Book Launch in Honor of Black History Month: Rachel Schine, "Black Knights"
Book Launch in Honor of Black History Month: Rachel Schine, "Black Knights"
Join us in the Multipurpose Room on the ground floor of St. Mary's Hall for a talk and Q&A discussion with UMD Professor Rachel Schine (SLLC-Arabic, History) about her new book in honor of Black History Month. Professor Schine's book, "Black Knights: Arabic Epic and the Making of Medieval Race," was published in 2024 by the University of Chicago Press.
In "Black Knights" Rachel Schine reveals how the Arabic-speaking world developed a different form of racial knowledge than their European neighbors during the Middle Ages. Unlike in European vernaculars, Arabic-language ideas about ethnic difference emerged from conversations extending beyond the Mediterranean, from the Sahara to the Indian Ocean. In these discourses, Schine argues, racialized blackness became central to ideas about a global, ethnically inclusive Muslim world.
Schine traces the emergence of these new racial logics through popular Islamic epics, drawing on legal, medical, and religious literatures from the period to excavate a diverse and ever-changing conception of blackness and race. The result is a theoretically nuanced case for the existence and malleability of racial logics in premodern Islamic contexts across a variety of social and literary formations.
More information about the book is available on the University of Chicago Press website.
Join us in the Multipurpose Room on the ground floor of St. Mary's Hall for a talk and Q&A discussion with UMD Professor Rachel Schine (SLLC-Arabic, History) about her new book in honor of Black History Month. Professor Schine's book, "Black Knights: Arabic Epic and the Making of Medieval Race," was published in 2024 by the University of Chicago Press.
In "Black Knights" Rachel Schine reveals how the Arabic-speaking world developed a different form of racial knowledge than their European neighbors during the Middle Ages. Unlike in European vernaculars, Arabic-language ideas about ethnic difference emerged from conversations extending beyond the Mediterranean, from the Sahara to the Indian Ocean. In these discourses, Schine argues, racialized blackness became central to ideas about a global, ethnically inclusive Muslim world.
Schine traces the emergence of these new racial logics through popular Islamic epics, drawing on legal, medical, and religious literatures from the period to excavate a diverse and ever-changing conception of blackness and race. The result is a theoretically nuanced case for the existence and malleability of racial logics in premodern Islamic contexts across a variety of social and literary formations.
More information about the book is available on the University of Chicago Press website.