Transformable Race: Surprising Metamorphoses in the Literature of Early America

As surprising as it might seem now, during the late eighteenth century many early Americans asked themselves, "How could a person of one race come to be another?" Racial thought at the close of the eighteenth century differed radically from that of the nineteenth century, when the concept of race as a fixed biological category would emerge. Instead, many early Americans thought that race was an exterior bodily trait, incrementally produced by environmental factors and continuously subject to change. While historians have documented aspects of eighteenth-century racial thought, Transformable Race is the first scholarly book that identifies how this thinking informs the figurative language in the literature of this crucial period. It argues that the notion of "transformable race" structured how early American texts portrayed the formation of racial identities. Examining figures such as Phillis Wheatley, Benjamin Franklin, Samson Occom, and Charles Brockden Brown, Transformable Race demonstrates how these authors used language emphasizing or questioning the potential malleability of physical features to explore the construction of racial categories.

Table of Contents:
Table of Contents Introduction: Surprising Metamorphoses 1. Becoming Colored in Occom and Wheatley's Early America To Make Samson Occom "So" "To Make a Poet Black" 2. The Political Bodies of Benjamin Franklin and Hendrick Aupaumut You Are What You Eat; or, Franklin's Practice Makes (Almost) Perfect Hendrick Aupaumut's Own Color 3. Transforming into Natives: Crèvecoeur, Marrant, and Brown on Becoming Indian Passing As, Transforming into Crèvecoeur's American Race John Marrant Becoming Cherokee Edgar Huntly's Unsettling Transformation 4. Doubting Transformable Race: Equiano, Brackenridge, and the Textuality of Natural History To Quote and to Question: Olaudah Equiano's Provocative Ends Brackenridge and the Limits of Writing Natural History Epilogue: Interiorizing Racial Metamorphosis: The Algerine Captive's Language of Sympathy NOTES

About the Author :
Katy L. Chiles is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville.

Review :
"Scholars of racial representation and those working in the subfield of science and literature will find Chiles's book valuable for the way it charts the influence of eighteenth-century racial science discourse on American literature." --Shawn Salvant, Clio: A Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History "Transformable Race has strong classroom appeal, particularly as it offers a fresh, socially-conscious reading of canonical early American authors; however, teaching separate chapters would prove difficult because the sections depend on the strong trajectory that Chiles establishes. Regardless, with scientific and aesthetic cultural texts, Transformable Race effectively traces the shift from eighteenth-century understandings of exterior race to nineteenth-century conceptualizations of racial interiority that influence writers' and citizens' perceptions in the twentieth century and beyond." --Alexandra Reznik, Journal of American Culture "...Chiles presents ample literary evidence of the concern about race and how these authors conceptualize how one becomes colored in colonial America." --Richard Mace, Journal of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association "Chiles's Transformable Race takes as its subject the shifting meaning of race from its eighteenth-century valence as a mutable external phenomenon to the more familiar internal 'biologized truth' that emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries." -- American Literature