Amherst College lecture

Alexandra Montero Peters (Northwestern University), Race, Chess, and Thirteenth-Century Court Culture in the Western Mediterranean.

The art of the thirteeth-century Book of Games (Libro del axedrez, dados e tablas) reveals visions of a diverse Mediterranean world, but one illumination stands out: that of chess-playing Black Muslims. These figures have been misidentified as enslaved, maligned as debauched, or simply ignored - this talk will instead focus on how the characters in this scene are a key source for positive representations of Blackness, a noteworthy outlier during a period that increasingly cast dark skin in a negative light.