Colonial Complexions : Race and Bodies in Eighteenth-Century America / Sharon Block.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Block, Sharon, author.

Series:

Early American studies.

Early American Studies

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Human skin color--Social aspects--United States--History--18th century.

Human skin color.

Racism--United States--History--18th century.

Racism.

Race awareness--United States--History--18th century.

Race awareness.

Missing persons--United States--History--18th century.

Missing persons.

Fugitive slaves--United States--History--18th century.

Fugitive slaves.

Advertising, Newspaper--United States--History--18th century.

Advertising, Newspaper.

Human body and language--United States--History--18th century.

Human body and language.

United States--Race relations--History--18th century.

United States.

Physical Description:

1 online reosurce (217 pages).

Place of Publication:

Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2018]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

CONTENTS

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

Appendix 1. Advertisements for Runaways: Sources and Methodology

Appendix 2. Graphic Overview of Advertisements for Runaways

Appendix 3. Newspapers with Advertisements for Runaways (1750-75)

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 24. Sep 2018)

ISBN:

9780812294934

0812294939

OCLC:

1029759871