Transformable Race

Surprising Metamorphoses in the Literature of Early America

Bibliographic Data

ID19987854
AuthorsKaty L Chiles (0000-0003-1481-8922, corresponding author)
Year2014
Pages336
Publication date2014-01-27
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
VenueTransformable Race (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199313501.001.0001
OpenAlexW4242785192
ISBN9780199313501
Open LibraryOL27555638M
LanguageEN
Citations received11

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. For early American studies, this project replaces prevailing critical race frameworks particular to later periods with one more fitting for early America. In critical race studies, this book illuminates how in this early literature identities take form through one’s potential to transform from one race into another. Transformable Race posits a historically specific, transformational model of critical race theory that refigures our understanding of racialization in early American literature and, in turn, offers critical race studies a new way of understanding racial formation

Aesthetics · Art · Race (biology) · Racial formation theory · Racialization · Sociology · Subject (documents) · Transformational leadership · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American History and Culture · Computer Science · Gender Studies · History · Psychology · Race, History, and American Society · Social Psychology · American literature · Blacks · Ethnic identity · History and criticism · Human skin color in literature · Indians of North America · Race awareness in literature · Race identity · Race in literature · Race relations in literature · Whites

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