Other Faces of Arthur

Reveals the role of Arthuriana in the racial logics of medieval Europe through an analysis of the construction of chivalric whiteness

The Other Faces of Arthur reveals the role of Arthuriana in the racial logics of medieval Europe through an analysis of the construction of whiteness in the global North Atlantic: Scandinavia, Britain, Iberia, and North Africa. Taking a comparative approach that draws on language traditions not commonly studied together and places lesser-known Arthurian texts in conversation with each other, Nahir I. Otaño Gracia explores the important role of translation in the dissemination and analysis of Arthuriana, showing how these texts functioned within the settings that produced them.

Introducing the framework of the global North Atlantic within the field of global medieval studies, Otaño Gracia examines Arthurian texts written in Castilian, Catalan, Middle Welsh, and Old Norse, among other languages, in order to illustrate the various ways that the writers adapt the materials to serve their specific cultural and aesthetic purposes. Tracing how Arthuriana shifts and changes throughout the global North Atlantic, Otaño Gracia uncovers the hierarchies of power present in Arthurian texts and how they reflect, manipulate, and critique the power relations existing in the courts that circulated the texts. Arthuriana’s obsession with chivalry, Otaño Gracia demonstrates, is fundamentally about whiteness; these texts deploy chivalric whiteness to naturalize relations of domination and normalize violence against racialized subjects.

The Other Faces of Arthur establishes Arthuriana as a pan-European project of racialization that ultimately serves to rationalize geocultural conquest and expansion.