The Complexion of Race : Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture / Roxann Wheeler.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Wheeler, Roxann, author.

Series:

New Cultural Studies

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Race awareness--History--18th century--Great Britain.

Race awareness.

English fiction--18th century--History and criticism.

English fiction.

Difference (Psychology)--History--18th century.

Difference (Psychology).

Race in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (382 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2010]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

In the 1723 Journal of a Voyage up the Gambia, an English narrator describes the native translators vital to the expedition's success as being "Black as Coal." Such a description of dark skin color was not unusual for eighteenth-century Britons-but neither was the statement that followed: "here, thro' Custom, (being Christians) they account themselves White Men." The Complexion of Race asks how such categories would have been possible, when and how such statements came to seem illogical, and how our understanding of the eighteenth century has been distorted by the imposition of nineteenth and twentieth century notions of race on an earlier period.Wheeler traces the emergence of skin color as a predominant marker of identity in British thought and juxtaposes the Enlightenment's scientific speculation on the biology of race with accounts in travel literature, fiction, and other documents that remain grounded in different models of human variety. As a consequence of a burgeoning empire in the second half of the eighteenth century, English writers were increasingly preoccupied with differentiating the British nation from its imperial outposts by naming traits that set off the rulers from the ruled; although race was one of these traits, it was by no means the distinguishing one. In the fiction of the time, non-European characters could still be "redeemed" by baptism or conversion and the British nation could embrace its mixed-race progeny. In Wheeler's eighteenth century we see the coexistence of two systems of racialization and to detect a moment when an older order, based on the division between Christian and heathen, gives way to a new one based on the assertion of difference between black and white.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Illustrations

Introduction: The Empire of Climate

Chapter 1. Christians, Savages, and Slaves

Chapter 2. Racializing Civility

Chapter 3. Romanticizing Racial Difference

Chapter 4. Consuming Englishness

Chapter 5. The Politicization of Race

Epilogue: Theorizing Race and Racism in the Eighteenth Century

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 08. Jul 2019)

ISBN:

9786613210623

9781283210621

1283210622

9780812200140

0812200144

OCLC:

759158231