Tirumular (Drew) Narayanan

Tirumular (Drew) Narayanan is a Ph.D. Candidate in Art History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His dissertation titled “Sultans of Babylon: Racialization and ‘Crypto-Visuality’ in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century European Manuscripts” analyzes the ways late medieval manuscripts from Italy, France and England visualize the “Sultan of Babylon” as both a historical and fantastical racialized construction. He uses this medieval phrase as a critical term to encapsulate the vagaries of Latin Christian race-building, one which describes both the Sultan of Egypt and an imaginary ruler who hails from an ill-defined region under Islamic control. His theorization of “crypto-visuality” moves away from considering the expected markers of racialization (such as particular types of skin color, physiognomy, costume, and accoutrements) and towards new vistas where text-image interaction, semiotics, materiality, topography, imposterism, accusations of appropriation, and visualized expropriation can serve as equally substantive and powerful indices when dealing critically with premodern formulations of race. This project also incorporates the historical royal articulations of Ayyubid and Mamluk Sultans to emphasize that the Sultan is not simply racialized. Far from just painted caricatures, these rulers served as powerful political actors who often successfully resisted crusader incursions, and even deployed accounts of these events to buttress their own legitimacy. In order to conduct his research Drew studied Arabic at UW-Madison and even had the privilege of teaching first-semester Arabic in the African Cultural Studies Department.  As a voracious consumer of twentieth-century pulp fiction, he also works on the deployment of racist medievalism in Americana.