See previous installments in this series here.
The RaceB4Race Mentorship Network began its work in 2022, intended to ‘offer new scholars support as they develop the research that will drive the academic conversation forward’. This Mellon-funded initiative spearheaded by the Director of the Folger Institute Dr. Patricia Akhimie not only includes individual mentorship opportunities, but also ‘a semester-long virtual reading/research group, meeting monthly to connect participants with a larger network of premodern critical race scholars.’
What are we reading?
For our third seminar meeting of the 2025-2026 year, we read The Other Faces of Arthur: Chivalric Whiteness in the Global North Atlantic (Penn Press, 2025) by Nahir Otaño Gracia. This book interrogates the medieval Arthurian legend from the margins, focusing not on the traditional English, French, and German canon, but instead on a truly impressive collection of lesser-known texts from the Iberian peninsula, Mediterranean islands, Scandinavia, and Wales.
Nahir Otaño Gracia is Associate Professor of English at the University of New Mexico, where she works primarily on medieval literature, translation studies, critical identity studies, and the Global North Atlantic (comprising Britain, Iberia, and Scandinavia). In addition to The Other Faces of Arthur, she has published a range of articles and co-edited the volume Women’s Lives: Self-Representation, Reception, and Appropriation in the Middle Ages with Daniel Armenti in 2022. She is also well-known for her extensive work in pushing the field of medieval studies in a more inclusive direction, in particular helping to create the Medieval Academy of America’s Belle Da Costa Greene award, presented annually to a medievalist of colour for research assistance.
Why are we reading this?
Building on a framework articulated by Laguna Pueblo poet and essayist Leslie Marmon Silko, Otaño Gracia urges her readers to re-envision the European Arthurian canon as a web. In an essay from 1979, Silko observes,
For those of you accustomed to being taken from point A to point B to point C, this presentation may be somewhat difficult to follow. Pueblo expression resembles something like a spider’s web—with many little threads radiating from the center, crisscrossing each other. As with the web, the structure emerges as it is made and you must simply listen and trust, as the Pueblo people do, that meaning will be made.
Reimagining the Arthurian canon in this way allows Otaño Gracia to tell a very different story about how these texts came into being and how they interact with one another. It brings to light not only differences but similarities, how influence flows in multiple directions rather than in a single forward progression, to create this collection of characters and settings that appear throughout Europe for several centuries and become a kind of shorthand for various cultural values and touchstones. In our previous meeting, we spoke about what it meant to study Shakespeare from a subaltern perspective, and this book makes clear that Arthuriana too is central to the creation of a white European identity, even if the borders of that fantastical Europe are in constant flux.
Otaño Gracia distills this into what she calls chivalric whiteness, a literary recharacterization of the violence enacted by white knights against racialized enemies as not only normal but admirable and worthy of reward. In this way, the Arthurian legend and its many iterations participate in what Geraldine Heng calls the fantasy of race-making. Versions of chivalric whiteness appear throughout the texts she analyses, from Icelandic sagas to the Welsh legends of the Mabinogion to courtly Castilian prose romances, each working within a different geographical context to remake the borders of Europe. It is a dense, fascinating book that sheds light on Arthurian traditions outside the usual suspects while calling attention to the whiteness underpinning the foundations of that mythology.
Further reading
While I will not be going into the particulars of the discussion, in order to preserve the seminar space as a safe and private one, below is a list of scholarship that came up at different points during the discussion.
Sara Ahmed, ‘A Phenomenology of Whiteness’, Feminist Theory 8.2 (2007), 149-68.
Ethics in the Arthurian Legend, ed. Melissa Ridley Elmes and Evelyn Meyer (D.S. Brewer, 2023).
Antonia Carcelén-Estrada, ‘Translation and Activism’, in The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Politics, ed. Fruela Fernández and Jonathan Evans (Routledge, 2018), 254-70.
Shannon K. Farley, ‘Translation, interpretation, fanfiction: A continuum of meaning production’, Transformative Works & Cultures 14 (2013).
Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2018).
Shannon Kinoshita, ‘Almería Silk and the French Feudal Imaginary: Toward a “Material” History of the Medieval Mediterranean’, in Medieval Fabrications: Dress, Textiles, Cloth Work, and other Cultural Imaginings, ed. E. Jane Burns (Palgrave, 2004), 165-76.
Leslie Marmon Silko, ‘Language and Literature from a Pueblo Indian Perspective’, in English Literature: Opening Up the Canon, ed. Leslie A. Fiedler and Houston A. Baker (Johns Hopkins UP, 1981), 54-72.
Guillem de Torroella, La Faula, ed. Anna Maria Compagna Perrone Capano (Edicions UIB, 2007). Note: this is not an English translation!
And one forthcoming publication:
Special Theories and Methodologies feature in PMLA on ‘Race, Racialization, and Whiteness before and after The Invention of Race’, ed. Tiffany Florvil and Nahir Otaño Gracia (forthcoming).
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