Saturday, April 25, 2015

Difference with a Difference: Wild Men, Gods, and Other Protagonists

In last weeks readings, I found Vanita Seth's writing on Medieval anthropomorphic creatures very interesting. She writes about how the "Wild Man" in Medieval literature represents transgression between the world of man and the world of nature by morphing animal parts with human parts creating centaurs, satyrs, cyclops, and many other creatures. What caught my attention the most is that these forms of wild men in Medieval literature were never classified by their race. I found this extremely fascinating and began to look up images of Medieval creatures on google to see if I could classify their race. Unsurprisingly, many of the images I found entailed males with racial ambiguity. Wild men in the middle ages were everything but racialized and had no racial differentiation. Race as a representation of human diversity did not exist in the middle ages in general. This made me think about the start of racism in our world, and I realized racism is of very recent origin. Below are my findings of Medieval creatures with racial ambiguity.


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