As theorized by Cedric J. Robinson in his magnum opus Black Marxism (1983), the term “racial capitalism” refers to the simultaneous and interdependent rise of global capitalism and racial classification and stratification. Robinson’s principal goal is to identify a tradition of radical thought and practice among Black intellectuals and activists in sites of colonial exploitation. He therefore decenters Marxist history by shifting our attention away from metropolitan Europe as a site of political radicalization. Black Marxism begins, however, in the European Middle Ages, which in Robinson’s view gave rise both to modern myths of whiteness and to the racialization of the proletariat. He thus views racial capitalism not as a revolutionary overturning of feudalism but instead as an elaboration of social differences already embedded in feudal ideology. In a subsequent study, An Anthropology of Marxism (2001), he further argues that the socialist critique of property is not the invention of bourgeois society but instead “an irrepressible response to social injustice,” one that is endemic to medieval dissent movements of all kinds, notably religious ones. To read Robinson’s work is thus to recognize the special responsibility medievalists possess to reckon with the legacy of medieval racialism, to recover liberation movements from the medieval past, and to build solidarity with liberation movements in the present.

The proposed panel invites literary medievalists to engage critically with scholarship on racial capitalism and logistics--such as Fred Moten, Stefano Harney, Christina Sharpe, Jodi Melamed, and others--and to identify (a) what medievalists might have to contribute to that scholarship and its struggle against racism; and (b) how that scholarship might be used to advance an analysis and critique of racialization in medieval societies and medievalist scholarship. The three proposed speakers will engage critically with, and seek to expand the historical reach of, scholarship on racial capitalism, beginning (but not ending) with Robinson's foundational work.

Hillary Cheramie's paper will read Brunetto Latini's The Book of the Treasure through the lens of Robinson's articulation of racial capitalism with a focus on the globalizing of social and economic relations. Her claim will be that Latini's compendium draws a world map that anticipates the uneven economic development of centuries to come and consistently tethers racialism to opportunity. Latini states that his Treasure has literal philosophical, economic, or political value -- "cash money" that eventually gets reinvested in travel narratives like Mandeville's Travels and establishes what Robinson might call the "species of the modern world," namely colonialism and bourgeois identity.

Wan-Chuan Kao's paper will examine the magical thinking underpinning the narrative logic of Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale, in which Custance is set adrift at sea yet follows an expeditious itinerary that delivers the human parcel to her destinations on time and undamaged. Reading Chaucer and the Custance Cycle through and against whiteness, refugee, and logistics studies, Kao asks what kind of racial capital is being trafficked by Custance. His claim is that the character's rudderless ship signifies both a universalizing medieval Church and the logistical space of premodern capitalism, and that Custance thus figures whiteness as a racialized, gendered, and Christianized commodity.

William Rhodes's paper will use Black Marxism to show how the dynamics of racialization are already at work in the class conflicts of the European Middle Ages and to demonstrate an important corollary to this claim, namely that analogies to the medieval racialization of class can be found in the interaction of Portuguese crusading ideology with nascent forms of slave trading and colonial exploitation on the northwest coast of Africa. In each case, the seemingly “early modern” phenomena of globalized racial hierarchies and colonial exploitation appear instead to be continuations of “medieval” dynamics of estates-based hierarchy and crusading.