Transformable Race: Surprising Metamorphoses in the Literature of Early America by Katy Chiles (review)

kaiy chiles’s transformable race endeavors to examine the concerns of Early Americans of the possibility of having one’s racial identity changed. No less so than it is now, race was an important factor in self-identity and classifications by society. Chiles’s text utilizes nativist studies and other texts to examine the presence of the mutable nature of race in Early American texts, arguing that “the notion of transformable race structured how Early American texts portrayed the formation of racial identity” (3). In undertaking this task, Chiles utilizes a broad spectrum of writers in interesting pairings to provide multiple examples of concerns and incidences where one is alleged to have transformed from one race to another. These pairing include Occom and Wheatley; Franklin and Aupaumut; Crevecoeur, Marrant, and Brown; and Equiano and Brackenridge.

As neither Occom nor Wheatley is white, they, to the eighteenth-century mind, represent the idea of becoming colored as part of God’s design. Chiles examines the idea of transformable race through Occom’s questioning of the different treatment he receives as compared to white missionaries, noting that he was paid the same amount by the Boston Commissioners for his twelve years of service as a white missionary for his one year. Occom concludes that he is as God made him and cannot help being any different than he is. Chiles notes that by juxtaposing “God has made me so” with “I did not make myself so” Occom’s treatment at the hands of the Boston Commissioners has more so do to the fact of how they see him as compared to what service he has performed and what they view as an Indian body and the lesser value it holds. Like Occom, Wheatley’s writings awakened questions of raced bodies. Chiles aptly highlights Wheatley’s use of the phrases “sable race” and “die” in her poem “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” with an understanding of the word “die” as something that alters a preexisting state and of the sable race as something “becomes black through a dark dying” (56). Wheatley, whom Chiles notes reflects environmentalist accounts of the sun producing dark skin pigments, does so with a purposeful racialized undertaking, while also hinting that she herself is infused with that same kind of “die.”

Chiles also utilizes Benjamin Franklin and Hendrick Aupaumut in her examination of how race is viewed. Chiles notes that neither Franklin nor Aupaumut stridently hold forth on how the different races originated; the challenge in examining their writings is that neither implicitly argues whether social environment, modes of living, or separate creations cause the differences between each race. Regardless, Chiles contends that the importance of examining these writings lies in how the authors engage in race “as a category in relationship to evolving political identities” (65) as they argue that political bodies connect to the racialization of physical bodies, which connects to how Occom and Wheatley are viewed. Chiles highlights concerns that everything from the sun to diet to how you lived could transform your race. By using Franklin, who purposefully fails in keeping to Tryon’s diet and wearing skins and furs to take up the habits of blacks and Indians and still remain white, Chiles shows that Franklin’s contemporaries could see that diet and actions do not alter race or being.

Chiles most closely examines the idea of transformable race through the anomaly of a slave, Henry Moss, starting to turn white, or fictitious stories like Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly, in which a man who sleepwalked and lived in the wilderness returns to civilization and is no longer recognized by his family. She also notes other authors whose works contain elements of “passing” like Stowe, Chesnutt, Twain, and Larsen. Despite these occurrences, which are mostly in fictitious stories, Transformable Race does not truly examine how race is transformed or reconsidered. Instead, Chiles presents the fear that some European Americans had that their life in...