{"product_id":"bad-medievalism-and-the-modernity-problem-9781531512415","title":"Bad Medievalism and the Modernity Problem","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eChallenges the assumptions made over the medieval\/modern divide by examining the medieval roots of modern racism \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHumanists have long insisted on a chasm separating modernity and the Middle Ages. In \u003ci\u003eBad Medi­evalism and the Modernity Problem\u003c\/i\u003e, Kathy Lavezzo demonstrates how the temporal divide scholars typically accept is a fiction that has shaped racial discourse over a \u003ci\u003elongue durée\u003c\/i\u003e. The hard line drawn between “then” and “now” is of a piece with the line separating whiteness from humans deemed irrevocably other. Thus, Lavezzo advocates a “bad”—that is, depressing and disturbing, even nau­seating—historicism attuned to the interpenetration of race, whiteness, and periodicity in the “west.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTeasing out the dialectical invocation of both periods by figures as diverse as W. E. B. Du Bois, Carolyn Bynum, Stuart Hall, Johan Huizinga, Paule Marshall, Karl Marx, Gloria Naylor, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Sylvia Wynter, Lavezzo demonstrates how the tension between and across categories of the “medieval” and the “modern” has mobilized intense emotional and political responses. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eInspired by Lavezzo’s discovery that Hall, the beloved founder of cultural studies, planned as a student at Oxford to become a medievalist but was dissuaded from that path by his teacher Tolkien, \u003ci\u003eBad Medievalism and the Modernity Problem \u003c\/i\u003eunpacks the implications of that charged encounter. Central chapters contrast Tolkien’s white heritage medievalism with a speculative inquiry into the \u003ci\u003ePiers Plowman \u003c\/i\u003edissertation that Hall never wrote. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOther chapters assess the white “feel” of periodization by scholars, including Jacob Burckhardt, Huizinga, Fredric Jameson, and Bynum, and draw on theorists, including Du Bois and Wynter, to chart the medieval roots of a racialized discourse of progress and primitivism. \u003ci\u003eBad Medievalism and the Modernity Problem \u003c\/i\u003eculminates in new readings of Gloria Naylor’s \u003ci\u003eBailey’s Cafe \u003c\/i\u003eand Paule Marshall’s \u003ci\u003eThe Fisher King, \u003c\/i\u003edemonstrating their importance as productively pessimistic engagements with the racial legacies of both the medieval and the modern.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Kathy Lavezzo","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48282747633915,"sku":"9781531512415","price":30.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0779\/3917\/9771\/files\/CoreSourceHub_7a0760a8-8e08-4f64-a15e-f71f3c94aa79.jpg?v=1776280343","url":"https:\/\/indiepubs.com\/products\/bad-medievalism-and-the-modernity-problem-9781531512415","provider":"IndiePubs","version":"1.0","type":"link"}