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Beginnings
Racial Worlds, Medieval Worlds: Why This Book, and How to Read a Book on Medieval Race
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 February 2018
Summary
Growing up in a Singapore that was undergoing a process of decolonization from the British Empire, one of my earliest memories of race came as a result of having to earn a badge in the Girl Guides – which was at that time the tepid equivalent, for girls, of the Boy Scout corps created by Lord Baden-Powell and spread across the British imperial world of the twentieth century. As I was born female and Chinese (the majority racial group in Singapore), sexism and misogyny were not unfamiliar recognitions in childhood (for instance, the old immigrant woman from China who lived downstairs in our apartment block still had tiny, crippled, bound feet, or “lotus buds,” as the classic pillow book The Golden Lotus called them), but race is not as easily recognizable for those who inhabit a majority race. Malay neighbors, Indian classmates, Eurasian friends, and the intertwining, multicultural, multireligious life-worlds in Singapore did not foreground racial apartness or a palpable racial hierarchy for a child who belonged to the majority race.
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- The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages , pp. 1 - 14Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2018