Black Metaphors by Whitaker Cord J.;

Author:Whitaker, Cord J.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2019-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

The Shimmer of Time and the Universal Salvation of Sin

The shimmer of mirage—philological, rhetorical, and otherwise—is part and parcel of textual interpretation, and it is intrinsic to the relationship between interdependent contraries such as Sensation and Reason, bondsman and lord, or black and white. Shimmer also inheres in Hegel’s relationship to Julian and Du Bois in another vein: the shimmer of temporality. Contraries are not contradictories; instead, they inhere in and constitute one another. They bring one another into being, but their mutual interdependence is not always obvious. More often than not, each contrary appears to be an independent entity. The Middle Ages and modernity are such contraries, and temporal shimmer occurs at the junctures where their mutual creation of one another is sometimes revealed, though often obscured. Alice Chandler, writing about the rise of the concept of an idyllic Middle Ages and the emergence of medievalism among scholars and enthusiasts in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, writes, “Medievalism was a philosophy . . . because it . . . brought to an increasingly urbanized, industrialized, and atomistic society, the vision of a more stable and harmonious social order, substituting the paternal benevolence of manor and guild for the harshness of city and factory and offering the clear air and open fields of the medieval past in place of the blackening skies of England.”22 Medievalism and the idea of the Middle Ages that has continued to permeate scholarship and popular culture alike was born of the need to contend with and justify modernity by setting it off against an other. That other was and is the Middle Ages. One juncture at which medieval-to-modern temporality shimmers is the intersection of racial ideology and the Middle Ages: the medieval idyll has traditionally been imagined as homogeneously white. As I have argued elsewhere, to be black has been to be other to the European Middle Ages. Denying blacks “the right to a shared medieval past that would, in turn, authorize them to share the present that emerges from it . . . allows Euro-centric cultures to relegate modern blacks to a strictly modern status in which their history appears to be without the authorizing length and depth available to whites.”23 When the interdependence of modernity generally, and modern race specifically, with the Middle Ages is illuminated, the shimmer of temporality is laid open to view.

The shimmer of temporality is deeply imbricated with the doctrine of salvation. Time has everything to do with judgments about an other’s morality or depravity, about a spirit’s condition and worth. Under normal conditions, judgments about morality are made in chronological order: one views another’s actions and then makes judgments about the actor using her actions as evidence. When humans engage in racial prejudice, however, they attempt to sidestep chronology by using cues, including skin color, to predict another person’s actions. Prejudice supposes the ability to see beyond temporal chronology and is itself an iteration of temporal shimmer. The supposition upon which racial prejudice is based is also the

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