one would hesitate to call them flaws because they are part of the book’s apparatus. The book’s challenging structure allows some topics to be more fully covered than others. Her chapters on the North Atlantic and the Romani are notably shorter and less fully developed than the others because she is pushing into terrain that is understudied in the field and relies on an evidentiary base that yields less than her other chapters. Additionally, in drawing together the patchwork of studies on topics adjacent to race in the Middle Ages, she reveals a long discussion of the topic that has been operating under other guises. This does not undercut her argument as much as it reminds the reader of how vital it is to have this conversation openly, so that we can productively build upon the suggestive work done by earlier scholars. The final issue is one that Heng readily concedes. Despite the heft of the book and the considerable effort in pushing outside of terrain familiar to medievalists evident on every...

  PublisherDOI

• Failed Knights and Broken Narratives: Mark Twain and Charles Chesnutt’s Black Romance

  2018-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Navigating Wonder: The Medieval Geographies of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant

  Arthuriana · 2018-01-01 · 8 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article explores Kazuo Ishiguro’s use of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to reflect on the formation of British identity on a deep time scale to suggest alterity as inherent within the nation’s foundational fictions. We argue Ishiguro borrows tactics from SGGK to destabilize the clarity of national origins.

  PublisherDOI

• A world on fire: seeing beyond the discrimination paradigm in Marvel’s<i>Daredevil</i>

  Journal of Graphic Novels & Comics · 2018-10-20

  article1st author

  This essay examines representations of vulnerability and urban biopolitics in Marvel’s Daredevil comic book and its recent Netflix television adaptation. We argue that the franchise cannily plays on a New York City history of urban space and projects of urban renewal and offers a critical lens on how physical vulnerability may promote links between politically distanced communities invested in recasting the extent of legal, financial, and state powers. Daredevil bridges the popular and the speculative to make visible urban assemblages and intervene into ongoing debates about how a community can mobilise vulnerabilities into sites of resistance.

  PublisherDOI

• The Black Middle Ages

  2018-01-01 · 40 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• History, Genealogy, and Gerald of Wales: Medieval Theories of Ethnicity and Their Afterlives

  2018-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Daniel J. Gustafson

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• Margaret A. Miller

  OhioHealth

  1 shared