Nahir I. Otaño Gracia, The Other Faces of Arthur: Chivalric Whiteness in the Global North Atlantic. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025, xii, 323 pp.

With chapter-headings boldly pointing the way, this volume’s orientation is never in doubt. After an introduction on “chivalry and whiteness” there comes a first chapter on ideological “whiteness” in Arthurian tradition. Chapter two’s concern is the status of “knights and ladies” in Spanish Arthurian literature; we then have the same for Catalan texts in Catalonia’s age of expansion. The fourth chapter takes us to “colonial power” in Norse Arthurian writings; thereafter are medieval British ones and their (supposed) technique of “Constructing a Unified Welsh Identity” by “Reappropriating” Wales and Arthur alike. A conclusion on “Arthurian Whiteness” as an “Exclusionary” device ends with hopes for “community building and tactics to build a better antiracist world” (p. 214). There follow appendices, with an “Arthurian timeline” (beginning not with sixth-century Arthur, but with Kenneth MacAlpine in 844 or so, and ending with Cervantes in 1615) plus Arthurian personal names in different languages. So: a study on race, color, power, imperialism, colonialism; on how “chivalry is fundamentally about whiteness” which is used to “normalize violence against racialized subjects” (as stated on the cover). Such claims may be true. Many texts involve power. Hence the author’s references to postcolonial and other writers (including Homi K. Bhabha, Frantz Fanon, Toni Morrison, Edward W. Said, Gayatri Spivak, Ludwig Wittgenstein). But there are two problems. First, those concerned with pre-modern mentalities may find a tendency to the anachronistic. They may feel that discourse on “whiteness” (especially when derived from fashionable theoreticians) is shallow and over-generalized. Second, whether it is or not, much in The Other Faces of Arthur about Celtic traditions (to say nothing of Iberian or Scandinavian ones) is defective. Amongst many examples, six will make the point.