In a recent conversation, a former graduate student mentioned that, as his teacher, I continuously describe just “how much work it takes to make structures of violence look effortless and natural” (Peay). I, of course, want my research to live up to this statement. In my first book, The Other Faces of Arthur: Chivalric Whiteness in the Global North Atlantic, I explore the racial logics of medieval Europe through an analysis of chivalric whiteness in Arthurian literature. The book reveals how fantasies of whiteness naturalize violence based on race. It exposes how much work it takes these texts to argue for whiteness. This monograph took a decade to get published, in part because scholars in medieval studies struggle to engage with and value work that deals with race. The truth is that Geraldine Heng’s groundbreaking book, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, opened the doors for my own project on whiteness.

Heng’s research, which is informed by scholarship emergent from ethnic studies, has been imperative for a new generation of scholars. Scholars such as Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Sahar Amer, Seeta Chaganti, Jacqueline de Weever, Sharon Kinoshita, and David Wacks have been revelatory to my research. However, Heng has been the scholar whose scholarship most supported my exploration on how the enforcers of structures of violence pretended they were nonviolent. In many ways, the invisible yet real impact of structural violence also shaped my publication journey. I was derailed from publishing because of the failure of scholars in medieval studies to see the merit in studies on race, often under the guise of claims that my writing was not clear (Otaño Gracia, “Critical Subjective Analysis”).

My research presupposes knowledge of several terms that are unfixed and therefore varied in their structures of meaning. These terms include Europe, race, racism, race-making, whiteness, and chivalric whiteness, to name a few. I want to linger on their unfixed nature because it is precisely their variability that makes them important but difficult to work with, and detractors often fixate on their indefinability to discard them altogether. But as Heng has productively explained, the stakes of using these terms are high. By using race, racism, and race-making, for example, we as scholars “bear witness to important strategic, epistemological, and political commitments not adequately served by the invocation of categories of greater generality (such as otherness or difference) or greater benignity in our understanding of human culture and society” (Invention 4). Despite the shifting nature of their meaning, it is their capacity to name that gives them power in our current academic and political landscape. To name them in the study of the Middle Ages is to refuse “to sustain the reproduction of a certain kind of past, while keeping the door shut to tools, analyses, and resources that can name the past differently” (23). For many of us, these are the high stakes in analyzing race in the premodern world, and it becomes a way to open the past to new forms of inquiry that help us push against the academic status quo.

It is important for me to define some of my unfixed terms, starting with Europe. Jiska Engelbert and her coauthors explain that “Europe” lacks a single, unified meaning. Europe becomes “a political project that ideologically (re)produces Europe not only in terms of territory, but also, and arguably increasingly more, in terms of a population connected in its ‘Europeanness’” (134). These scholars define Europe as a response to Fortress Europe—a set of European Union migration policies that lead to thousands of deaths every year (McGuirk; “Migration”). (Not to be outdone, the US border has the “deadliest land route for migrants” with 689 to 800 deaths in 2022 [Rose and Peñaloza; “US-Mexico Border”].)Footnote ¹ Europe is undefined but held together by its boundaries that exclude populations from outside Europe: “The political discourse of Fortress Europe thus features as part of efforts to shape Europe as bounded territory and as population” (Engelbert et al. 134).Footnote ² The very term Europe brings together peoples and boundaries through the violence of excluding people from its borders.

The term race is also unfixed, and its elasticity is connected to boundaries and people. The complex discursive constructions of race vary across time and space, and whiteness is not an exception to this complexity. Nevertheless, I am not searching for already existing categories of whiteness as it is understood today; rather, I want to describe the progression through which whiteness was constructed in the medieval past. How did “Europe” reproduce Europe in the premodern past? How did whiteness connect and disconnect boundaries and populations?

Again, Heng provides a way to understand the fluidity of these processes: “It stood to reason that the differences selected for essentialism would vary in the longue durée…with perhaps a multiplicity of interlocking discourses elsewhere” (Invention 3). Heng’s call to be open to understanding the past differently and as part of a process of essentialism allows medievalists to analyze “what happened: the impacts, effects, and outcomes produced by laws, institutions, and behaviour as these affected populations and peoples” (“Before Race” 160). It allows for a more nuanced and complex picture of the time period. Of course, whiteness is not exempted from these complexities of race or of their historical understandings, especially as whiteness draws on a multitude of discourses to create exclusion.

But what do I mean by whiteness? What does it add to scholars’ understanding of the Middle Ages, and how does it help us recognize race as evolving and unfixed, detectable not only in post-Enlightenment eras but in the premodern also? These are the questions that I attempt to answer as part of this cluster. I understand whiteness as a race that presents itself as “the absence of racialization” that normalizes violence “through an ideology of victimization. Because whiteness is constructed as the norm, medieval objects of study do not openly discuss whiteness” (Otaño Gracia, Other Faces 4). Instead, they delineate the contours of whiteness (more boundaries), and I observe these boundaries through the interactions of the main characters—often knights—with their enemies.

bell hooks explains that whiteness is a “fantasy” that imagines itself as representing “goodness and all that is benign and nonthreatening,” and because white people are conditioned to believe in this fantasy of whiteness as goodness, they cannot “imagine” that for racialized subjects whiteness is a “terrorizing imposition, a power that wounds, hurts, tortures, [and] disrupts the fantasy of whiteness as representing goodness” (169). Indeed, practitioners of whiteness use the veneer of goodness, virtue, benevolence, and so forth to disguise its power, terror, and genocidal violence against racialized subjects. Therefore, I delineate the contours of whiteness—the illogics of whiteness—by paying attention to the responses of racialized subjects to the violence enacted by whiteness. In this way, I am able to discuss the violence that whiteness produces and expose how much work it takes to construct whiteness through violence that is deemed nonviolence.

Continuing my discussion of whiteness, I need to segue and explain why medieval romance (especially Arthurian romance and its afterlives) becomes such an apt space to analyze the racial logics of medieval Europe. Just as whiteness is a fantasy, Arthurian literature functions as a cultural fantasy that engages in a project of race-, meaning-, and ultimately world-making even in contexts where there is an apparent absence of racialization. Arthurian texts create fantasies that imagine a pan-European geography of exclusion. And here, again, Heng provides the language to understand why this is important:

To me, this has always been the “critical” aspect of premodern critical race studies—to analyze the “material effects and consequences” of racism. Scholars of fantasy literature often point out that fantasy has an intimate connection with the reader or listener who accepts the fantasy world—the vacillation between the real and the imagined (Rabkin 2–8; Jackson 2–7). The role of readers is not just to accept but to actively participate in the creation of an imaginary world, the literary imaginary, thus making them complicit within its construction.Footnote ³ Similarly, medieval Arthurian romance engulfs readers and listeners into the fantasy of the texts as well as the ideologies of white supremacy that underpin them. The consequences are acceptance of and participation in normalizing violence as fantasy to make violence seem effortless and natural.

In Arthurian literature, the fantasy of whiteness presents the knights participating in chivalric activity—l’aventure. The knights are cast as the underdogs who are supposedly victimized by the violence of their dehumanized enemies only to win triumphantly against them. There is a tendency in Arthurian texts for the enemies to vocalize animosity against the knights. The enemies, through letters or monologues, “say” violent things, and this discursive violence serves as justification for the knights to respond by enacting physical harm. Chivalric aggression becomes self-defense, discursive violence begets physical violence, and the construction of whiteness justifies and distributes this right to violence at the same time that whiteness is regarded as a victim of violence. And as I argue throughout The Other Faces of Arthur: “chivalry—to be chivalrous—becomes an institution that enshrines whiteness with everything that whiteness privileges and secures.” Therefore, violence “becomes synonymous with chivalric whiteness, turning violence and whiteness into interchangeable terms and interchangeably substitutable properties” (6). Chivalric whiteness is a tool of whiteness more generally and a racializing enterprise that aptly describes the representation of knights in literature, especially medieval romance, because they are agents that ultimately represent whiteness.

I have identified four aspects of chivalric whiteness in Arthurian literature—normativity, violence as nonviolence, defense of class and gender, and whiteness as goodness. First, the knights are presented as the norm, marked by their absence of racialization, and they do the work of naturalizing violence. Second, I emphasize how discourses of whiteness promote violence by presenting the knights as the victims whose actions are a form of defense. Third, the knights not only “defend” themselves from their enemies but also “defend” women as well as their subjects from discursive violence and harm.Footnote ⁴ Finally, the actions of the knights become morally righteous by fiat. Romance, especially Arthurian romance, builds its narratives by incorporating several if not all these aspects of whiteness. I analyze the moments that disrupt this perspective, the moments where the illogics of whiteness become apparent. These moments of disruption often manifest through the disguising of violence as nonviolence when directed against racialized targets or the “absence of recognition [as] a strategy that facilitates making a group ‘the Other’” (hooks 167). Therefore, I center the perspective of the racialized subjects within a text to help deconceptualize whiteness as the norm.

I would like to provide an example that shows the consequences of the Arthurian normalizing of whiteness in the conquest of Mallorca.Footnote ⁵ The Catalan crònicas, four historiographies written in Catalan between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, used Arthurian themes to legitimize the reign of the Catalan King Jaume I (or James I of Aragon [1208–76]). They used chivalric whiteness to normalize the colonization of Mallorca and the genocide and displacement of its Muslim population. Colonizing Mallorca began as a fantasy. In 1113 Pope Paschal II (pope from 1090 to 1118) granted papal privileges, allowing for the siege of the Balearic Islands to become coded as a potential crusade of Christians against Muslims. It was not until 1229, however, that Jaume was able to materialize the fantasy and conquer Mallorca using the excuse that several Christian boats had been detained in Ibiza. By 1235, he also conquered both Menorca and Ibiza, taking over the Balearic Islands. The conquest of Mallorca helped define Jaume as the founder of a Catalan heritage and kingdom—the Crown of Aragon. The Catalan crònicas depict the conquests of the Catalan Crown as chivalric adventures.

The siege of Mallorca, however, was devastating to the Muslim population of the island, the majority of which were killed, enslaved, and displaced by the Catalans who settled the island immediately after these events (Soto Company and Forners 345). In fact, the “success of colonization could only be guaranteed by the immigration of Christian settlers in sufficient quantities to replace all or part of the conquered Muslim society” (Soto Company and Forners 342).Footnote ⁶ The Crown killed and displaced the Muslim population of the island and replaced them with Catalan settlers. The devastation brought to the Muslim community of Mallorca was so pervasive (Soto Company) that the neighboring Muslim population of Menorca agreed to pay an annual tribute to the Catalans presumably to prevent the same acts of violence from happening to them.Footnote ⁷ The signed treaty of Capdepera (1231) describes the guarantees of their contract, stipulating that Menorca will pay tribute to the Crown of Aragon in exchange for the Crown’s “protection” (presumably protection from that same Crown).Footnote ⁸

Menorca’s response to the fate of the Muslim population of Mallorca demonstrates how violent and horrific the siege was for those that were attacked, killed, and enslaved. In fact, Kitāb Tārīẖ Mayūrqa (Chronicle of the Conquest of Mallorca), by Ibn ʿAmīra al-Maẖzūmī, the only extant account written in Arabic of the siege, begins by stating, “Esta es la relación del hecho de Mayūrqa y de su tome por los rūm, desde el inicio de su empresa, cuando ansiaron su captura, hasta que destruyeron su realidad; se apoderaron de su tierra y esclavizaron a sus habitantes; expulsaron la fe de su corazón y azuzaron a sus cuervos para adueñarse de su riqueza” (“This is the account of the takeover of Mayūrqa by the Catalans [rūm], from the beginning of its undertaking when they wished for its capture, until they destroyed its reality; seized its land and enslaved its habitants; expelled the faith from its heart, and instigated their crows to take possession of its riches”; 53).Footnote ⁹ Furthermore, the account calls the Catalans “obsesiona[dos] en saquearla” (“obsessed with looting”; 57) the island; they gave “rienda suelta a su maldad” (“free rein to their evil”; 88); they brought “los horrores de la Guerra” (“the horrors of war”; 98); and their horses were like “torrentes devastadores, camparon por la ciudad arruinando toda aquella belleza” (“devastating torrents that destroyed the city and ruined everything beautiful”; 113–14). The population of the Balearic Islands did not react to these events as if they were justifiable or morally right. They, instead, saw the Catalans as warmongering and evil.

The acquisition of the Balearic Islands was a violent endeavor that was described as a chivalric, knightly one (see fig. 1). Jaume’s account of the conquest of Mallorca in the Llibre dels fets (Chronicle of James I) describes the event as a “chivalric adventure par excellence” (Fernández Armesto 12). The crónicas by Bernat Desclot and Ramón Muntaner turn Jaume’s life and conquests into an Arthurian adventure that affords Jaume and his soldiers the social and cultural assets that come with chivalric whiteness.

Fig. 1.

A section of the mural paintings of the conquest of Mallorca depicting the Catalan encampment during the siege. At the top left corner, a white Catalan soldier stabs someone who is presumably a Black Muslim Mallorcan. Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

The “Arthurization” of King Jaume—in which Jaume’s birth, childhood, and rule are compared with those of Arthur—turns Jaume into a fully realized human. As the early-twentieth-century scholar Manuel de Montoliu explains,

Montoliu’s explanation, like the crònicas themselves, uses the comparison between Jaume and Arthur to turn Jaume and his army into white knights through the categories discussed above.

Jaume’s actions become normalized through his humanization, especially through the stories of his birth and youth. Jaume and his men’s violence in killing and converting Muslims against their will is glossed over and turned into a defense against “Saracens.” Consequently, his vicious expansions of the borders of his kingdom, which included decimating the Mallorcan population, are described as protection from Muslim attacks and reclaiming their homeland. Catalans (and Castilians) used la tesis Visigoda, the myth that the Catalans and Castilian nobles descendent from the Visigoths and therefore had a right to Muslim lands in the Iberian Peninsula, the Mediterranean, and North of Africa (O’Callaghan 227). While Jaume is cast as morally right and the founding hero of the Catalans, Muslim populations defending their own kingdoms and experiencing slaughter become “usurping Saracens.” The effective and affective rewriting of Jaume’s actions in the crònicas constitutes chivalric whiteness.

The proliferation of medieval Catalan texts that use these tactics and the scholarly production on medieval Mallorca and Catalonia that accepts chivalric whiteness as the norm create a loop that erases the devastation of the conquest of Mallorca. The colonization, reorganization, and redistribution of the island was a settler colonial project that began as a fantasy of conquest (as the papal privileges attest) that solidified into a swift, decisive, and violent endeavor. The material consequences of chivalric whiteness in the conquest of Mallorca are the justification and rewriting of the violence of conquest and the erasure of the dispossession and murder of Muslims.

Understanding Mallorca as a Muslim-Christian contact point with a sizable Muslim population, or even as a frontier site, does not do enough to express the violence that was enacted against its Muslim population. The description of the siege of the island through chivalric whiteness allowed Catalan power—the monarchy, writers, and settlers—to reshape the narrative of conquest into an adventure in which the good guys did what they had to do to defend, to survive, and to thrive even as the Muslim populations of these islands did not experience the siege in this way. Early modern scholarship did not critically engage with the crónicas and their Arthurization of Jaume; too often scholars have accepted violence as natural, implying or arguing that structures of violence are simply there as opposed to constructed, and then defended by being normalized.

Heng helped open the doors to new research, including on the global middle ages, premodern critical race studies, and indigeneity. She has done this because she has laid out why it is imperative (and ultimately powerful) to name the processes we as scholars encounter in the archival records we analyze. For me, this has meant analyzing and actively theorizing chivalric whiteness to demonstrate how fantasies of whiteness were effective in taking hold of the medieval imaginary, and the material consequences of medieval racial logics on the peoples and lands conquered through this system of whiteness. Chivalric whiteness works as a tool that elides structures of violence by calling violence defense. It does the work of framing violence as normal and justifiable. We do not need to buy into these stories.