Making Race: From Travel Writing to Discourse

Medieval European travel writing reveals the particular ways that race-making and world-making are bound together. This literature combines ethnography and historiography, usually providing details about the culture and history of the peoples encountered by the traveler, as well as descriptions of the geography and landscapes traversed. Travelers consistently blurred the lines between fantasy and reality, but their writings nonetheless became common source material for encyclopedic texts and romance literature, thereby fueling European knowledge production and popular culture. As this literature developed a fantastical perspective about the world and its diverse inhabitants, it forged a crucible for making up people. It was a mode of writing particularly suited for race-making. This chapter examines race in medieval European travel literature that looked beyond the Levant and into Asia in order to demonstrate how histories of contact in the global Middle Ages shaped the development of racial ideologies in the period. It takes the ‘global’ not as an empirical concept, but as, to use Sanjay Krishnan’s argument, ‘a mode of thematization or a way of bringing the world into view’.