Colonial Complexions: Race and Bodies in Eighteenth-Century America (Early American Studies) - Softcover

Block, Sharon

 
9780812224924: Colonial Complexions: Race and Bodies in Eighteenth-Century America (Early American Studies)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0812224922 ISBN 13: 9780812224924
Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

In Colonial Complexions, historian Sharon Block examines how Anglo-Americans built racial ideologies out of descriptions of physical appearance. By analyzing more than 4,000 advertisements for fugitive servants and slaves in colonial newspapers alongside scores of transatlantic sources, she reveals how colonists transformed observable characteristics into racist reality. Building on her expertise in digital humanities, Block repurposes these well-known historical sources to newly highlight how daily language called race and identity into being before the rise of scientific racism.

In the eighteenth century, a multitude of characteristics beyond skin color factored into racial assumptions, and complexion did not have a stable or singular meaning. Colonists justified a race-based slave labor system not by opposing black and white but by accumulating differences in the bodies they described: racism was made real by marking variation from a norm on some bodies, and variation as the norm on others. Such subtle systemizations of racism naturalized enslavement into bodily description, erased Native American heritage, and privileged life history as a crucial marker of free status only for people of European-based identities.

Colonial Complexions suggests alternative possibilities to modern formulations of racial identities and offers a precise historical analysis of the beliefs behind evolving notions of race-based differences in North American history.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Sharon Block is Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Introduction
Chapter 1. Complicating Humors and Rethinking Complexion
Chapter 2. Shaping Bodies in Print: Labor and Health
Chapter 3. Coloring Bodies: Naturalized Incompatibilities
Chapter 4. Categorizing Bodies: Race, Place, and the Pursuit of Freedom
Chapter 5. Written by and on the Body: Racialization of Affects and Effects
Epilogue

Appendices
1. Advertisements for Runaways: Sources and Methodology
2. Graphic Overview of Advertisements for Runaways
3. Newspapers with Advertisements for Runaways (1750-75)

Notes
Index
Acknowledgments

* * * * *

Introduction

Colonial Complexions grew out of two related questions: What were the meanings of black, white, and red in the colonial eighteenth century; and how did Anglo-American colonists describe people's appearance? A desire to explain the intersections of colonial Anglo-American racial ideologies and physical appearance led me to question historians' deployment of skin color categorizations as stable identities. No matter how natural visible racial divisions may seem to modern readers, they have not transcended history. Revisiting these anachronistic applications of modern racial taxonomies led me to colonial interpretations of bodies and persons that have been lost to us through the overriding violence of racism. By treating physical appearance as unremarkable or by employing classifications of white, black, and red as self-evident, scholars risk giving short shrift to the daily creation of constructed corporeality that lay the foundations of racism among early America.

We can see such shifting notions of race, complexion, and identity by comparing two pieces of early modern writing. Shortly after his return to England in 1671, John Josselyn published a travel narrative that described the Massachusetts, Mohegans, Narragansetts, Pequots, Pokanokets, and other Native Americans he had encountered in the lands that would be known as New England. Josselyn paralleled indigenous peoples' appearances to those of Europeans with whom his English readers might be more familiar: "as the Austreans are known by their great lips, the Bavarians by their pokes under their chins, the Jews by their goggle eyes, so the Indians by their flat noses, yet are they not so much deprest as they are to the Southward." Pronounced-mouthed Austrians, Bavarians with goiters, goggle-eyed Jews, and flat-but-not-too-flat-nosed Native Americans: these physical stereotypes likely do not resonate with most modern readers, because perceptions of physical appearance are historically and culturally bound.

Almost a century later, Benjamin Franklin again tied identity to appearance. He described Africans as "black or tawny" and Native Americans (and Asians) as "wholly tawny," and he noted that most Europeans (Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians, Swedes, and some Germans) were "of a swarthy Complexion," leaving only the English as "White People." Franklin's commentary suggests both the ways that racial scripts had developed since Josselyn identified people by facial features and how familiar racialized terms held historically specific meanings. Whiteness was not necessarily a synonym for European heritage in the eighteenth century, where humorally influenced interpretations of complexion continued to hold sway. Both men's descriptions point to the power of a writer's frames of reference and the ways that power relationships could be produced through descriptions of bodily features.

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, skin color began to consistently be privileged as the sign of racial identity in literary, legal, and public arenas. Race science would be born out of these shifts, as skin color became the primary tool to mark slavery, freedom, and presumed innate racial qualities. But the linkages between bodies, race, and freedom were not inevitable. Historian Barbara Fields's explanation of race is still one of the most eloquent: "Race is not an element of human biology (like breathing oxygen or reproducing sexually); nor is it even an idea (like the speed of light or the value of *pi*) that can be plausibly imagined to live an eternal life of its own. Race is not an idea but an ideology."

To understand the arc of American racial ideologies, Colonial Complexions chronicles the quarter century (c. 1750-75) before skin color became increasingly equivalent to race. In this time period, missing persons advertisements were an established genre in colonial newspapers, regularly including categorizations of sex, race, and status; aspects of the runaways' appearance and behavior; details about items carried with them; and sometimes a discussion of past relationships that aimed to pinpoint where the person might be headed. The thousands of late colonial print descriptions of missing persons gathered from these advertisements reveal the kinds of daily racial scripts that naturalized writers' beliefs about race and gender, status and hierarchy, health and illness, labor capability and material reality. These newspaper descriptions of physical appearance were widely disseminated throughout colonies where they could both enforce and sustain particular ideologies of everyday racism. This book thus complicates understandings of eighteenth-century racism beyond a catch phrase of red, white, and black.

The title, Colonial Complexions, intentionally nods to my interrogation of eighteenth-century meanings of complexion and aims to remind readers that complexion was not the equivalent of skin color. Historians have productively traced the "racially ambiguous men and women [who] passed as free in the fluid, bustling, and multiracial world of the eighteenth[-] century mid-Atlantic," but how did colonists determine what "racially ambiguous" looked like? Because complexion could be interpreted as a sign of health, behavior, or emotions, it did not yet hold a predominant racial meaning. I build on literary scholar Roxann Wheeler's conclusion that black and white have become powerful "cover stories for a dense matrix of ideas as closely associated with cultural differences as with the body's surface." Representations of physical appearance gave daily meanings to racial ideologies that reflected historically specific social, economic, and cultural needs.

The chapters of Colonial Complexions range from the macro to the micro, from the quotidian to the noteworthy, and from the transatlantic to the local. Sources include scores of colonial and British publications as well as occasional private writings, but this study is based primarily on more than four thousand newspaper advertisements for runaway servants, slaves, and other missing persons issued between 1750 and 1775. Amassing large numbers of these brief advertisements has allowed me to analyze aggregate trends of print descriptions for laborers and other missing persons in early America. Appendix 1 offers an extended discussion of sources and methodology.

At the same time, the subjects who populate this book were far more than the sum of their body parts. I begin here with a story about one runaway's life as seen through print advertisements to offer context for the book's aggregated use of such sources. In the summer of 1769, a Virginia man named Barnaby escaped enslavement. Why he chose that moment to challenge his slavery remains unrecorded. Maybe his family situation had changed. Maybe he decided the unknown dangers of escape outweighed the known horrors of chattel slavery. Or perhaps Barnaby had sought freedom repeatedly, without leaving historical records, and his enslaver chose this occasion to advertise publicly for his return. We know about Barnaby's bid for freedom in 1769 because three weeks after his departure, Augustine Smith paid for an advertisement in the local newspaper to recover his...

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Verlag
University of Pennsylvania Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2021
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0812224922
ISBN 13 
9780812224924
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
217
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Mare Nostrum Group B.V.
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