The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture, and: Caught between Worlds: British Captivity Narratives in Fact and Fiction (review)

REVIEWS117 Roxann Wheeler. The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. ix + 37lpp. US$26.50. ISBN 0-8122-1722-5 Joe Snader. Caught between Worlds: British Captivity Narratives in Fact and Fiction. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000. 339pp. US$34.95. ISBN 0-8131-2164-7. There is a fruitful overlap between these two substantial new books by Roxann Wheeler andJoe Snader which examine the classification and depiction of racial difference in British narratives of the "long" eighteenth century. Where the one sets out to "trace how English religious and commercial categories designated the manifold excellence of British civil society and how a white and rosy complexion was, on occasion, called on to bolster the picture of British commercial eminence" (Wheeler, p. 7), the other focuses on the portrayal through captivity narratives of "the world outside the modern British isles as permeated with subjugation, tyranny, debasement , and transgression" (Snader, p. 4). Both studies make important connections between factual and fictional representations, showing how authorial claims ofverisimilitude in eyewitness accounts of native peoples are frequently undercut by "signs of editorial intervention and even of outright fabrication" (Snader, p. 97). The two authors share a bifocal agenda that allows us to approach the depiction of Britishness (and, more commonly , Englishness) by meaningful contrast with the portrayal of the alien "Other." And both show a finely tuned awareness and understanding of recent theoretical positions on representations of race and difference. A great deal of critical attention has been given in current discourse to what may be learned from Eurocentric accounts of Africans and of native Americans. A troubling revelation by Wheeler emerges in her demonstrations that arguments in favour of "the efficacious effects of commerce, education, and Christianity" (p. 210) employed by Edward Long in his notorious pro-slavery History ofJamaica (1774) strikingly anticipate similar strategies in SamuelJohnson's account of the condition of the Highlanders in his Journey to the Western Islands ofScotland, first published the following year. As Wheeler points out, Johnson's frequent denigration of Highland Scots and Hebrideans as savages and barbarians "invokes contemporary racial ideology" (p. 193), and may in many ways be read as closely echoing Long's dismissal of African slaves in the British West Indies as physically and intellectually inferior to Europeans. But, where Long's detestable remarks on African slaves have "justly" earned him the title of the "father of English racism" (p. 210), Johnson has come down to us as many people's conception of the quintessential Englishman. On one level, we are left here with the disturbing imputation that the writings of Samuel Johnson—and 118EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION14:1 indeed those of many of his contemporaries—are to a significant degree racially inflected and that, by extension, our consensual and canonical acceptance of them implicates us too. Wheeler wisely refrains from spelling this out in so many words, but the implication is there. Readers of this review may wish to compare her analysis with that ofJames Basker in his very recent essay on "Johnson, Race and Rebellion" (The Age ofJohnson 11 [2000], 37-51), in which Johnson is interpreted as an ardent apologist for violent resistance against slavery. Whatever conclusions we may tentatively reach, it is evident that, with its perpetual debate concerning our ability (or otherwise) to improve upon ourselves, the Enlightenment tooled for itself a hegemonic template that was riven with its own ironies and selfcontradictions . Inevitably perhaps, the sheer ambition of Wheeler's attempt to probe and decipher categories of racial difference in eighteenth-century British culture means that the parts of her study become often more revealing than the whole. She is at her most perceptive when she describes the gradual emergence of the term race, which takes the place of the more common eighteenth-century term, variety (p. 31), and the growing preference for amalgamation over the more negative miscegenation as "the preferred eighteenth-century reference to interracial sex and marriage" (p. 143). Her book contains helpful discussions of racial connotations in representative writers (for example, Defoe, Goldsmith, Hume, and Equiano) and, within these discussions, can arrest the reader with revelatory nuggets that are perceptive...