Some years ago, we—Belinda Wallace and Kathy Powers—were deep in conversation about Kathy’s research on global reparations and restorative justice movements. As our discussion spanned continents and nations, weaving through histories and policies, Belinda asked, “Where does the Caribbean fit into these global reparations narratives?” Over the next eight years, we would have long, complex conversations about Caribbean reparations, planting the seed that would become this essay. We examine here the interplay between medieval racial logic and contemporary calls for reparations in the Caribbean to reveal how narratives of human worth continue to obstruct meaningful reckonings with the past, rendering justice not impossible, but certainly (and systematically) deferred. To uncover insights as to why calls for reparations in the Caribbean remain persistently unheeded, we extrapolate from the medievalist scholar Geraldine Heng’s reading in The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages of the character Belakane in the medieval epic poem Parzival, by Wolfram von Eschenbach, and place it in conversation with the Caribbean novelist and poet Dionne Brand’s allegory of the door of no return.
Heng’s work does not advance an argument in favor of reparations—that is not the premise of her text. Instead, Heng’s scholarship exposes the deep roots of racist logic. Heng and Brand, in different but complementary ways, focus on the dehumanization and systematic violations of Black people’s rights during a period when redress for such harms was inconceivable. Mechanisms for repair and restitution did exist in the Middle Ages—for white people.Footnote 1 But the idea of repair was unimaginable and structurally foreclosed for Black people in both Africa and Europe. We take up this paradox and, by placing Heng in conversation with Brand, open a space to consider alternative approaches to reparations and how such claims for justice, redress, and restitution have historically been dismissed. This essay provides an alternative framework for imagining what Caribbean reparations might entail and for confronting the persistent obstacles that have prevented them from being taken seriously and adequately addressed.
Considering Caribbean Reparations
Human societies construct and enforce differences—of race, class, and other forms of belonging—through narratives of superiority and exclusion that develop into codes, rules, laws, and institutions—that is to say, into systems. These systems, in turn, determine who counts as human, who holds rights, and who is protected or harmed, and although they may evolve over long periods of time, they are remarkably persistent.Footnote 2 Control over such narratives shapes not only power and policy but also who gets remembered and who is forgotten. The historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot calls attention to this form of historical amnesia in his critique of the portrayal in Western discourses of the Haitian Revolution as a triumph for France. Characterizing this narrative as a “game of hide-and-seek,” Trouillot asserts that “worldview wins over the facts: white hegemony is natural and taken for granted; any alternative is still in the domain of the unthinkable” (93). Medieval studies, traditionally confined to literature and history, has long centered European whiteness, making it vulnerable to recent attempts to position it as the last bastion of “white studies” and white supremacy in the humanities.Footnote 3
In rethinking reparations, we begin with the word itself. The term reparations often evokes visceral imagery—slave ships crossing the Atlantic, sugarcane plantations in the Caribbean, cotton fields in the American South, and, inevitably, large sums of money changing hands. Yet such associations, while historically grounded, represent only a fraction of what reparations truly encompass (see Powers; Powers and Proctor). The concept is far more nuanced and multidimensional than the constrained visions our collective imagination tends to produce. The Caribbean Community—commonly known as CARICOM—is contesting this inadequate narrative. CARICOM is a political and economic union of Caribbean nations whose primary aims are economic integration, foreign policy coordination, community governance, and equitable resource mobilization.
We situate our work in direct alignment with two points from CARICOM’s Ten-Point Plan for Reparatory Justice: point 7, proposing an “African knowledge program” that would advance initiatives to restore suppressed African cultural knowledge and identity through education and cultural exchange, and point 8, on psychological rehabilitation, which calls for programs addressing the intergenerational trauma of slavery, including support for mental health infrastructure and public education campaigns (CARICOM Reparations Committee). We invite readers to think alongside us about how this work is not only relevant but also urgent. What new insights might surface if scholars approach the Middle Ages through the theoretical premises of other disciplines, such as political science; through alternative geographies, such as the Caribbean; or through racial categories that disrupt conventional narratives, such as blackness?
How the Medieval Period Forged a Foundational Racial Logic
The association of blackness with sin, heathenism, and spiritual deficiency emerged in medieval Christian thought not through consistent, meaningful, and direct contact with Black people but through symbolic projections. We are not keen to engage the debate regarding just how “white” the Middle Ages truly were. We will leave that debate to our medievalist colleagues. Instead, we explore how medieval logic laid the groundwork for later colonial justifications of slavery and dehumanization, including the idea that Africans were soulless and thus unworthy of rights or redemption.
A phrase like medieval logic, admittedly, is rather broad. The medieval period spans over a millennium, during which intellectual and cultural paradigms underwent significant transformation. Parzival, a thirteenth-century Christian German text, reflects this evolution and draws heavily from earlier French literary traditions. Thus, medieval logic in this context is shorthand for the intellectual, moral, and cultural frameworks of thirteenth-century Western European chivalric thought—particularly as it emerges in literary works such as Parzival. Here chivalry was not simply a code of battlefield conduct; it was a fusion of Christian morality with knightly virtue, an ethical system in which bravery and loyalty were inseparable from spiritual purity, humility, and charity. The ideal knight served both his earthly lord and God, aligning courtly behavior with the promise of salvation.Footnote 4
This logic also extended into the social sphere through the ideals of fin’amor, or courtly love, which elevated romantic devotion to the level of a moral discipline. Romantic devotion was not merely a private sentiment but a path toward moral and personal excellence—often portrayed as a test of restraint, patience, and virtue rather than a pursuit of physical consummation. Within these idealized frameworks of chivalry, heroism was increasingly measured not only by outward deeds but by the cultivation of inner virtue. The knight’s quest became more than a bid for glory; it was recast as a moral and spiritual journey that reinforced ideals that privileged internal virtue while still upholding the social order of the day.
It is precisely this blend of moral aspiration and structural exclusion that makes medieval logic a useful methodological tool—one that brings with it the mythologies, epistemologies, and contradictions of its own time. Assumptions about virtue, civilization, and worth that continue to shape racialized understandings of identity and belonging are embedded in this logic. By engaging with these chivalric frameworks, we create space to interrogate present-day notions of Caribbean blackness, tracing how inherited ideas about morality, hierarchy, virtue, and identity continue to shape our world.
The symbolic and theological reasoning embedded in medieval Christian discourses constructed hierarchical distinctions between human beings—especially through race, religion, and gender. It was a system of thought that linked blackness to sin, heathenism, and inferiority, not through empirical knowledge or lived experience but through absence, projection, and allegory. This logic operated by naturalizing difference, spiritualizing whiteness, and codifying blackness as abject, soulless, and irredeemable. As Heng’s work demonstrates, far from being a relic of the past, medieval logic endures as a living legacy that continues to inform modern institutions, cultural narratives, and the global racial order (see Invention 20–27 and Empire 35–46).
As scholars shaped by our academic training as well as our racialized identities (as Black women), we begin with the entwined logics of race and gender. Heng’s reading of the seduction of Belakane, a Black non-Christian queen, by Gahmuret, a white Christian knight, exposes how racialized desire masks economic and imperial motivations. Gahmuret’s pursuit of Belakane is transactional: Gahmuret seduces her, gains access to wealth and power, and then abandons her, using her lingering heathen identity as justification, despite her conversion to Christianity. This dynamic illustrates the extractive logic of both medieval and colonial projects, where blackness is useful only insofar as it serves white advancement. Once that utility ends, so does the pretense of redemption. Heng’s investigation of racial and religious identities in medieval literature makes explicit their veiled nature, revealing how they functioned as mutable symbols tied to broader narratives of conversion and colonial ambition. Belakane’s story is an invitation to contemplate further how medieval discourse constructed Black women as fetishized and debased. Its binary logic contributes to modern narratives of blackness as unworthy and supports the evasion of imperial accountability.
The Case of Belakane: Symbols, Souls, and Systems
We are struck by Heng’s analysis of Parzival, and in particular by her observation that “[w]hen Gahmuret needs a reason to be gone, Belakane is really still a heathen, despite her virtue and her ‘baptismal’ tears” (Invention 212). Through her critique of Gahmuret, Heng underscores how medieval thought extends its logic from the corporeal, where white bodies are valorized as superior and Black bodies are subordinate, to the spiritual. Here the assumed existence of white souls and nonexistence of Black souls is posited as further evidence of white superiority. The fleeting promise of redemption, as embodied by the knight Gahmuret, proves ultimately impossible. This impossibility, embodied by figures like Belakane, illustrates the ways in which medieval literature used racialized and gendered symbolism to naturalize Black subservience. These reductive representations were not confined to the literary—they evolved into systemic ideologies that underpinned transatlantic slavery, empire, and the dispossession of African peoples. Thus, symbolic logic transitioned into systemic exploitation.
Belakane’s inveterate blackness exemplifies how a symbolic-turned-systematic link between blackness and abjection was established through this logic, making the negation of Black people’s humanity appear not only natural but also predetermined. Symbols do more than represent; they embody entire ideological systems and shape beliefs. Yet symbols often lack nuance; they reduce rather than reveal. In medieval logic, blackness—cast as the absence of grace, intellect, and worth—is reduced to a shorthand for sinfulness, inanity, barbarism, and contamination. This construction of blackness in Wolfram, as in so many other writers of the time, was not born out of meaningful and direct contact with Black people but from an absence that became fertile ground for the projection of inferiority—that is, for the projection of an absence of worth. This void enabled white thinkers to imagine blackness solely through its supposed deficiencies, in contrast to whiteness. Such symbols traveled.
The Catholic Church’s role in racial hierarchies predates the colonial state. In the field of Caribbean studies, it is commonly known that during the colonial period the Catholic Church, the Church of England, and other Christian denominations sanctioned the transatlantic slave trade and legitimized it with the assertion that Africans were soulless (Adiele; Sweet). But it was in the medieval period that the church helped establish a spiritual and moral hierarchy that positioned whiteness as pure and blackness as lacking. This theological foundation was later co-opted by colonial powers to legitimize slavery, making the demand for reparations a challenge not only to economic systems but also to deep-seated religious and cultural ideologies. To be soulless was to be irredeemable and thus unworthy. This theological fiction was echoed by many colonial and, later, imperial powers—England, Spain, and Portugal, for example—to justify the continual exploitation and dehumanization of Black people.
Archival evidence demonstrates with clarity that Christian doctrine was instrumental in the invention and perpetuation of racial hierarchies. This legacy endures; such doctrines continue to sustain, shape, and reinforce racial orders embedded in Caribbean social and political systems. In 2007, Queen Elizabeth II led a service at Westminster Abbey to mark two hundred years since Britain abolished the transatlantic slave trade. The ceremony—which was steeped in Anglican religious culture, with prayers, hymns, and liturgical rites—emphasized Britain’s moral leadership in ending slavery instead of addressing its foundational role in profiting from it. By centering religious redemption and national repentance, the monarchy repositions Britain as a moral agent rather than a culpable one. The Christian narrative of sin followed by repentance and forgiveness becomes a way to symbolically close the chapter without offering material redress or any other form of reparation. Then, in 2015, then–Prime Minister David Cameron’s call for the Caribbean to “move on” from its history of slavery and colonialism offers a telling example of how political rhetoric can work to sidestep, minimize, or even erase demands for historical accountability (“David Cameron”). Even when accountability seems at hand, it is swiftly followed by pushback. In 2019, the Legacies of Enslavement Advisory Group reported that Cambridge University had significantly benefited from “companies and individuals participating in the [slave] trade” (“Study”). Although Cambridge funded the research, the project was met with resistance.
Lastly, in a remark akin to Cameron’s, Prince William, during a 2022 royal visit to Jamaica, called slavery “abhorrent” and expressed “profound sorrow” but offered no apology or reparative action (Gentleman et al.). During this visit, Jamaicans not only demanded reparations but also sought to remove the sovereign (Queen Elizabeth) from the country’s currency. What lingers from this royal visit, however, is an image: young Black children pressed against a chain link fence, arms outstretched in hope of touching Prince William and Princess Catherine. A year later, the Church of England announced a hundred-million-pound fund to address its historical links to slavery. This money would go toward research and community projects (Russell). In 2024, this financial contribution was adjusted to one hundred billion pounds, and the Church acknowledged the insufficiency of the original financial contribution in proportion to “the moral sin and crime of African chattel enslavement” (qtd. in Lawless). Yet the monarchy itself (headed by the Supreme Governor of the Church, currently King Charles III) did not pledge financial reparations or acknowledge its direct enrichment from slavery through the Crown’s colonial charters and royal African companies. By allowing the church to take responsibility, the monarchy circumvents direct accountability, even as it remains religiously and historically entwined with the church’s power and profits. This act of avoidance is not uncharacteristic; it is another example of how medieval discourse is intrinsically linked to modern racial anxieties.Footnote 5
A recent and highly publicized illustration of medieval logic intersecting with modern racial anxieties can be found in Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s 2021 interview with Oprah Winfrey. It was here that Prince Harry related a story concerning a royal family member’s outwardly speculating about the skin color of their unborn son (Oprah). This racial anxiety finds a medieval parallel in the figure of Belakane. Having given birth to Gahmuret’s son—a child described in some translations as having black and white mottled skin—Belakane is said to kiss only the white parts of his body.
From the unnamed royal’s concerns about skin color to symbolic gestures without justice, within the twenty-first-century British monarchy, medieval logic regenerates. These narratives are not historical artifacts but living legacies. When it comes to contemporary discourses on reparations, the logic is disturbingly persistent. The unrelenting repetition of these narratives reveals not only their staying power and the ways in which they have shaped the material realities of Black people across centuries and continents but also the intellectual dishonesty of ignoring them. Reparations must confront these lingering ideologies—especially those that render Black people as historically marginal, morally suspect, or undeserving of full redress. By way of confrontation, we offer Brand and the door of no return.
Allegory and Afterlife: Brand’s Epistemic Breach
Whereas Heng engages symbolism, Brand turns to allusion.Footnote 6 In her collection of essays, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging (2001), Brand invokes literal doors of no return—that is, thresholds through which enslaved Africans were forced before being loaded onto slave ships—to unpack what Saidiya Hartman calls “the afterlife of slavery,” the enduring social, economic, psychological, and epistemic effects of slavery long after its formal abolition (6). The afterlife of slavery is how the logic of racial violence, dehumanization, and dispossession established during slavery continue to structure Black life in the present. These effects include disproportionate poverty, racialized surveillance, social death, and the denial of redress. A Map to the Door of No Return is cerebral as well as tactile in addressing the afterlife of slavery and its relationship to Black worth—personal and political, public and private.Footnote 7
Yet, in Brand’s work, the afterlife of slavery emerges in her invocation of the Door as more than a historical threshold. It is an ongoing condition of erasure, grief, and longing for full humanity, freedom, and acknowledgment. The Door is thus both actual and emblematic: it signals the violent rupture of history, the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade, and the spiritual and personal dislocation that followed. It represents historical and epistemological loss—a lasting sign of racial abjection and systemic erasure. It points to a psychic break that has disproportionately framed our thinking and our feelings about blackness. The ruptures Heng identifies in medieval thought resurface in Brand’s reflections and haunt our conversations and consciousness.
Brand writes, “I wanted to be free. I wanted it to feel as if history was not destiny. I wanted some relief from the enclosure of the door of no return. That’s all” (168). There is a deep, unquenched yearning in this statement—a longing not merely for political freedom or legal status but for psychic, epistemic, and spiritual liberation. Brand is entreating a recovery from historical harm, a release from the persistent weight of inherited trauma (Graff), and an acknowledgment of worth. In this way, the project of reparations is also an epistemological one, charting rather than erasing. It demands inventive knowledge—new stories, new maps, new truths—to reckon with material losses and restore epistemic integrity.Footnote 8 In connecting Brand’s reflections on the door of no return to the intergenerational consequences of slavery, we make legible how the trauma it induced has shaped Caribbean identity, diasporic memory, and racialized being—and that shaping is profoundly influenced by a discourse on worth and worthiness.Footnote 9
To move from understanding to strategy, scholars must ask: What narratives are we crafting, protecting, and disseminating? The linkages explored here, which connect medieval logic to Caribbean reparations, offer novel ways of knowing, analyzing, and contesting present-day discourses that reify and normalize blackness as contemptible. Our inquiry underscores yet another reason why the medieval period should matter to us today. While representing erasure and loss, the door of no return also signals entry into resistance, reclamation, and reparative work. It becomes a redemptive breach—a site for reimagining the future.
This work of rethinking reparations is urgent. Around the world, narrative, law, and knowledge are wielded to determine who counts as human, who is disposable, and who is remembered. Reading the Middle Ages through the lens of race and Black life disrupts this logic of erasure. It insists that Black people were always present—and that their histories, dignity, and demands for redress must be taken seriously. Brand takes up this charge, tracing a lineage from the Middle Ages through the Middle Passage and into the present, where Black corporeality remains a site of conquest and erasure. Her allegory refuses containment—temporal or spatial—and contests the seeming permanence of racialized and gendered dehumanization. Brand’s door of no return is a portal to memory and not just history, to the reclamation of self, and to the possibility of a future unbound from the fabrications of race and value. Reparations constitute a recognition of Black personhood and humanity. To grant reparations is to acknowledge past violence while simultaneously acknowledging that those who were harmed had full souls, full lives, and full rights. It is only through reparations that we can begin to quiet the logic of white supremacy, to repair the wound, and to affirm the lives so long deemed irredeemable.
Yet, medieval logic persists; it insists that Black Caribbean life is a problem to be placated with gestures, not justice—akin to Gahmuret’s seduction of Belakane. In the words of Jamaica Kincaid, “[I]sn’t that the last straw; for not only did we have to suffer the unspeakableness of slavery, but the satisfaction to be had from ‘We made you bastards rich’ is taken away, too” (57). A more candid and complete view of history must account for race as a foundational element of medieval thought and its enduring consequences. Until we confront the persistent medieval logic(s) that cast blackness as negation, there can be no Door, and certainly no return.
