UC Davis

“Bountiful and Barren: Speculative (Re)presentations of Racial Capitalism in the Middle Ages” examines how compendia, maps, and travel narratives from the Middle Ages strategically utilize speculation in the construction of racialized geographies. I argue that racialized geographies were consistently conscripted with the opportunity for the extraction of material wealth, and that the epistemological stabilization of these speculations demonstrates that the origins of racial capitalism exist in a deeper timescale than is commonly acknowledged. The recent reinvestigation of postcolonialism by medieval studies has incited much-needed conversations about race across the field, but little attention has been given to how the material conditions of racialism have been continuous over time – and how economic theory can help us to better understand the emergence of global colonialism from the Middle Ages as well as the centrality of speculation in modern racial capitalism. My study engages Marxism to interrogate economic history and accumulation while interrogating why the terms of Marxism have been so difficult to translate to the preindustrial Middle Ages. I argue that speculative writing practices – in both the past and the present – have embedded fictitious perspectives into the power relations of extraction, accumulation, and subjugation that are the necessary conditions for racial capitalism to develop and spread. My research demonstrates that medieval compendia, maps, and travel narratives are racializing technologies used by Latin Christendom to speculate and foreclose the future of colonialism and racial capitalism. My analysis details how knowledge was constructed and negotiated in these genres, and how speculative realities were refracted onto the materially fraught ambitions of Latin Christendom. This project traces racialized geographical knowledge as it stabilizes from the thirteenth century to the twentieth, beginning with Brunetto Latini’s Li Livres dou Tresor. The first chapter, “Brunetto Latini’s Tresor: Investment strategies for deniers, precieuses pierres, and fin or” analyzes the tripartite division and description of the world and the imposed juxtaposition of barrenness and bounty that compels the reader toward a literal cash-grab – Latini frames his Tresor as valuable information that should be invested in efforts that would lead to the accumulation of material value and wealth for the European elite. This chapter offers a clear frame of world-building as part of a cycle of speculation, investment, and foreclosure that would become the driving force of colonialism in the Early Modern period. In the second chapter, “Mandeville’s Racializing Prism: Race, Time, and Speculation in The Book of John Mandeville,” I argue that The Book (re)presents Latini’s world of barrenness and bounty through the voice of the would-be traveler persona John Mandeville. The shift in genre from compendia to travel narrative heightens the material stakes of world-building by explicitly inviting readers to be writers, learners to be educators, everyone to be investors in the future of the world of Latin Christendom driven by colonialism. Scholars have dismissed The Book as plagiarized or have held it up as an example of benign multiculturalism – I posit that The Book served as a prism that triangulates race, geography, and wealth and through which future travelers would filter their accounts and experiences. Finally, the third chapter, “The Realm of Prester John: The Lost Horizon,” identifies the effect of Mandeville’s racializing prism on Columbus’s Letter and the Catalan Atlas. These texts confirm Mandeville’s speculation that there is space for a vastly wealthy, Eurocentric hegemony on the horizon.