Katy L. Chiles,Transformable Race: Surprising Metamorphoses in the Literature of Early America.

Abstract

DRAWING on theoretical insights from Foucault and others who argue that an epistemological shift to an internal focus on the self occurs in the nineteenth century, Katy L. Chiles posits that many eighteenth-century writings show more external and transformative notions of race. She follows critics like Ezra Tawil and Roxann Wheeler in questioning the concept of race for the eighteenth century but aims to ‘defamiliarize’ (9) the term. Chiles enhances our understanding of the nuances in meanings of race that are, to quote Judith Butler, ‘performative’ (111), in discourses of natural science. Transformable Race takes its title to indicate the ways eighteenth-century authors depicted race as transformative and mutable, rather than as a biological or essentialist. Transformable Race is divided into four chapters, an introduction, and an epilogue. The introduction elaborates theories and debates in natural science, ranging from those of Carl Linneaus, Benjamin Rush, and Thomas Jefferson. Chapter 1 addresses climatological and geographic understandings of race in Samson Occam and Phillis Wheatley; Chapter 2 considers the related political bodies of Benjamin Franklin and Hendrick Aupaumut; Chapter 3 reconsiders traditional meanings of racial passing in the captivity narrative for Crevecoeur, John Marrant, and Charles Brockden Brown; and the final chapter places Olaudah Equiano’s ambiguities over natural history autobiography next to Henry Brackenridge’s ironic reversals of natural history in Modern Chivalry . The pairings of authors in the chapters manages to place the familiar associations (Occom and Wheatley) next to unfamiliar ones (Equiano and Brackenridge), which defamiliarizes common classifications of authors. The epilogue creatively touches on previous themes through an analysis of Tyler’s early Republic tale, The Algerine Captive , and the shift to internal racial identification through the language of ‘cross-racial sympathy’ (203).