Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

9-2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Program

English

Advisor

Steven Kruger

Committee Members

Glenn Burger

Karl Steel

Subject Categories

English Language and Literature | Literature in English, British Isles | Medieval Studies | Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies

Keywords

Middle English romance, crusades, early globalities, premodern critical race studies

Abstract

“Bodies that Traverse: Colonial Fantasies of Oriental Incorporations in Late Medieval England” shows how a picture of a proto-colonialist England arises from popular romances of the period, particularly those featuring the Crusades and the “Orient,” or the fictional Near East, as its central narrative locus. While the historical Crusades to the Holy Land mainly took place between the eleventh and twelfth centuries, English fictional writing on the Crusades flourished in the “post-crusade” period of 1200–1450. My project argues that the Orient in these writings, especially popular vernacular romances, serves as a colonial ‘contact zone,’ a fetishized site for England to write a nationalist fiction of translatio imperii—the geographical and temporal transfer of imperial power—from the pagan Orient to the Christian England and thus to negotiate its own belatedness in the local colonial history of the Latin West. As a locus of shifting imperial power, the Orient in this fiction is also a colonial frontier of European (proto-)colonial endeavors, rather than standing as a remote space beyond its outreach. My project looks especially for moments of ‘initial contact’ in late medieval English romances that stimulate the narrative to set forth, while exposing its charged colonial impulse. Writing the Orient in this regard is a kind of thought experiment for medieval Europe—and specifically England—not only rehearsing a post-crusades colonial endeavor in the East but also engaging in the race-making of Oriental alterity, which promotes collective proto-imperialist fictions of the Orient. For England, this experiment also contributes particularly to the making of Englishness as mediated by religious, ethnic, and racial epistemologies. I approach the racial formations of Oriental alterity in these experimental fictions, which are heterogenous and self-conflicting at best, as a compelling by-product of, as well as an essential prerequisite for, the earliest colonial endeavors in the Orient.

My special focus is on the specific modes of representation of the Orient in these fictions, that is, the prevailing interests revealed in moments of transculturation and racialized embodiment. Zooming in on the romance fixation on the human body that undergoes the assimilation and incorporation of the Orient and its ways of being, my dissertation shows how transcultural encounters between England and the manifold Orients are contemplated in terms of embodiment and corporeal clashes and the fictions of such encounters are written on and through bodies as intermediaries. The chapters are arranged to discuss in order some of the popular examples of these corporeal clashes and racialized bodies in Middle English romances. The first three chapters examine how the transcultural encounters in and through the Oriental contact zones are articulated in relation to a particular preoccupation with: interfaith sexual mixing and miscegenation in the King of Tars (Chapter 1); the (impossible) hybrids/offspring of transcultural encounters in the Sultan of Babylon (Chapter 2); and food consumption and eating habits in Richard Coer de Lyon (Chapter 3). Approaching similar questions from a slightly different angle, Chapter 4 turns its gaze inward to England’s nation-building in Chaucer, or the making of an “English” race, illuminating the ways in which all these obsessions with the “Oriental” transcultural contacts contribute to the imagination of a distinct, post-colonial (pseudo-)history inflected by a fantasy of a homogenous—religiously, ethnically, racially cleansed—national community.

The primary goals of “Bodies that Traverse” are twofold. First, it aims to rethink crusade romance featuring the fictional Near East, inarguably a prominent popular literature of the period, as a forward-leaning thought experiment on the Oriental contact zone that bears witness to the march of English colonial aspiration in its nascent stage. Crusade romances have largely been read as an ideological product that retrospectively respond back to the frustration and trauma of the crusade failure and thus wrestles with the contemporary Islamic threat and the ongoing territorial conflict over the Near East. Approaching from a different angle, I instead propose to read this genre as actively envisaging English imperial ascendancy and prosperity in and through the Orient, grappling with how the Oriental colonial enterprise could pave the way for its dominance beyond the Latin West. Second, by closely examining the engrossed interest of this genre in the human body at colonial frontier as a site of transcultural clashes, my project aims to productively engage with and further contribute to the recent vigorous scholarship on premodern race and racial formations. Recent medievalist scholarship on race conceptualizes race-making as a political operation of fabricating an epistemological discourse that essentializes the distinctions between different ethnic/national/geographical groups of people, and these operations require specific occasions as strategic sites of essentializing practice. My project illuminates a particularly colonial moment as the occasion for the articulation and racialization of Oriental alterity, in which England not only negotiates its post-coloniality in relation to France and other European polities, but also envisions its position as an emerging empire stretching beyond Europe.

Download

This work is embargoed and will be available for download on Wednesday, September 30, 2026

Share

COinS