Wan-Chuan Kao, In the Lap of Whiteness

Design: Linh-Yen Hoang

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The Mellon Research Initiative in Racial Capitalism Presents:
Wan-Chuan Kao, "In the Lap of Whiteness"

  • RSVP here to receive a link to the Zoom event and a copy of Professor Kao's pre-circulated paper for discussion.

The Racial Capitalism Mellon​ ​Research Initiative is​ ​hosting a workshop of Professor Wan-Chuan Kao's pre-circulated material, with responses by Matthew Vernon (ENL) and Hillary Cheramie (ENL).

What did the premodern hold look like? What cargoes and feelings did it traffic? If the hold, in Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s formulation, is a periodizing and racializing technology of modern logistics, the two imbricated vectors do not necessarily coincide. Instead of approaching the premodern hold from a modern biologization of race or from a cultural-political mode of historiography, Kao proposes a method grounded in empathy studies. Kao takes as a litmus test "The Squire’s Tale" by Chaucer, in particular its image of a feminine lap cradling a wounded talking falcon that signifies whiteness as racial capital in the guise of courtliness. An alternative to the extraction model of racial capitalism, Canacee’s empathic lap is one figuration of the premodern hold that attempts to traffic whiteness as its terrible load. Next, Kao considers periodization as the historiographic equivalent to racial passing, arguing that the two phenomena share traits and tactics, and that classification and recognition do not always align. In fact, the empathic scene is often marked by the non-coincidence of subjects—a certain wrongness inherent in a failed encounter—that demands willful interpellation. Kao then turns to the reception history of "The Squire’s Tale" and contend that Spenser and Milton repurpose the text through a Foucauldian contre-move rooted in modernist, Orientalist strategies of differentiating texts, bodies, affects, and histories. Periodization is the racial logistics of time.

Wan-Chuan Kao is Associate Professor of English at Washington and Lee University. Wan-Chuan’s research interests include medieval literature, whiteness studies, race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, queer studies, hotel theory, affect, cuteness, and critical theory. His work has appeared in Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Exemplaria, Journal of Lesbian Studies, Mediaevalia, postmedieval, and several collected volumes; his latest essays are forthcoming from New Literary History, Arthuriana, and Medieval Travel Writing: A Global History (edited by Sebastian Sobecki, Cambridge UP). With Jen Boyle, Wan-Chuan coedited The Retro- Futurism of Cuteness (Punctum Books, 2017), which interrogates how cuteness as a minor aesthetics refocuses critical understandings of premodern and modern media, literature, and culture. His monograph, entitled White Before Whiteness in the Late Middle Ages (Manchester UP, 2022), examines late-medieval representations of whiteness across bodily and non-somatic figurations and argues that premodern whiteness is fragile, precarious, inviable, and labile. Wan-Chuan has served on various professional committees for the Medieval Academy of America, the New Chaucer Society, Medievalists of Color.

Image credit: "Wrong Asian" by Linh-Yen Hoang

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