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"The Other Faces of Arthur lays bare 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. By analyzing Arthurian texts written in Castilian, Catalan, Middle Welsh, and Old-Norse Icelandic, among other languages, the book introduces the Arthurian materials, discusses the important role of translation in the dissemination and analysis of Arthuriana, and demonstrates how these texts function within the chivalric setting that produced them, concluding that Arthuriana's obsession with chivalry is about whiteness-a racial category that privileges dominance-by normalizing violence and marginalizing non-whiteness. Beyond its primary intervention-to shape the framework of the Global North Atlantic using the sub-corpus of Arthurian texts to discuss the function of chivalric whiteness, this book aims to highlight lesser-known Arthurian texts. In many cases providing excerpts of these texts and translations, and relevant scholarship, which are not readily available. In this sense, The Other Faces of Arthur isn't just a literary study; it may be the easiest way for Arthurian scholars who do not read some of these languages, especially Castilian or Catalan, to access these materials. In this way, The Other Faces of Arthur aims to introduce the Global North Atlantic as a subset of Global Medieval Studies to further literary and historical analysis, centers lesser-known Arthurian texts in conversation with each other, and it establishes how the texts construct chivalric whiteness to disguise power, genocide, and terror against racialized subjects, ultimately rationalizing geo-cultural expansion"--
About the author
Nahir I. Otaño Gracia is Assistant Professor at the University of New Mexico.
